Windjammer
Adventurer
Over ten years ago, I wrote a tribute to Rob Heinsoo on the occasion of his departure from WotC. The tribute was warm, sincere, and over 11 years later, I still stand by all of it. Rob Heinsoo was and remains an incredible designer, and D&D is poorer for having lost his contributions.
11 years later, a similar occasion presents itself that compels the opposite conclusion. It's hard to look back on the past 11 years, and the last two years especially, and feel neutral about it all. It's much easier, by comparison, to feel massive relief right now, and hopes for better times ahead.
Yes, I am not sorry Mike Mearls has finally - after so many, many years - left D&D in a design capacity. There's no need to begrudge his many contributions to D&D, but plenty of reason to doubt he should have steered the ship.
Mearls is the classic example of a great writer who can't design his way out of a paper bag. His review of the original Keep on the Borderlands,written before he got hired by WotC, is great writing. His various articles, blog posts, interviews, and so on, always showed the great acumen he had as a salesman.
The problem is: D&D doesn't need a cheerleader at its helm, it needs a designer. And here Mearls can't hold a candle to a Jonathan Tweet, a Monte Cook, or a Rob Heinsoo.
Mearls is the classic example of a guy who comes up with an interesting idea that dissipates on contact with reality. His design for the knight class in 3.5 was half baked, and the excuse was, oooh I'm being moved on to 4E and couldn't finish that to be properly playable.
Well check out what Mearls did under 4E. While he became the cheerleader for skill challenges, he didn't originally design them. He wrote a series of articles that were confusing in the extreme, never showed a clear design goal or implementation, and was all really just written to make feel people good about playing 4e without resolving anything concrete in the design space.
Mearls published no less than 3 wholly unworkable, non-playtested, and half-assed versions of skill challenges. And that wasn't even the worst part of what he did with 4E.
Mearls is the lead developer for the 4E Monster Manual. That's the book where not a single number, from hit points, to the defense scores, or the damage output, was right - and in 4E, that's 95% of the mechanics. If we should remember Mearls the designer for anything, it's for this.
It's his great genius as a salesman that hardly anybody seems to. While, in his own words, his 2008 design work for 4E is the one he's "proudest" of, people on Enworld in 2020 seem to debate his degree of involvement at all.
The 4E Monster Manual will live on as the great exhibit of Mearlsian work ethos. While superior designers like Rich Baker, on release, gave us workable houserules (halving hp, upping damage output) to make that book workable, Mearls did his online promotion tours and went in full-on self-ingratiation mode with a ton of online websites, e-zines, youtube interviews, etc. what have you. He clearly had no aptitude or interest in providing us gamers with a single workable stat block on release. It was left to others to clean up the design of minions, of solos, and to give us numbers that worked. At lot of those people, by the way, got the sack, while Mearls the hack just prodded on.
Enter Essentials. It was a crazy idea to begin with. It wasn't a new or even semi-new edition, it was largely another exercise in Mearlsian sales pitch where nothing worked. You had a starter box whose rules or components weren't even the same game as the rulebooks, or a boxed set for the Dungeon Master that left out rules for creating dungeons. It was an incredible mess. When Essentials was released, 4E designers said 'if this bombs, we'll lose our jobs.' Well, it did, and they did - or, at least many of them. Not Mearls. He somehow seemed to have the ear of upper management and, I'm sure, was ready with his next sales pitch to steer the ship around that he'd already sunk twice.
Enter 5e. It's the essence of a Mearls'ian D&D. A feel-good edition, fan service edition, that does what it does despite of what it is mechanically. Failing to deliver on 3 pillars of game play, failing to deliver on the most modest of modularities, it falls apart anytime it foolishly attempts to create a sub-system. 5e is best played lightly, despite of itself.
This infinite loop of puff piece mechanical failures would have continued ad nauseam, were it not for that crucial Public Relations mis-step that people have documented so well again this week. Did you notice, by the way, that the Tweet that got Mike Mearls removed from the public eye was not actually a text - but a scanned GIF/image file of a text? Mearls did that so his half-hearted attempt to roll back his prior PR failure would not be text-searchable. I, for one, am grateful for the people who pointed it out at the time.
More than the cheapness of the words, the decision to make it an image file rather than text-searchable tells you everything you need to know about the person who was, for an incredible 10+ year period, at the helm of D&D. Someone who had real talent at promoting the game, but over and over showed us that he lacked the inclination or talent to spearhead things at a substantive level.
Whatever happens next, I hope WotC can come to its senses, and return us (and D&D) to more civilized times - times when marketing and promotion was left in the hands of able PR staff, and designers could be designers... without having to excel in being their own best self-promoters on social media, having to give online interviews, streamed live play, or what have you.
Let journalists be journalists, marketing folks do marketing - and let designers be designers. The game will be the better for it, because, historically, it's been better for it.
D&D is a game, not a marketing exercise.
11 years later, a similar occasion presents itself that compels the opposite conclusion. It's hard to look back on the past 11 years, and the last two years especially, and feel neutral about it all. It's much easier, by comparison, to feel massive relief right now, and hopes for better times ahead.
Yes, I am not sorry Mike Mearls has finally - after so many, many years - left D&D in a design capacity. There's no need to begrudge his many contributions to D&D, but plenty of reason to doubt he should have steered the ship.
Mearls is the classic example of a great writer who can't design his way out of a paper bag. His review of the original Keep on the Borderlands,written before he got hired by WotC, is great writing. His various articles, blog posts, interviews, and so on, always showed the great acumen he had as a salesman.
The problem is: D&D doesn't need a cheerleader at its helm, it needs a designer. And here Mearls can't hold a candle to a Jonathan Tweet, a Monte Cook, or a Rob Heinsoo.
Mearls is the classic example of a guy who comes up with an interesting idea that dissipates on contact with reality. His design for the knight class in 3.5 was half baked, and the excuse was, oooh I'm being moved on to 4E and couldn't finish that to be properly playable.
Well check out what Mearls did under 4E. While he became the cheerleader for skill challenges, he didn't originally design them. He wrote a series of articles that were confusing in the extreme, never showed a clear design goal or implementation, and was all really just written to make feel people good about playing 4e without resolving anything concrete in the design space.
Mearls published no less than 3 wholly unworkable, non-playtested, and half-assed versions of skill challenges. And that wasn't even the worst part of what he did with 4E.
Mearls is the lead developer for the 4E Monster Manual. That's the book where not a single number, from hit points, to the defense scores, or the damage output, was right - and in 4E, that's 95% of the mechanics. If we should remember Mearls the designer for anything, it's for this.
It's his great genius as a salesman that hardly anybody seems to. While, in his own words, his 2008 design work for 4E is the one he's "proudest" of, people on Enworld in 2020 seem to debate his degree of involvement at all.
The 4E Monster Manual will live on as the great exhibit of Mearlsian work ethos. While superior designers like Rich Baker, on release, gave us workable houserules (halving hp, upping damage output) to make that book workable, Mearls did his online promotion tours and went in full-on self-ingratiation mode with a ton of online websites, e-zines, youtube interviews, etc. what have you. He clearly had no aptitude or interest in providing us gamers with a single workable stat block on release. It was left to others to clean up the design of minions, of solos, and to give us numbers that worked. At lot of those people, by the way, got the sack, while Mearls the hack just prodded on.
Enter Essentials. It was a crazy idea to begin with. It wasn't a new or even semi-new edition, it was largely another exercise in Mearlsian sales pitch where nothing worked. You had a starter box whose rules or components weren't even the same game as the rulebooks, or a boxed set for the Dungeon Master that left out rules for creating dungeons. It was an incredible mess. When Essentials was released, 4E designers said 'if this bombs, we'll lose our jobs.' Well, it did, and they did - or, at least many of them. Not Mearls. He somehow seemed to have the ear of upper management and, I'm sure, was ready with his next sales pitch to steer the ship around that he'd already sunk twice.
Enter 5e. It's the essence of a Mearls'ian D&D. A feel-good edition, fan service edition, that does what it does despite of what it is mechanically. Failing to deliver on 3 pillars of game play, failing to deliver on the most modest of modularities, it falls apart anytime it foolishly attempts to create a sub-system. 5e is best played lightly, despite of itself.
This infinite loop of puff piece mechanical failures would have continued ad nauseam, were it not for that crucial Public Relations mis-step that people have documented so well again this week. Did you notice, by the way, that the Tweet that got Mike Mearls removed from the public eye was not actually a text - but a scanned GIF/image file of a text? Mearls did that so his half-hearted attempt to roll back his prior PR failure would not be text-searchable. I, for one, am grateful for the people who pointed it out at the time.
More than the cheapness of the words, the decision to make it an image file rather than text-searchable tells you everything you need to know about the person who was, for an incredible 10+ year period, at the helm of D&D. Someone who had real talent at promoting the game, but over and over showed us that he lacked the inclination or talent to spearhead things at a substantive level.
Whatever happens next, I hope WotC can come to its senses, and return us (and D&D) to more civilized times - times when marketing and promotion was left in the hands of able PR staff, and designers could be designers... without having to excel in being their own best self-promoters on social media, having to give online interviews, streamed live play, or what have you.
Let journalists be journalists, marketing folks do marketing - and let designers be designers. The game will be the better for it, because, historically, it's been better for it.
D&D is a game, not a marketing exercise.
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