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

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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.
 

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Putting the ProJared scandal aside. If I am to engage with the substance of what he is saying here, I personally do believe that the game has shifted to become way more player centric in his absence. I do not believe we would have seen the 2024 rules in their current state if Mearls worked on them.
What's ProJared got to do with this? I didn't see any mention of that?
Perhaps you're mixing up your creeps?
 
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I remember one of the Todd Krenwick (?) YouTube video where he was interviewing Crawford on the direction of rules for 5e and where things like Sage Advice and Unearthed Arcana fit into that.

And he asked Crawford if they were planning to implement some option presented in a then-recent UA by Mearls (can’t remember which one). Crawford bursted out laughing and added that the only UA content they were actually considering for official inclusion had his name on it.

I get that he was the lead rule designer, but I still found it a puzzling thing to say out loud and wondered if there was some disagreement between him and Mearls on the future direction of 5e.
 



Yes. If it was just an amicable shift there would have been some sort of announcement on it. I mean he was the face of dnd and then just gone. So there was some sort of conflict there. And while it might not be because of the controversy I feel like it was something that basically made him disappear from the dnd sphere.
I just think there was some office politics, Jeremy Crawford's profile rose as Mearls was quietly sunsetted. Which is weird cux crawford has the charisma of soggy toast. Alternately Mearls might not have liked the direction they were going and said, just put me on MTG.
 



Aishwarya Rai Lol GIF by Identity

I will say that I forgot that he was mixed up in any of the ProJared nonsense*, but that one was much less his fault (the Zak S stuff however...)

Also, a reminder that much of this controversy (the Zak S stuff, in any case) simmered for a long time not on Twitter but on Google+, and the poostorm didn't grow much beyond that until the latter went defunct.

*e: I was thinking of Perkins here, not Mearls
 
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