WotC Mike Mearls: "D&D Is Uncool Again"

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.

 

[AlViking]

Wow....you and I had very different takes on what he said. He clearly established that the type and style of the game would be set up in session 0 so every player would have already agreed to it.

He never said the entire point of the game was to kill 3 characters. He said it happened because the enemy had a vorpal sword. That is chance, not intention. He said it was a great game, not because of the character deaths, but because the threat and risk and stakes of the game were pleasing to everyone at the table.

He also said nothing about adversarial DMing. He said that it was the job of the DM to challenge the players through combat or story. In fact, that is the job of the DM. You create combat encounters in D&D and most TTRPGs to oppose the players and give them a fun game. There are cooperative TTRPGs but those are more rare.

You can focus on semantics, but he clearly defined what his comments meant that has folks up in arms.

A good DM does provide opponents, risk, and stakes for the game whether it be combat or story risks. For example, my players faces a bunch of ghouls in a pirate cave after learning about an island in the bay where people disappeared. The players chose to explore the underdark first and when they returned, a fever had infested the nearby town and people who died from it were becoming ghouls. They chose to ignore the hook and it had story consequences and a lot of townfolk died. They are now on the island facing a lot more ghouls and great undead because they had time to increase their foothold. They are enjoying the story and they all messaged me saying that they loved that their decisions were affecting the world around them.

Mearls is not saying that a DM has to be a jerk to the players. He is saying that a DM should impose risk to the players in order to have a good game.

There's a single line talking about session 0 that he then ignored for the rest of his post. What he describes is old school Gygaxian adversarial gaming even if he did not use those exact words. A great game included killing off 3 characters. He did not mention or address in any way his declaration of other styles of games are time-wasting slop which clearly indicates he said what he meant and meant what he said.

I run a very challenging game but I do not run an adversarial game. If other groups don't offer the level of challenge I generally do, they are not wasting their time if they are enjoying the game. I have more thoughts on this but I've got to go and I need to think about whether or not I can explain my approach more clearly. Perhaps in a different thread.

 

[Imaro]

No, he is not responsible for other people.

It looks like he did clarify in this very thread but people will still use their own lens to interpret the comments. He can choose chess or thermonuclear war.

Where did he clarify his reference to differing playstyles as slop?

 

[Imaro]

Depends on the game. If it is a one-shot con game, then it could have been the final boss, which means that retreat probably ends the session. Even in a home game, I have seen players refuse to retreat because they feel like they can win, and they usually do even when people start to go down.

The session sounds like a fun con game.

Didn't say it wasn't fun but I dont think one can infer what does or doesn't makes a good rpg from a single (or even a few) sessions of play at a niche Con. Certainly not enough to denigrate other (probably more popular) playstyles.

 

[Maxperson]

No he doesn't but in being a prominent figure in the ttrpg community and posting publicly he very much opened up his comments to being interpreted and used by the general public and in turn bears some responsibility In making sure the message he was trying to deliver was the received correctly.

Edit: including the implications of other playstyles being slop.

He said that as an opinion, not a statement of fact. His statement, which is all three of the paragraphs from that day, started with, "Because I'm at Gary Con and feeling salty - I think the idea..."

He can have that opinion. We are all entitled to opinions, even prominent figures in the industry. You can choose to ignore that he was simply stating his opinion, or you can choose to think he was engaging in One True Wayism. That's up to you, but he has no responsibility to make sure the message was received correctly, because he already did when he put in the "I think" to clearly indicate that it was just a personal opinion.

Also, he isn't speaking about playstyles at all, but rather about the design of the game itself. The game doesn't dictate playstyle, as that's up to the individual groups who play the game.

 

[Maxperson]

Wow....you and I had very different takes on what he said. He clearly established that the type and style of the game would be set up in session 0 so every player would have already agreed to it.

He never said the entire point of the game was to kill 3 characters. He said it happened because the enemy had a vorpal sword. That is chance, not intention. He said it was a great game, not because of the character deaths, but because the threat and risk and stakes of the game were pleasing to everyone at the table.

He also said nothing about adversarial DMing. He said that it was the job of the DM to challenge the players through combat or story. In fact, that is the job of the DM. You create combat encounters in D&D and most TTRPGs to oppose the players and give them a fun game. There are cooperative TTRPGs but those are more rare.

You can focus on semantics, but he clearly defined what his comments meant that has folks up in arms.

A good DM does provide opponents, risk, and stakes for the game whether it be combat or story risks. For example, my players faces a bunch of ghouls in a pirate cave after learning about an island in the bay where people disappeared. The players chose to explore the underdark first and when they returned, a fever had infested the nearby town and people who died from it were becoming ghouls. They chose to ignore the hook and it had story consequences and a lot of townfolk died. They are now on the island facing a lot more ghouls and great undead because they had time to increase their foothold. They are enjoying the story and they all messaged me saying that they loved that their decisions were affecting the world around them.

Mearls is not saying that a DM has to be a jerk to the players. He is saying that a DM should impose risk to the players in order to have a good game.

I agree with most of what you said. However, he did say something that could confuse people into thinking he was talking about adversarial DMing if you don't look at the rest of his paragraph and post. He said,

"That then dovetails to the purpose of rules in gameplay. If the players' goal is success, the GM's goal should be defeating or foiling the players. A good system enables that by moving questions of success or failure to a die roll or some other disinterested mechanic rather than relying solely on GM fiat (though fiat has a very useful place in TTRPGs as a whole)."

He's talking about the role of the DM being to put challenges to the players' goals in front of the players for them to overcome or fail at. That's not adversarial DMing, especially in the context provided about the game providing the disinterested tools to do that(monster encounters, traps, riddles, etc.). The sentence itself, though, sounds adversarial, and those already thinking the worst are seizing on that one sentence to argue further.

 

[KYRON45]

Isn't social media supposed to encourage a free exchange of ideas?

Play the game the way you like. That's how you invalidate his thought on the issue.

 

[Maxperson]

no idea, if 3 are down and you keep going I assume at least 6. Notice that he wrote groups (plural) that suffered a severe setback, losing 3 party members was an example, and probably the most extreme one

Yep, and he said groups who suffered severe setbacks, indicating that there were others who didn't suffer much in the way of setbacks at all. We don't know how many did or didn't, but we can say that he wasn't forcing such adversity on groups or there wouldn't have been groups who didn't have severe setbacks.

the takeaway isn’t that you should kill off half the party to make it interesting…

Right.

 

[KYRON45]

the takeaway isn’t that you should kill off half the party to make it interesting…

Don't i get to decide how to make my game interesting?

 

[Maxperson]

There's a single line talking about session 0 that he then ignored for the rest of his post. What he describes is old school Gygaxian adversarial gaming even if he did not use those exact words. A great game included killing off 3 characters. He did not mention or address in any way his declaration of other styles of games are time-wasting slop which clearly indicates he said what he meant and meant what he said.

I run a very challenging game but I do not run an adversarial game. If other groups don't offer the level of challenge I generally do, they are not wasting their time if they are enjoying the game. I have more thoughts on this but I've got to go and I need to think about whether or not I can explain my approach more clearly. Perhaps in a different thread.

No. He didn't describe that at all. The entire point of his post wasn't that you should kill off PCs or run an adversarial game, it was that he made an observation that the groups that did get unlucky rallied around that adversity and used it as incentive, rather than let it get them down.

I haven't run a Gygaxian style game since 2e, but I still have observed since then that players like to be challenged. They like overcoming the adversity that challenges represent. Why? Because then the victory over the situation actually means something.

Many, if not most of the best stories my players talk about, and that I've heard strangers talk about, are those stories when they are fighting the BBEG and everyone in the party is down except for that one last PC who is on his last leg and will drop if he doesn't hit/crit/roll a 20, etc. and he does it. Those situations are the ones that make the best memories and stories. I've never heard someone talk about how 6 years ago they curb stomped the BBEG without taking much damage.

 

[Maxperson]

Don't i get to decide how to make my game interesting?

No! Only someone else's clearly worded opinion stating what he personally thinks about the game can do that for you.

Okay, okay, Yes, you do get to decide that for your game and Mike didn't say or imply otherwise.