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.

 

[TiQuinn]

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).

Me thinking about Jeremy Crawford Sage Advice tweets...

 

[DEFCON 1]

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).

I've always maintained the conspiracy theory that that was entirely his point in doing so. That he and the D&D team wanted people to embrace "Rulings, not rules"... and for every DM to only worry about and make decisions for their own game and not care what anyone else was doing. But they all still kept harassing him looking for "official" rules to all sorts of ridiculous questions because they had this need to "get it right" as though there was some universal standard. So he gets so nitpicky-in-the-weeds-follow-the-words-in-the-book-exactly in how he responded to everyone... so as to hopefully make DMs get so annoyed at the responses that they just ignore him and Sage Advice. Which is exactly what he wanted everyone to do in the first place.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Ahh my bad, sorry.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've always maintained the conspiracy theory that that was entirely his point in doing so. That he and the D&D team wanted people to embrace "Rulings, not rules"... and for every DM to only worry about and make decisions for their own game and not care what anyone else was doing. But they all still kept harassing him looking for "official" rules to all sorts of ridiculous questions because they had this need to "get it right" as though there was some universal standard. So he gets so nitpicky-in-the-weeds-follow-the-words-in-the-book-exactly in how he responded to everyone... so as to hopefully make DMs get so annoyed at the responses that they just ignore him and Sage Advice. Which is exactly what he wanted everyone to do in the first place.

I love this but it falls under the "4D chess" rule, which is that whenever someone claims a person IRL is "playing 4D chess" and wanted something to happen, no they weren't, they were just being a dumbass. It's like when a cat falls off a fence, and then looks at you like "I MEANT TO DO THAT", and you're like sure buddy, really looked intentional.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I love this but it falls under the "4D chess" rule, which is that whenever someone claims a person IRL is "playing 4D chess" and wanted something to happen, no they weren't, they were just being a dumbass. It's like when a cat falls off a fence, and then looks at you like "I MEANT TO DO THAT", and you're like sure buddy, really looked intentional.

To be fair... if there's anyone who I would say would actually enjoy a game of 4D chess, it's Jeremy Crawford.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've always maintained the conspiracy theory that that was entirely his point in doing so. That he and the D&D team wanted people to embrace "Rulings, not rules"... and for every DM to only worry about and make decisions for their own game and not care what anyone else was doing. But they all still kept harassing him looking for "official" rules to all sorts of ridiculous questions because they had this need to "get it right" as though there was some universal standard. So he gets so nitpicky-in-the-weeds-follow-the-words-in-the-book-exactly in how he responded to everyone... so as to hopefully make DMs get so annoyed at the responses that they just ignore him and Sage Advice. Which is exactly what he wanted everyone to do in the first place.

No you can still see extreme shading of wotc only really being concerned about players while GMs were dismissed to be the cause of their problems through rulings not rules while the official books were aiming for world of cardboard feel for players.

Look at things like the bonkers invisibility ruling or almost anything wrt druid like why dragon born breath weapon works in wild shape but the magical plating on a magical sapient free willed golem did not a few minutes later in the same conversation. Having both a footnote that explicitly mixed "I think the rules say I can coffee locking you the GM don't go digging for & strings together multiple related reasons why it doesn't" in a totally different section of the same book allows warlocks to ignore sleep.


The end result was effectively: "Player concerns for pc power and absence of consequence are a crisis that can't be left to the community while gm concerns over pc power and absence of consequence must remain a thing the individual gm is to blame for causing or failing to fix well enough" getting more and more strongly implied as books continued to focus almost exclusively on player desires for those two games breaking things.

 

[Staffan]

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).

His interpretation of magic missile damage is what made me think "Who put this guy in charge of the rules?"

 

[Cergorach]

and he stopped posting on Twitter for reasons unknown and he still doesn't state why here.

I think you're reading too much into that.

People sometimes just stop posting due to all kinds of reasons, from avoiding a toxic environment to just not having the mental bandwidth to do it anymore. And maybe after a while realize that they can do without xyz (in this case Twitter) in their lives.

As an example I posted daily on a certain tech news site (very active), I suddenly stopped posting over seven months ago. The reason: Buying a house (your first) is very stressful, especially in the current market (and other factors). At a certain point something had to give, I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to do everything I needed to do, my online presence on multiple platforms became virtually 0 as that's the least important going on in my life. And to be honest I can live without it at this point. Maybe Mike Mearls determined that he could live without Twitter when he started a new job in MTG and had a lot of stuff to do... It could be far more sinister, it could be a conspiracy! But generally, there are often very simple answers.

 

[Umbran]

I mean, obviously he wasn't fired, because he was technically promoted. But whatever the reasoning was, he stopped being directly in charge of D&D. So this feels a bit "the lady doth protest too much" to me, I mean, just vibes-wise.

On the other hand, you're going to see the vibe you are looking for, right? If you don't trust Mearls to be basically honest, why bother reading what he says about it?

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?

You have to ask? It isn't like larger corporations are well-known for their tendency to listen to good advice or ideas when they are given. It usually takes a while before they realize their error, and they don't acknowledge it when they do.

 

[Muttercrawl]

He should have been fired, I don't think he's expressed any remorse for hiring that filth who harassed those women and then revealing their names.