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

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.

 

[Belen]

I agree with the article. If anything, 5.5's affect on me was to look back to Cypher, Saga Edition, 2e or 3.0 (not 3.5).

The luster of 5e has worn off. I still like 5.0 but now I know that 5.5 is moving away from me. The only thing keeping me with 5.0 is DDB and the legacy content.

5.5 is just not what I want. They seem to have betrayed the original design goals that made me like it such as optional feats and the overall writing is so generic. They have taken a lot of flavor away or replaced it with less interesting stuff.

 

[dbolack]

Exactly this. If you're even asking "Did this property peak?", then yes, it peaked.

Sometimes. Sometimes it's being asked by a very hopeful prat. Not the case here - but the existence of the question doesn't indicate the occurance.

 

[delericho]

That's kind of like saying you can know who wins the super bowl after the game has been played. If it happens of course we will know something is going on but your statement adds no support to your statements.

You said that "We won't know the answer to that until 2034 at the earliest." If they announce a new edition in 2028, that's a good bit before then.

 

[delericho]

True. But acting as though there was no gap before the 3E glut kicked in ( also? Are we now NOSTALGIC about the glut? ) is a bit disingenuous.

That's fair. Also, to answer your question, I'm not.

 

[TiQuinn]

That's kind of like saying you can know who wins the super bowl after the game has been played. If it happens of course we will know something is going on but your statement adds no support to your statements.

In fairness, I think actual data is very difficult to obtain in support of any argument so we're left with parsing together theories and looking at company moves in lieu of that data. If a new edition were to come out shortly after this release, that would be a strong indication that the company felt they needed to fix things.

 

[mearls]

I don’t have specifics at hand really. There are Greyhawk products there that I think are more focused on lore, either updating old lore to the new DMG or compiling a lot of lore leaning towards the old lore.

In that mix I think are at least one product, but I think more, that update old mechanics to 2024. (Old as in pre 5e).

Also I think I saw some adventures.

But it’s probably not near what Mike was looking for anyway, part of that is no one knew for sure that it was going to be open until after the DMG. So it’s kinda still early.

I'd expect to see a bit more of a goldrush mentality, with larger publishers jumping in with big products. Fundamentally, the OGL pushed people like Kobold Press to create their own games. They're now interested in getting you to buy a competing product, rather than something for D&D.

As another example, Flee Mortals! has replaced the Monster Manual for me, but rather than MCDM doing a follow-up they're off doing their own game.

I think that takes some air out of a launch.

 

[Osgood]

I'm not saying the idea that D&D's peak has passed it wrong, but I don't buy that the lack of supporting 3rd party products is a compelling proof point--the Monster Manual isn't even out yet. I guess you could put out an adventure that only included those handful of monsters that have appeared in a previews, but that would just be weird. I get that we live in an age where everyone wants to be first with their hot takes, but it's probably going to take a year before anyone can speak with anything close to actual evidence on the success of the 2024 rules. And as to D&D's waxing or waning cultural popularity, that may take even longer.

 

[dbolack]

In the past, D&D shrinking hurt everything because the stereotypical D&D player was the entirety of the hobby. These days, we have a much wider variety of people in the hobby and with that, far more ways that people want to engage with TTRPGs.

We also have an increasingly large number of ways to engage in the hobby without being a measurable metric - not that we ever have had a large number of reliable metrics.

 

[AlViking]

In fairness, I think actual data is very difficult to obtain in support of any argument so we're left with parsing together theories and looking at company moves in lieu of that data. If a new edition were to come out shortly after this release, that would be a strong indication that the company felt they needed to fix things.

Because of multiple changes I think even our guesses at how well the books sell has been dramatically diminished. My only real point was that how well DnD is doing is likely only ever going to be known to people inside of wizards. The business of DnD has changed over the past decade so even sales of books doesn't give you the whole picture any more. If you want to be technically correct I should have included "probably won't know" but I guess I thought that was obvious since I'm not Nostradamus.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I feel like there was a period in the 90s where WW posed a genuine threat to D&D’s dominance. Not sure what the numbers actually were but looking around it sure felt like it was gaining. That was also a period though where you had lots of non-D&D games on the market. I suppose Pathfinder did something similar in the wake of 4E. I wouldn’t completely dismiss the idea of D&D eventually being replaced by an alternative (I am sure people will still probably call it D&D like the way Q-Tips are the generic name for cotton swabs)