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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Probably not. That year had a very cramped release schedule. That summer had 5 or 6 big budget movies released 1 week apart.

It's biggest problem was most likely it's a D&D movie even if it's the first good one

Well, just recently Disney had their newest live action Lion King movie soundly trounced by a Sonic the Hedgehog movie for over a month, so a Mario movie stealing all the attention from a D&D movie isn't surprising to me at all.

From Deadline:
This week Mufasa will pass Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at the domestic box office. Both after 45 days in theaters wound up Sunday with respective running cumes of $229.5M and $230.5M.
 

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I mean, you can't force people to be cheerful for your entertainment when they feel bad about something. Your hobby is made of people; it's not a pure mote of fun floating through the cosmos. Your hobby is a part of the real world, whether you like it or not.
And that’s not what I’m referring to. Mike has been vocally saying D&D is on the decline in multiple threads…I’m just askiing for him to dial it back as it’s been enough for me as it seems like he’s sour that his edition is being out sold so he’s drumming up that it didn’t. Nothing like what you mention or pertain to think above.
 


Ironically I think Mearls is too far inside the industry to analyze it. Attributing anything significant to the OGL issue is silly. The attitude of an average D&D player to the OGL is "what's an OGL?"
People keep saying this and I am curious if it is based on anything other than what folsk expect. We all know that influencer culture is huge, and information disseminates much faster and more broadly than it ever has -- especially for fandoms.

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 feel like people like to have their cake and eat it too in these situations. Online gamers are at once the trendsetters, and completely alien compared to "typical" gamers. D&D players are primarily GenZ and younger, yet are somehow unaware of online D&D culture. There are 50 million D&D players, but it is a weird niche that is completely isolated from borader cultural trends.

Pick a lane.
 

We had people here poo-pooing the idea that Mario was going to have a big impact. I think unless people had young kids -- who were the audience the movie was aimed at, as the howls of protest from older fans at the trailer made very clear -- it was easy to make that mistake.

My kids were up for seeing DADHAT, but really wanted to see Mario the next weekend, which we saw at the first showing of the day to avoid the crowds and it was still really well attended.
I loved Mario, I watched the trailer and realised that the people complaining were just an "old man shouts at clouds" situation. I also loved the dnd movie, I had a bit more disposable income but if my brother took all his kids to even one of those movies he'd probably go bankrupt.

I definitely think that the complainers who really wanted Mario to fail severely underestimated the target demographic for Mario, they probably thought it was only the old fans of the games that wanted to see it.
 

People keep saying this and I am curious if it is based on anything other than what folsk expect. We all know that influencer culture is huge, and information disseminates much faster and more broadly than it ever has -- especially for fandoms.

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 feel like people like to have their cake and eat it too in these situations. Online gamers are at once the trendsetters, and completely alien compared to "typical" gamers. D&D players are primarily GenZ and younger, yet are somehow unaware of online D&D culture. There are 50 million D&D players, but it is a weird niche that is completely isolated from borader cultural trends.

Pick a lane.
I had tons of people who never really talked to me about D&D news bring up the OGL. These folks aren’t into the hobby at all but they heard about it and they asked me about it. It was wild.
 

I loved Mario, I watched the trailer and realised that the people complaining were just an "old man shouts at clouds" situation. I also loved the dnd movie, I had a bit more disposable income but if my brother took all his kids to even one of those movies he'd probably go bankrupt.

I definitely think that the complainers who really wanted Mario to fail severely underestimated the target demographic for Mario, they probably thought it was only the old fans of the games that wanted to see it.

I just looked it up and the Mario movie was the second highest grossing movie of 2023 after Barbie. The Mario movie came out the week after D&D: HAT, and a lot of people go to the movies infrequently so that definitely had an impact.
 
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The D&D movie is a good example of why fan sentiment matters.

Did the OGL directly hurt the movie? Maybe. You can't be sure, but when you make a $150 million bet on something, you want to ensure that you have as many things running in your favor as possible.

Remember that the OGL received plenty of mainstream press coverage:
So if you are a movie studio exec trying to explain to your bosses why a movie you backed didn't make its money, what are you going to do? Are you going to take the blame, or point to the D&D license holders and say, "It would have been a huge hit if it wasn't for those guys at WotC."

Remember all the TV series they talked about, and the documentary? Where do you think they went?

Corporations do not release a product under a no strings attached license because they want to keep a small subset of online fans happy. I'm sure there were serious conversations on whether the D&D business was going to survive. It's very likely that the fans weren't the only people hounding Wizards.
Honor Among Thieves definitely underperformed at the box office and that is very likely why other big and small screen D&D projects evaporated. But is that an indicator that D&D isn't "cool" anymore?

Or just how Hollywood works?

I try not to pay any attention at all to film projects announced until they are showing the second trailer on YouTube . . . even films with a solid release date sometimes get yanked in today's market. A lot of movie fans are worried that cinema is dead . . . not unlike the perennial worry here that D&D is dead.
 

Does anyone see anyone playing that 50 million ks game?

I’ve seen people playing Draw Steel and Daggerheart, but not that.

Edit: 15 million.
The Stormlight RPG is shipping in September. I am pretty plugged into the Sandwrson fandom, and I can guarantee that game will see play.

I don't think it will "unthrone" D&D or anything, but I think the system Brotherwise is cooking might be one of the most credible challenges D&D has faced...maybe ever?

Based on my observations of the under 12 crowd, I am, however, skeptical that D&D is "uncool" with the target audience.
 

Maybe I am missing something but blaming the OGL for D&D being uncool seems way off base. Wasn't it around the year 2000 that the OGL was first released and afterwards D&D rose in popularity? D&D 3.x sure seemed more popular than it's predecessors. I can't speak for 4E since I paid no attention to it but 5E certainly seemed to be the height of D&D's popularity. Maybe it's becoming less cool now, I can't judge since I haven't played D&D since the release of 4E, but blaming the now 25 year old OGL on D&D becoming less cool seems to be ignoring other possible factors.
 

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