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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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 petty. 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.
You could say the same about almost all reviews. They almost never take place after someone has ran the campaign. While youtube reviews have a financial incentive to be extreme/original/negative.

The days of Endzeitgeist reviews have gone I’m afraid.
 

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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 petty. 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.
Also some of YouTube channels tend to be fairly uncritical about their subject matter and only say positive things about products with their "reviews" or acting as "hype machines" because that's how they maintain positive relationships/partnerships with related businesses.
 

My main theory is a revision just won't be as exciting as new.

If I had a time machine and you put 2014 and 24 side by side I would pick the 2024 version

BUT I've been playing 5E heavily for a decade. I don't really want to play it another decade.

This is not the designers fault. If anything it's a credit to the 2014 team for making an edition that kept me going for a decade. 3.X pulled that off as well but with 2 revisions.
 
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It shows that even the biggest TTRPG is pretty small compared to the biggest video games. It's why Hasbro is going after that market.
Actually what moves have Hasbro made to garner a piece of the videogame market? My impression was that they were going after the steady revenue that a subscription model offers through DnD Beyond... which is not a videogame.
 

Actually what moves have Hasbro made to garner a piece of the videogame market? My impression was that they were going after the steady revenue that a subscription model offers through DnD Beyond... which is not a videogame.
They have a few games in development. One is helmed by ex-Bioware staff and is under the banner of Wizards of the Coast - that one's called "Exodus". (Voice acting include Matthew McConaughey). It got revealed at the Game Awards, though the studio was founded in April 2019.

"(This new sci-fi video game comes from Archetype Entertainment, a studio founded in 2019 as a division of publisher Wizards of the Coast)."

Will it be good? Who knows!

Cheers!
 

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.


When I run "One D&D" vs "D&D Next," I get different results and the curves look closer to the point where I'm not sure there's anything to conclude here. (Sorry, blue and red are inverted in my graph.) WotC talked about "D&D Next" longer than "One D&D." Interest in both pseudo-brands waned as the real product plans came into focus.

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As for BG3, this data strongly suggests that massive interest in the video game hasn't carried over to tabletop D&D in any appreciable way. That doesn't surprise me at all. I strongly believe that TTRPGs offer a completely different value proposition from CRPGs--one of my major disagreements with the WotC C-suite. (And FWIW, there is barely any D&D branding on BG3.)
 

As for BG3, this data strongly suggests that massive interest in the video game hasn't carried over to tabletop D&D in any appreciable way. That doesn't surprise me at all. I strongly believe that TTRPGs offer a completely different value proposition from CRPGs--one of my major disagreements with the WotC C-suite. (And FWIW, there is barely any D&D branding on BG3.)

Would this potentially not be due to the limited tie in products, or do you believe that BG3 players are simply of a different demographic from 5e players all together?
 

When I run "One D&D" vs "D&D Next," I get different results and the curves look closer to the point where I'm not sure there's anything to conclude here. (Sorry, blue and red are inverted in my graph.) WotC talked about "D&D Next" longer than "One D&D." Interest in both pseudo-brands waned as the real product plans came into focus.
I have a sneaking suspicion that "One D&D" was also abandoned during the development process - I sort of suspect because a lot of the audience really didn't like that name.
 

It shows that even the biggest TTRPG is pretty small compared to the biggest video games. It's why Hasbro is going after that market.
Sort of. The number of people who play D&D regularly is comparable to the number of people who play games like HALO, ASSASSIN'S CREED and WoW regularly (although it's nowhere near the number of people who play FORTNITE). A big difference, of course, is that D&D doesn't monetize as well as those games, primarily because lots of D&D players don't actually buy anything.

It's also worth noting that it took almost seven years to develop BG3. Seven years' worth of D&D revenue compares pretty well to what BG3 has raked in to-date.
 

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