WotC Mike Mearls: "D&D Is Uncool Again"

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In Mike Mearls' recent interview with Ben Riggs, he talks about how he feels that Dungeons & Dragons has had its moment, and is now uncool again. Mearls was one of the lead designers of D&D 5E and became the franchise's Creative Director in 2018. He worked at WotC until he was laid off in 2023. He is now EP of roleplaying games at Chaosium, the publisher of Call of Chulhu.

My theory is that when you look back at the OGL, the real impact of it is that it made D&D uncool again. D&D was cool, right? You had Joe Manganiello and people like that openly talking about playing D&D. D&D was something that was interesting, creative, fun, and different. And I think what the OGL did was take that concept—that Wizards and this idea of creativity that is inherent in the D&D brand because it's a roleplaying game, and I think those two things were sundered. And I don’t know if you can ever put them back together.

I think, essentially, it’s like that phrase: The Mandate of Heaven. I think fundamentally what happened was that Wizards has lost the Mandate of Heaven—and I don’t see them even trying to get it back.

What I find fascinating is that it was Charlie Hall who wrote that article. This is the same Charlie Hall who wrote glowing reviews of the 5.5 rulebooks. And then, at the same time, he’s now writing, "This is your chance because D&D seems to be stumbling." How do you square that? How do I go out and say, "Here are the two new Star Wars movies. They’re the best, the most amazing, the greatest Star Wars movies ever made. By the way, Star Wars has never been weaker. Now is the time for other sci-fi properties", like, to me that doesn’t make any sense! To me, it’s a context thing again.

Maybe this is the best Player’s Handbook ever written—but the vibes, the audience, the people playing these games—they don’t seem excited about it. We’re not seeing a groundswell of support and excitement. Where are the third-party products? That’s what I'd ask. Because that's what you’d think, "oh, there’s a gap", I mean remember before the OGL even came up, back when 3.0 launched, White Wolf had a monster book. There were multiple adventures at Gen Con. The license wasn’t even official yet, and there were already adventures showing up in stores. We're not seeing that, what’s ostensibly the new standard going forward? If anything, we’re seeing the opposite—creators are running in the opposite direction. I mean, that’s where I’m going.

And hey—to plug my Patreon—patreon.com/mikemearls (one word). This time last year, when I was looking at my post-Wizards options, I thought, "Well, maybe I could start doing 5E-compatible stuff." And now what I’m finding is…I just don’t want to. Like—it just seems boring. It’s like trying to start a hair metal band in 1992. Like—No, no, no. Everyone’s mopey and we're wearing flannel. It's Seattle and rain. It’s Nirvana now, man. It’s not like Poison. And that’s the vibe I get right now, yeah, Poison was still releasing albums in the ’90s. They were still selling hundreds of thousands or a million copies. But they didn’t have any of the energy. It's moved on. But what’s interesting to me is that roleplaying game culture is still there. And that’s what I find fascinating about gaming in general—especially TTRPGs. I don’t think we’ve ever had a period where TTRPGs were flourishing, and had a lot of energy and excitement around them, and D&D wasn’t on the upswing. Because I do think that’s what’s happening now. We’re in very strange waters where I think D&D is now uncool.
 

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It feels like he’s out from under an NDA that just ended and is sour for how things were handled, fired, quit moved, let go and has a small chip on his shoulder for the old company and airing the grievance anytime he can….the timing of the responses after a long gap of social media presence and follow up interviews skews my mind slightly as to the reason behind the verbose posts and that back and forth with Ray in that other thread made it feel like a chip on his shoulder from an ex employee.

Mike, your more fun when it’s happy fun hour Mike, not the dnd is dying Mike as of late :)

This could all be true but even if it is, he does come from an informed perspective. There’s nothing to say he has to be happy with the direction of the game and decisions that were made, but I don’t feel that should just be dismissed out of hand.
 

So folks that keep parroting the notion that "no oen knows what the OGL is"" -- how do you square that with the absolutely massive coverage that event got in D&D spaces.
I didn't say no one, and I'm not "parroting" it (a very dismissive term). I square it very easily - huge numbers of people are still introduced to the game by their friends. Lots of people are aware of it, but if they bring some friends in to play the game, the OGL isn't exactly a vital piece of information to relay.

Lots of people play the game without being in "D&D spaces", as I already said. Huge numbers of people still just play with their friends, and spend no time watching streams or on message boards.

So in the end, I square it pretty easily.
 


Wait -- do you actually believe that it is the 20-somethings running the show at WotC? Or Disney? Or Netflix? Or Larian?
you’re confusing cool with popular. Like Netflix and Disney and WoTC aren’t cool. I’ll allow that Larian might still be. Those companies might release something cool, but they absolutely aren’t determining what’s cool, what gets a wide release and gets and marketing force to be popular, sure. What’s cool will forever be the domain of independents and kids-these-days. And if you don’t think those companies aren’t employing all their reasources to figure out what they’re thinking, and instead putting out stuff that the 40+ upper management likes…

Like, take fashion, there’s plenty of 40+ designers, and tastemakers, but they’re absolutely stealing from teenage club kids like they always have. The club kids will always be cool, the designers popular.
 


It feels like he’s out from under an NDA that just ended and is sour for how things were handled, fired, quit moved, let go and has a small chip on his shoulder for the old company and airing the grievance anytime he can….
there might be some truth to this part at least as far as biases go. I do believe he genuinely is interested in where D&D is headed sales wise however, it's just hard to get any reliable data

The reason you initially gave however was
it seems like he’s sour that his edition is being out sold
and that was what I disagreed with
 

Cool? Like I don’t know how to respond to this. I’m glad you have your opinion and I have mine?
You said it’s undebatable that D&D under WotC is “incredibly lame.” You weren’t merely presenting your opinion, you were claiming it was an objective fact that couldn’t be denied by anyone because of your anecdotal experience.

I can say from my own anecdotal experience that my players have thoroughly enjoyed the new rules and one of my players has been talking about how awesome the new Monster Manual looks for weeks. And he’s the player at my table that has a harder time getting engaged at the table.
 

He probably is sour, sure, but he has reason to be. Personally, I don't think I'll move to the new edition, as I find myself increasing drawn to older editions. Or maybe I'll try something different entirely, out of the D&D sphere. Demon City kinda caught my eye for now.
 

I believe Mike overstates the impact of the OGL debacle. Does the average player really care (No, not really). I also don’t think D&D is “uncool” now. What we have is D&D fatigue.

While the percentage of players it caused to leave DND was probably somewhat small compared to the overall userbase I imagine a lot of them who were aware and were moving away were some of the more hardcore players who not only used third party products but they were likely the type who would buy many of the first party releases.

New customer acquisition is expensive, and you don't want to lose your dedicated customers because those are even harder to replace.
 

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