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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Vibes on this forum don't mean a lot to me. If you want to try to read tea leaves I won't try to talk you out of it I just don't see the point. I'm hoping we see a few more publications, new book with higher level monsters would be nice for example beyond that I have way to many real world issues to worry about whether other people happen to like something I enjoy. Besides, the number of people playing the game could shrink dramatically and it likely would still be the single most played game out there.

Vibes here don't matter. More social media, youtube, reddit, Facebook.
 


Apparently sales are down on books can. New phb apparently is being outsold by Tashas.

How reliable that is idk as I haven't seen the it myself.

My expectation is 5.5 won't hit the heights of 5.0 regardless just because it's a revision. Generally it's better than 5.0 problem is it's not that different so if 5E is starting to get boring 5.5 probably won't excite you.
Don’t know where you got that? It was reported as the fastest selling D&D book back in September surpassing Tasha’s for that.

Their Q4 Conference https://investor.hasbro.com/events/event-details/hasbro-fourth-quarter-2024-earnings-conference-call

From the Transcript
D&D released the first significant update to 5th Edition since 2014 and closed out the year strong with both the new Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide breaking records for the best-selling D&D books ever.

D&D is also set up to continue its recent momentum. This week we released the widely anticipated 2025 Monster Manual with strong initial orders. We’ll continue to build the D&D community leveraging D&D Beyond as a marketplace, with many third-party publishing releases set for the first half. And the future of D&D’s wider franchise ambitions is strong with all new video games and new entertainment on the horizon, including a new streaming series in development, The Forgotten Realms, from Netflix and executive producer Shawn Levy.
 





fastest selling product, whatever that means, ie most likely not printed books
We heard this, and yet it didn't even get mentioned in the quarterly report. Seems like it may have been some semantics rather than something that the shareholders would be excited about. It will be interesting to see how much is discussed in the next few months.
 


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