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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Mearls later goes on to say that he thinks D&D may never recover and that we may be living in a "post-D&D" landscape. I would think someone who's been in the business as long as he has would realize how cyclical these trends are.

Yeah that's a bizarre take. I agree we've passed the current peak, but D&D is a permanent thing in our culture. It'll have another peak years in the future, and then another valley. The brand will be bought and sold again. But there isn't a post-D&D anymore than there is a post-Spider-man or post-Star Wars.
 

He touched on that elsewhere in the video. He suspects "fastest-selling" is a weasel word designed to conceal the fact that it's not doing as well as they want to project.
Which is odd to me. How else do you say a book does well close after its release?

We know a lot of 5e books kept selling well, the Player Handbook being a big one. Did we expect the news to say "Sold more than the 2014 PHB!"? I don't think anyone expected that.
 

While I agree this is possible... there's also the possibility that it doesn't contract, but rather stays the same size (or even continues to just slowly grow) but because it isn't noteworthy anymore no one pays much attention to how it stays.

I mean look at something like the WWE: their "coolness" went off the charts with the advent of Stone Cold Steve Austin and his feud with Vince McMahon (along with the ascension of The Rock, Triple H et. al.)... and yet from all accounts the WWE is wildly more successful now than it was then, even though no one in common culture is all that "excited" about it in the same way people were back in 1997 or saw the massive upswing in cultural cache. The WWE isn't "cool"... it's just what it is. But what it is is massively successful.

So for all we know, D&D 5E24 might very well maintain the levels that 5E14 set... but because that would just be the status quo and not things blowing up massively past that, there's no real story to be told. We really won't know for a couple years. Let's see if/when Jeremy, Chris, and James are let go and mumblings of someone like McKenzie DeArmas beginning work on 6E start surfacing. Then we'll have a better idea the state of D&D. ;)
Lots of things have their moment in the sun and don't die after, but lose their prominence. Doctor Who had a major American revival during the Matt Smith/David Tennant eras but crested nearly 10+ years ago. Is Doctor Who still popular? Yes, but not "show the season opener in the theaters" popular. A lot of people feel Marvel crested at Endgame, and that Star Wars's last hurrah was the first two seasons of Mandelorian. All those properties are still relevant, but audiences are seeking new thrills and tastes.

Put another way, the 2024 PHB can outsell every other PHB to date AND still be less culturally relevant than it was 10 years ago.
 


Lots of things have their moment in the sun and don't die after, but lose their prominence. Doctor Who had a major American revival during the Matt Smith/David Tennant eras but crested nearly 10+ years ago. Is Doctor Who still popular? Yes, but not "show the season opener in the theaters" popular. A lot of people feel Marvel crested at Endgame, and that Star Wars's last hurrah was the first two seasons of Mandelorian. All those properties are still relevant, but audiences are seeking new thrills and tastes.

Put another way, the 2024 PHB can outsell every other PHB to date AND still be less culturally relevant than it was 10 years ago.
Exactly this. If you're even asking "Did this property peak?", then yes, it peaked.
 

Regardless of the minutia of the ups and downs, I think it's important to note that fluctuations like this are why it's good that D&D is part of Hasbro.

There's a group of players that have been arguing that ever since D&D got popular, WotC should break from Hasbro. If what Mearls says is even remotely true, how bad of a position would D&D be in right now if they were solo? Layoffs, restructuring, or even looking for another buyer? Changes like this show the short sightedness of the "we're the big dog, let's drop those Hasbro financial losers" mentality.

Hasbro brings a level of financial stability to help weather contractions and expansions like this. Without stability and long term planning, very minor market changes can cause huge problems that make smaller companies struggle.
 

His argument here is that this is the first time that relationship seems to have broken, and he only to the Cosmere RPG out-earning the 2024 corebooks (by his estimation) as an example.
That was an odd example IMO. He is way off base if he thinks the 15m Cosmere made is going to outsell the 2024 core books. He guessed WotC would need to sell 500,000 core books to beat that. Based on the hints we have seen I think the 2024 PHB will blow by that alone (if it hasn't already) and it has been out for what a half-year?
 

I can't help but equate this to superhero comics and the DC/MCU movies. Superhero comics have always been there, and were there before mainstream media outlets started talking about how cool superheros are, but the big moment was the release of Iron Man, and the hint that they were going to release a series of movies that would all be connected as part of a bigger universe -- a bigger story. We got that with the Marvel Phases and the Avengers movies, and each movie was making hundreds of millions of dollars, and getting more buzz than the last one -- until one day, that buzz started to die down.

DC couldn't really get their interconnected universe off the ground. Marvel wrapped up the Infinity Saga, key actors retired from their roles, no one knew where the next story would go, and we started to hit a level of saturation that made the whole endeavor seem less cool even as they continued making money...but also noticeably less money than they were before. I think it's difficult to keep something like that sustainable, but in the case of WotC and D&D, I also feel like in some ways, they didn't reach the heights that they could've reached. There's more growth to potentially be had, I think, but I'm not convinced they're on a path to achieving that growth and that reach.
 


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