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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is that also Ben Riggs? Do you have any link to that, whether Ben or not?
I'm afraid I don't.

I'm not sure it would be helpful anyway, as various factors complicate the numbers in odd ways - 4e was significantly impacted by DDI (which almost certainly cost a lot of book sales, brought in lots of money from subscriptions, but was also very expensive to develop and run), and the delineation between 1st Ed and B/X or BECMI wasn't terribly clear ("Keep on the Borderlands" sold a crazy number of copies, was not a 1st Ed adventure at least on paper, but was almost certainly bought and used with a lot of 1st Ed games. So to what extent should it count?)

As I said, it's probably just best to pick whatever measure makes your favourite edition win and leave it at that. :)
 

I don't see D&D ever being dethroned as long as D&D is in print. The worst possible set of circumstances happened around 2010 and it didn't dethrone it. This is a drop in the bucket.
You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the Reaper.
 


You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the Reaper.
Superman has been uncool for decades. He's got a new movie coming out this year and people are hyped. The X-Men were out of the spotlight for decades due to gross mismanagement from Marvel and slop Fox movies, and then Deadpool and Wolverine and X-Men 97 brought them back to full prominence.

Brands this old don't die, they go dormant and then roar back to life.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die”
 

the delineation between 1st Ed and B/X or BECMI wasn't terribly clear ("Keep on the Borderlands" sold a crazy number of copies
certainly true for BX / 1e / 2e

I thought Keep sold so much because it came with the boxed set rather than individually

Would be interesting if anyone even had the numbers to firmly say 1e < 2e < 3e < 4e in total sales, whatever the actual sequence would then turn out to be.
 


Superman has been uncool for decades. He's got a new movie coming out this year and people are hyped. The X-Men were out of the spotlight for decades due to gross mismanagement from Marvel and slop Fox movies, and then Deadpool and Wolverine and X-Men 97 brought them back to full prominence.

Brands this old don't die, they go dormant and then roar back to life.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die”
As far as I can tell, the only 'person' [1] writing Westerns any more is the despicable William W. Johnstone. Properties, and even entire genres, die.

[1] In quotes because he died years ago; it's his niece writing under his name now as I understand it.
 



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