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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On the other hand, if we zoom into just the last few years, we see that interest is quite stable, but relatively flat. One the one hand, that stability is impressive; most pop culture phenomena zig-zag wildly between lengthy periods of waxing and waning interest. But on the other hand, the 2024 PHB seems to have lifted interest by only a few percentage points.

I don't find it terribly surprising that the 2024 revisions haven't caused a lot of increase in interest. After all, they are pretty much reorganized, prettier, and slightly tweaked versions of decade old books. I appreciate them and think nearly all of the mechanical changes are for the better, but something brand new is going to excite me more.
 

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I think there has been a bad energy towards D&D for the last two years which has gone quite some way to sucking the joy out of the things I like. When the community is full of folks dogpiling discussion of any new product with WotC hate it’s harder to get excited.
It's not as if it is entirely unwarranted. WotC peed in the hobby's cereal with the OGL crisis (among other things) and then you're saying that you're bummed that there was negative energy towards WotC? Gee, I wonder why? But I guess those people should apologize that the negative feedback from WotC's screw-ups that affected them somehow inconvenienced your personal enjoyment of their products. This just feels a bit tone-deaf.
 
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Interesting to think about the overall activity around the game. What if we dig in a little deeper for specific elements of the game?

Here's D&D Next versus OneD&D:
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It's pretty interesting to see how those curves look so different. The blue one matches my experience. I was very confident in the 5e launch because all our metrics - downloads, survey participation, etc. - show rising interest.

The launch of both hits the same height, but One D&D trails off. The double whammy of the OGL and the directives from on high probably made it very difficult to claw back momentum.

Here's D&D on its own and a comp showing D&D against Baldur's Gate 3. Helps put things in perspective:
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I still feel like 5e only succeeded in spite of Mearls and the general trend under his watch for WotC to only put out half-assed adaptations of things written decades previously along with what felt like corporate-enforced MtG settings no one wanted. Plus the way he behaved around the Zak S accusations that led to his social media presence vanishing... I'll take what he has to say about it after being off the team for several years with a barrel of salt.
The guy was an integral part of designing the system, and you say it succeeded in spite of him. Ha, wow. I'd say there's some spite there, alright.

If one removes the vitriol, that idea supports the "it could've been any edition of DnD that was current, what made it surge in popularity were outside forces," (critrole, stranger things, etc) an idea that I've supported in the past...

But thinking on it, in some cases one has to ask: would CritRole have switched to from PF1e to DnD5e if it... wasn't DnD5e? After all, it was an edition designed to appeal to DnD players. I can't speak to Stranger Things' inclusion, I wonder if the writers were current players, had only played in the past, or what. There's probably some interview out there about it.
 

Interesting to think about the overall activity around the game. What if we dig in a little deeper for specific elements of the game?

Here's D&D Next versus OneD&D:
View attachment 395320

It's pretty interesting to see how those curves look so different. The blue one matches my experience. I was very confident in the 5e launch because all our metrics - downloads, survey participation, etc. - show rising interest.

The launch of both hits the same height, but One D&D trails off. The double whammy of the OGL and the directives from on high probably made it very difficult to claw back momentum.

Here's D&D on its own and a comp showing D&D against Baldur's Gate 3. Helps put things in perspective:
View attachment 395321
View attachment 395322
Isn’t that because One D&D changed names several times. might be worth considering if a drop off on searches for One D&D was matched by an increase in D&D 2024.
 

Isn’t that because One D&D changed names several times. might be worth considering if a drop off on searches for One D&D was matched by an increase in D&D 2024.

This along with D&D '24, D&D 2024 and D&D 5.24.

Also I'm not sure what relevance comparing it to Baldurs Gate (a videogame that won game of the year) has... I feel like maybe I'm missing something here.
 


It’s worthless because you don’t agree with it. It’s like the rotten tomatoes reviews. I look at the critics and I look at the audience and I take both into account. I’ve seen critically acclaimed films that fell flat and I’ve seen critically panned films be a lot of fun.

Thing is almost all reviews of WotC books are pretty darn good too… where the reviewer is independent and unbiased. Just google it. It just doesn’t fit a narrative.

Amazon reviews are also heavily skewed towards delivery and first impressions. It takes months to play through them generally. Basically they're useless.

All of WotC books look pretty. Overall their adventures are fairly mediocre and I've bought a lot of them.

There's lots of tier list type youtube videos. The obviously bad ones tend to get low ratings the good ones tend to get high ratings. A few are all over the place which indicates it might be niche. If it scratches your itch you'll love it if not.....

Some are also crap adventures good sourcebooks.
 
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So I am working on a spreadsheet for work, so I had a moment to throw the Google trends data on D&D on to a sheet.

I think the movie really distorts things. It's trending down for the past couple of years, but I think that's mainly due to the movie providing the highest peak in search interest. I'd say overall interest is steady since about late '22.
 

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