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 it? Every release performing worse than the previous one at the box office, going from 900M for the first part of their trilogy to 200M for Solo does not feel all that subjective

Did not really look at viewer numbers of their series, but with The Acolyte being cancelled after one season and Skeleton Crew renewal being uncertain, they are not exactly doing great there either

They threw untold buckets of money at The Acolyte so it's not a surprise it was cancelled, especially given the execution of the story. You can't just throw a Star Wars label on something and expect it to sell and honestly I don't know how they spent $29 million per episode for a total of $230 million on the show. Maybe they should have spent some of that money on better writing. But this is a problem that big entertainment is facing right now, they don't know how to make content people will pay for at a price that is reasonable for the audience.
 

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then explain to me how the box office numbers are subjective
Because you are cherry picking again and ignoring the fact that even Lucas’ films had a similar trajectory. You claim to want to make it not about their investment and yet their purchase of Star Wars allowed them to build a theme park, multiple tv shows and movies that whether you think didn’t pass muster, were successes in the sense that each one of the new trilogy earned over a billion dollars. But by virtue of the completely arbitrary metric that each successive movie did less than the last, you claim it a failure.

Not playing your game with the all the goalpost shifting.

Also, not the topic ultimately.
 

All things have their time in the sun and then we put them down for awhile. "Rock is dead" has been on a twelve year cycle since the 1940s. Alan Cross has a great podcast episode about how that happens in music. Geekdom is no different, when it comes to cycles.
The OGL is irrelevant. It was a bad contract by Hasbro and the internet behaved poorly as expected, when contract conversations by the rare few making $750k+ on someone else's IP was the appropriate response. (See Paizo's god-awful "we were there" open letter to try to make their own half-assed second edition relevant).
WotC had a good thing going and fumbled it with mechanics they fixed in Tasha's being rebroken (see character building a la stat choices and forced backgrounds for class - Sailor Monk!), AI art the community doesn't want to see and failing to follow up on a very successful movie release.
Marvel kept comic books relevant much longer than a typical popularity cycle with a reasonably well-managed movie franchise. They're wanting not because of bad movie choices (though that's not irrelevant), but because our appetites change for a time.
We don't hate chicken for dinner. We just want to mix it up once in awhile. With gaming, those who enjoy maintain their fun so long as they aren't alienated from the game.
 

All things have their time in the sun and then we put them down for awhile. "Rock is dead" has been on a twelve year cycle since the 1940s. Alan Cross has a great podcast episode about how that happens in music. Geekdom is no different, when it comes to cycles.
The OGL is irrelevant. It was a bad contract by Hasbro and the internet behaved poorly as expected, when contract conversations by the rare few making $750k+ on someone else's IP was the appropriate response. (See Paizo's god-awful "we were there" open letter to try to make their own half-assed second edition relevant).
WotC had a good thing going and fumbled it with mechanics they fixed in Tasha's being rebroken (see character building a la stat choices and forced backgrounds for class - Sailor Monk!), AI art the community doesn't want to see and failing to follow up on a very successful movie release.
Marvel kept comic books relevant much longer than a typical popularity cycle with a reasonably well-managed movie franchise. They're wanting not because of bad movie choices (though that's not irrelevant), but because our appetites change for a time.
We don't hate chicken for dinner. We just want to mix it up once in awhile. With gaming, those who enjoy maintain their fun so long as they aren't alienated from the game.
 

There’s multiple ways to increase monetization. I don’t think that’s okay to do at the expense of your customers or your original value proposition (outside of things like risk of bankruptcy, etc).

Increased monetization doesn’t have to mean customers paying more for less, but that’s usually how big companies try to implement it.
The fundamental problem is that Hasbro is a public company.

Old school Keynesian economics would dictate that people/entities generally make decisions that are in their long-term self interest. This however did not really take into account the pressures of entering the capital markets. How many times have you heard that say, Amazon's stock decreased in value even though they posted X Billion Dollars in profit? But they only grew 1.2 %, time to take a bath.

It used to be that, you could sacrifice increased short term gain for a healthier, sustainable business that would be better for business long term. Now, that's no longer possible. You need to grow, infinitely, forever to make the revolving door of people/funds who own your stock happy. Thus, because every possible efficiency and business process optimization has been, more or less, already made they squeeze their consumer, which is not a good long term strategy but works well enough in the short term for their shareholders and, not inconsequentially, the C-suite guys who derive alot of their compensation from stock and are only going to be there a few years, interests. It's why every app you love gets inevitably enshittified.

So really, it's in nobodies interest (at least anyone making the decisions) to really strive for a model where you don't pressure the customer with subscriptions, micro transactions, needless products that cause them to tire of your product as a whole and just leave etc. I wanta da money now, I don't care about da money 5 years for now. I needa da money now.
 
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Given Disney's poor track record with a number of it's movies recently, I would be concerned about any Executive meddling damaging the game.

IMO, they would not be the right company to take over D&D.
 

They threw untold buckets of money at The Acolyte so it's not a surprise it was cancelled, especially given the execution of the story.
it was cancelled because it had too few viewers, not because it cost too much in a vacuum. Not entirely sure what you consider the execution of the story, but if it is what I interpret it as, then isn’t that what results in both the number of viewers (to a degree) and their opinion of the show?

You can't just throw a Star Wars label on something and expect it to sell
yes, and who is responsible for what story they choose to tell and how they tell it? I am not sure how any if this is not the responsibility of Disney, just as it would if it had been a success
 


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.

Doesn’t make much sense to me. Fastest selling means from launch till now it’s sold more than any other version. No idea how that’s a weasel word.

Now it can still be selling better than any other version and still failing to meet internal expectations. That may be a matter of modifying expectations.
 

Because you are cherry picking again and ignoring the fact that even Lucas’ films had a similar trajectory.
except that I to III dropped from 430M to 380M rather than from 900 to 500, so not quite the same drop, is it

Ultimately none of the Lucas trajectory has much bearing on Disney’s handling of the franchise, they could have grown it too, even if their trilogy too had a 20% or so drop

You claim to want to make it not about their investment and yet their purchase of Star Wars allowed them to build a theme park, multiple tv shows and movies that whether you think didn’t pass muster, were successes in the sense that each one of the new trilogy earned over a billion dollars.
yes, it is not about whether they broke even. I was looking at growth or decline, as that is what their stewardship is responsible for, and that is not something I consider a success story.

If Disney bought D&D and halved sales over 5 years, would you consider that a success?
 

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