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's basically an echo chamber with a few outliers. Then someone is authority says something tune changes.

Swings older and out of touch (I include myself here).

No one with actual knowledge of how well things has been posting on these forums as far as we know. The bookscan numbers were highly flawed for reasons others have explained, not to mention that they don't account for online sales from Amazon, wizards or any other source. About the only reference to a reliable statistic on this thread on page 9 by @Steampunkette is that millions of people still play DnD on on roll20 and the numbers don't seem to be dropping. Is that a good indicator? I have no clue. We simply don't know how many books are being sold or how much of the market is going completely online without relying on physical books.

People are just reading tea leaves and making proclamations based on what could easily be internal biases that they may not even be aware of. I'm just glad my group and I are still enjoying playing the game and that it continues to be supported.
 

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I've seen a lot of doomerism around the 3.6 million character figure.

Basically, CNBC made a 10 minute long D&D advertisement for 2024's ruleset with Jess Lanzillo of WotC and called it a news report. It aired on December 28th, 2024, after D&D's 2024 ruleset hit on September 17th.

People have pointed out that D&D Beyond has 19 million users and 3.6 million is a paltry proportion of them. Especially considering "I know a guy who made 4 of those characters!"

But this neglects several important pieces of information:

1) How many D&D Beyonders use the integrated character builder? The proportion is large, but it's not 100%.
2) How many D&D Beyonders were in the middle of 2014 campaigns and didn't have DMs looking to run 2024 immediately? (And thus didn't bother making characters) (Especially relevant since the DMG didn't release 'til November and the Monster Manual HASN'T RELEASED YET)
3) How many 2014 Heritage and Archetypes actually work with 2024? (Paladin Oaths and Warlock Pacts, for example, and thus people who wanted to make those, didn't)
4) When was the video shot?

Now... the first one seems trivial, and the middle ones are of some import... but the last one is also pretty important. 'Cause it determines how much actual time people had with D&D24 before the interview happened.

If the video was shot the day after Thanksgiving, for example, when most of the municipal Christmas decorations in New York (where it was filmed) go up, that cuts off a month of potential character-making time.

Will D&D24 get heavy market saturation? No one can say, for sure. Anecdotally I can tell you that I know a bunch of folks who plan to stick with 2014 or A5e or another 3rd party 5e-compatible game.

What I can tell you, is that D&D isn't going away any time soon. And that even if WotC stopped producing material, tons of people would just move to Pathfinder, DC20, Level Up, and other games further afield.
 

Are you saying that Enworld is an echo chamber of WotC cheerleaders, or do you mean that it's an echo chamber of negativity apart from a small group of WotC cheerleaders?
I think it's the same people just repeating themselves over and over again. Love it, hate it....same ole same ole.
You can tell because they (we?) have been making the same arguments for so long that we (they?) tie ourselves in knots to try and make our points. Definitions of things, demanding proof of things, people agreeing with one another aggressively etc.
 

No one with actual knowledge of how well things has been posting on these forums as far as we know. The bookscan numbers were highly flawed for reasons others have explained, not to mention that they don't account for online sales from Amazon, wizards or any other source. About the only reference to a reliable statistic on this thread on page 9 by @Steampunkette is that millions of people still play DnD on on roll20 and the numbers don't seem to be dropping. Is that a good indicator? I have no clue. We simply don't know how many books are being sold or how much of the market is going completely online without relying on physical books.

People are just reading tea leaves and making proclamations based on what could easily be internal biases that they may not even be aware of. I'm just glad my group and I are still enjoying playing the game and that it continues to be supported.

Pretty much. Book scan isn't great for total numbers but useful perhaps for trends.

It's vastly more respondents than say polling.
 

I've seen a lot of doomerism around the 3.6 million character figure.

Basically, CNBC made a 10 minute long D&D advertisement for 2024's ruleset with Jess Lanzillo of WotC and called it a news report. It aired on December 28th, 2024, after D&D's 2024 ruleset hit on September 17th.

People have pointed out that D&D Beyond has 19 million users and 3.6 million is a paltry proportion of them. Especially considering "I know a guy who made 4 of those characters!"

But this neglects several important pieces of information:

1) How many D&D Beyonders use the integrated character builder? The proportion is large, but it's not 100%.
2) How many D&D Beyonders were in the middle of 2014 campaigns and didn't have DMs looking to run 2024 immediately? (And thus didn't bother making characters) (Especially relevant since the DMG didn't release 'til November and the Monster Manual HASN'T RELEASED YET)
3) How many 2014 Heritage and Archetypes actually work with 2024? (Paladin Oaths and Warlock Pacts, for example, and thus people who wanted to make those, didn't)
4) When was the video shot?

Now... the first one seems trivial, and the middle ones are of some import... but the last one is also pretty important. 'Cause it determines how much actual time people had with D&D24 before the interview happened.

If the video was shot the day after Thanksgiving, for example, when most of the municipal Christmas decorations in New York (where it was filmed) go up, that cuts off a month of potential character-making time.

Will D&D24 get heavy market saturation? No one can say, for sure. Anecdotally I can tell you that I know a bunch of folks who plan to stick with 2014 or A5e or another 3rd party 5e-compatible game.

What I can tell you, is that D&D isn't going away any time soon. And that even if WotC stopped producing material, tons of people would just move to Pathfinder, DC20, Level Up, and other games further afield.

WotC might have shot themselves in the foot as well. 19 million accounts sounds useful but how many are active accounts?

That number is rally costly lower
Bob the World builder video he looked at it and 2 million out of 18 *at the tine) were active iirc.
 

Bob the World builder video he looked at it and 2 million out of 18 *at the tine) were active iirc.
how would he know what is active vs not? I assume the 2M might be paid / subscribed accounts vs free, I have no idea how he would determine this either however
 

D&D is not about selling stories, but selling the tools to create those stories. If the players enjoy creating characters and stories then D&D can't stop to be cool.

Maybe the moment when D&D was new and unexplored for lots of new gamers has ended but this shouldn't mean the end of the second golden age.

And there is a clear difference between the best years of the hobby and the best years for WotC as company.

The adventage of the brand is this isn't too linked to a little group of characters or plot.

* My opinion is D&D-Beyond is proving to be useful as showcase for 3PPs. I haven't got enough date but if a 3PP publishes a second sourcebook in D&DB that should be a good signal.
 


I've seen a lot of doomerism around the 3.6 million character figure.

Basically, CNBC made a 10 minute long D&D advertisement for 2024's ruleset with Jess Lanzillo of WotC and called it a news report. It aired on December 28th, 2024, after D&D's 2024 ruleset hit on September 17th.

People have pointed out that D&D Beyond has 19 million users and 3.6 million is a paltry proportion of them. Especially considering "I know a guy who made 4 of those characters!"

But this neglects several important pieces of information:

1) How many D&D Beyonders use the integrated character builder? The proportion is large, but it's not 100%.
2) How many D&D Beyonders were in the middle of 2014 campaigns and didn't have DMs looking to run 2024 immediately? (And thus didn't bother making characters) (Especially relevant since the DMG didn't release 'til November and the Monster Manual HASN'T RELEASED YET)
3) How many 2014 Heritage and Archetypes actually work with 2024? (Paladin Oaths and Warlock Pacts, for example, and thus people who wanted to make those, didn't)
4) When was the video shot?

Now... the first one seems trivial, and the middle ones are of some import... but the last one is also pretty important. 'Cause it determines how much actual time people had with D&D24 before the interview happened.

If the video was shot the day after Thanksgiving, for example, when most of the municipal Christmas decorations in New York (where it was filmed) go up, that cuts off a month of potential character-making time.

Will D&D24 get heavy market saturation? No one can say, for sure. Anecdotally I can tell you that I know a bunch of folks who plan to stick with 2014 or A5e or another 3rd party 5e-compatible game.

What I can tell you, is that D&D isn't going away any time soon. And that even if WotC stopped producing material, tons of people would just move to Pathfinder, DC20, Level Up, and other games further afield.

Yeah, I think it is best to wait until the MM to play with the new rules.

I only adopted them because we happened to be starting up a new campaign a couple weeks after the PHB was released.
 

Yeah I'm also in the "its too soon to tell" boat. The average group doesn't buy all the new books immediately and this edition seems to not have a lot of changes so there's probably not a huge rush in a lot of folk's minds. While D&D may be on something of a downswing lets remember that it was like everywhere for years, a lull in interest may be good as it may make it fresh news story in a few years when a new IP like a game or movie comes out.
 

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