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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Hasbro will part with Wizards of the Coast and it's brands when President Musk demands it's dissolution and Federal acquisition.

Mod Note:
Someone in the market for red text and a Warning Point for political commentary, I see!
Here you go, then!
 

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No, it’s too valuable to not be part of some company’s “portfolio”.
This. Hasbro might be persuaded to part with D&D, if they find themselves in enough trouble and someone makes them a sufficiently good offer. More likely, I think, is that the same company that might make that offer would simply buy out the whole of Hasbro (D&D isn't the only valuable IP they have...).

Either way, that still just replaces one corporate overlord with another. And even if you imagine that the buyer is Musk, or Bezos, or Zuckerberg, that's still really X, Amazon, or Meta.
 



To be fair, Disney, Sony, Warner - these are the companies that I would think of as buyers for D&D.
More seriously, if D&D becomes so unprofitable that Hasbro wants to sell it off, another big company would only buy it if they had a plan for the IP. We can't really imagine what that would be.
 

More seriously, if D&D becomes so unprofitable that Hasbro wants to sell it off, another big company would only buy it if they had a plan for the IP. We can't really imagine what that would be.
I agree. I don't think there is any chance of putting that genie back in the bottle. D&D belongs to the corpos now and will forevermore, for better or worse.
 

More seriously, if D&D becomes so unprofitable that Hasbro wants to sell it off, another big company would only buy it if they had a plan for the IP. We can't really imagine what that would be.
I actually don't think it's that crazy - if anything, I think the knock on Hasbro is that they don't really know how to use their IP effectively.
 

I actually don't think it's that crazy - if anything, I think the knock on Hasbro is that they don't really know how to use their IP effectively.
What I mean was that Disney would only buy it if they decided they could make it into the next Star Wars. I think if they thought that, they would have already bought it.
 


What I mean was that Disney would only buy it if they decided they could make it into the next Star Wars. I think if they thought that, they would have already bought it.
given how the last Star Wars acquisition worked out for them, I am not expecting much from them
 

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