WotC Mike Mearls: "I Was Not Fired From D&D"

Back in 2019, Dungeons & Dragons designer Mike Mearls left the D&D team to work on Magic: the Gathering. This move happened shortly after a controversy regarding abuse allegation within the TTRPG industry and the way many people alleged that Mearls handled the complaints and investigation, with a common rumour being that he was moved from the D&D team in order to move him out of the spotlight. In this recent interview with D&D historian Ben Riggs, Mearls denies that this was the motivation for the move, stating that Wizards of the Coast was moving D&D in a direction he no longer wanted to work on, and that the opportunity came up to work on Magic: the Gathering.

Ben Riggs: Since you brought up X and your return to it, I’ll ask about your departure from it. For three years, people were like, "Mike Mearls was fired from D&D in some way, shape, or form." So—were you fired from D&D?

Mike Mearls: I was not fired from D&D. And, you know, I don’t want to go into too many details about everything that happened back then because it was, like—oh, you know what? That was four or five years ago. But no.

It was actually kind of interesting. And I wonder if part of my social media thing is that a lot of the people who really latched onto that and all this weird conspiracy theory—like, I don’t know—maybe they’re all on some other social network now? Or maybe it just isn’t as interesting if the guy isn’t working. But no, no—I left. And I don’t really want to get into it too much, and honestly, there aren’t really any great details. But I moved over to Magic: The Gathering. I had the chance to work on Magic.

I’d been working on some digital tools for D&D, and I—well, I know there was this thing where someone publicly said I was no longer working on D&D, and I was like—no, that never happened. I have no idea why that happened, but I’m not even going to touch that. But I was working on digital tools, and then the company was looking at, "What do we want to do with digital? What’s our next step forward?" I was in favor of a very DM-centric approach. Let’s make tools for DMs. We have D&D Beyond—that’s great for players—but I want tools that will make running D&D faster and easier for me. And, you know, it became a decision about which direction we wanted to go. The company didn’t want to go in that direction. So I was like, well, I’m not really interested in working on something that’s so far from what I want to work on. And that’s why I got the job offer to go work on Magic.

So that was not like, at no point—to be clear—if like a quarter of what people talked about had happened, I would not have kept my job. Like, I really even know what people think happened. But yeah—that was never even close to being on the table.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would be inclined to believe it was purely that if his job role didn't shift at the same time, moving from a public-facing to a non-public-facing one. That suggests (no more than suggests) there's maybe a little more going on.

Maybe there was more going on, I don’t know. I’m just saying, he was the proverbial “main character of Twitter” at the time, so I can’t imagine WotC would have had to mandate he stay off social media, because I doubt he wanted to stay on it anyway. Like, if I remember correctly I’m pretty sure the other people involved also kinda disappeared from social media at around the same time, because the whole thing was a horrific poo storm.

 

[TiQuinn]

Maybe there was more going on, I don’t know. I’m just saying, he was the proverbial “main character of Twitter” at the time, so I can’t imagine WotC would have had to mandate he stay off social media, because I doubt he wanted to stay on it anyway. Like, if I remember correctly I’m pretty sure the other people involved also kinda disappeared from social media at around the same time, because the whole thing was a horrific poo storm.

I'm inclined to believe a bit of both is true. At some point, Crawford stopped doing his Sage Advice tweets (side commentary: a very VERY good thing that he stopped), Perkins stopped tweeting anything D&D related, and eventually I think it was only specific folks like Tito who were still tweeting and it was all very specifically marketing related. But also at the same time, you had Mearls getting blowback for folks like Zak S being named a contributor in the PHB, Perkins was coming off of an actual play where a couple of the players got caught up in a non-consensual nude picture scandal and that ki-boshed that. I could easily see someone in corporate getting antsy about people being on social media.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm inclined to believe a bit of both is true. At some point, Crawford stopped doing his Sage Advice tweets (side commentary: a very VERY good thing that he stopped), Perkins stopped tweeting anything D&D related, and eventually I think it was only specific folks like Tito who were still tweeting and it was all very specifically marketing related. But also at the same time, you had Mearls getting blowback for folks like Zak S being named a contributor in the PHB,

The Zak S stuff was a bit more involved than that, and I’ll just say I’m no fan of how Mearls handled the whole thing. But, like, that’s what I’m getting at, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on Twitter in any of those people’s positions, so if WotC had anything to do with them disappearing from social media, I doubt it would have needed to be anything more than a suggestion. When you’re surrounded by filth, you don’t need to be forced to take a shower. At most, you might need to be reminded that you have the option available.

 

[TiQuinn]

The Zak S stuff was a bit more involved than that

It is, and I'm only commenting on the portion that hasn't been outright denied.

 

[mamba]

Re: the working on tools for DMs, the statement that WotC weren't interested in that is interesting because during 4E, WotC were very much interested in that, and then a year or two after Mearls left D&D, WotC started working on precisely that again. Bad timing?

what DM tools have they been working on?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

what DM tools have they been working on?

The 3D VTT apparently features a bunch of stuff for building maps and encounters and tracking campaigns, but they've been VERY VAGUE about exactly what this.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When you’re surrounded by filth, you don’t need to be forced to take a shower.

This seems like a very loaded and dodgy analogy, frankly, calling everyone critiquing Mearls "filth" and suggesting he was pure and without sin here. I feel like you might not have intended it that way, but it sure comes across that way to me. And I don't like that very much I have to say.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Like, if I remember correctly I’m pretty sure the other people involved also kinda disappeared from social media at around the same time, because the whole thing was a horrific poo storm.

Nah. Other people had already gone or left months or even years later. There was no group disappearance. In most cases it was a good thing as noted, because Crawford's "Sage Advice" for example, was, in the grand tradition of Sage Advice going back all the way to Dragon, actively muddying the waters and decreasing, not increasing, people's understanding of the rules, because of his peculiar interpretations and often unnecessary prevarications about the rules (I'm not even mad, it makes him "one of us" but like, it wasn't helpful).

EDIT - The original Sage Advice in Dragon was probably the first time I got mad with someone's interpretation of RPG rules, before the internet. Like, with people in groups, I didn't get mad about rules issues at that age, I just discussed them, but like Sage Advice? That absolute wanker in Dragon in like 1990/1991 was just straight up getting rules wrong and/or interpreting them in ludicrous ways a lot of the time!

 

[Charlaquin]

This seems like a very loaded and dodgy analogy, frankly, calling everyone critiquing Mearls "filth" and suggesting he was pure and without sin here. I feel like you might not have intended it that way, but it sure comes across that way to me. And I don't like that very much I have to say.

I can see how it might have come across that way, that was careless phrasing and I apologize for that. For what it’s worth, I was one of the people critiquing Mearls for that, and I still stand by those critiques, so no, I definitely don’t think us critics are filth. I was trying to call the whole environment surrounding that controversy “filthy;” there was no way to be involved in it without wading into the mess. In part because that’s just how Twitter is built to work. But, I shouldn’t have used quite such loaded language. I’ll leave the post as-is for posterity’s sake.

 

[Charlaquin]

Nah. Other people had already gone or left months or even years later. There was no group disappearance. In most cases it was a good thing as noted, because Crawford's "Sage Advice" for example, was, in the grand tradition of Sage Advice going back all the way to Dragon, actively muddying the waters and decreasing, not increasing, people's understanding of the rules, because of his peculiar interpretations and often unnecessary prevarications about the rules (I'm not even mad, it makes him "one of us" but like, it wasn't helpful).

To be clear, “the people involved” I was referring to there were Mearls, Zak S., and Olivia Hill, not other folks at WotC. I was trying to speak vaguely because I don’t want to rehash that mess here, especially when one of the relevant parties is definitely present and the other two definitely aren’t.