WotC Ray Winninger Is Head of D&D RPG Team; Mike Mearls No Longer Works on RPG

People have been wondering where Mike Mearls has gone for quite some time. It seems that he has not been working on the D&D tabletop RPG since some time last year, and the new head of the team and Executive Producer is Ray Winninger. Winninger is an RPG industry veteran. Amongst other things, he was co-designer of DC Heroes and Torg, and wrote the Dungeoncraft column for Dragon Magazine. He...

People have been wondering where Mike Mearls has gone for quite some time. It seems that he has not been working on the D&D tabletop RPG since some time last year, and the new head of the team and Executive Producer is Ray Winninger.

Winninger is an RPG industry veteran. Amongst other things, he was co-designer of DC Heroes and Torg, and wrote the Dungeoncraft column for Dragon Magazine. He has worked at a number of RPG companies including TSR, Mayfair Games, West End Games, and more.

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Winninger is Chris Perkins' and Jeremy Crawford's boss. And in further comments, Chris Perkins says that Mike Mearls has not been part of the tabletop RPG team since some time last year.


That explains why Mearls' Twitch shows, like Happy Fun Hour, have disappeared. Although he's made a couple of retweets since, his last tweet on Twitter was February 13th, 2019. He still works at WotC on the D&D brand in some capacity, but not the tabletop RPG itself (he did an interview about Baldur's Gate 3 on Polygon last year).

Ray Winninger introduces himself in the latest issue of Dragon+, WotC's online magazine. "My name is Ray Winninger and I’m the new Executive Producer in charge of the Dungeons & Dragons studio at Wizards of the Coast. In just a few months on the job, I’ve already been impressed by the skills and the passion of the designers, artists, editors, and production staff who bring you our terrific D&D products. They are a uniquely talented group, and it is an honor to work alongside them."
 

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To each their own. I liked Essentials. My 3e group that tried 4e and hated it, hated the books, and hated the layout...they also liked Essentials.

I’ve had RPG designers that I am a fan of, but not one I’ve hated.
I forget products I don’t like.

Again, I am not on Twitter, I know nothing about this Affair d’ Zak......but Adam Koebel in the Twitter link was prominent in calling out Mike Mearls.

Adam “let’s role play a sexual assault...as a JOKE” Koebel.
 

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Again, I am not on Twitter, I know nothing about this Affair d’ Zak......but Adam Koebel in the Twitter link was prominent in calling out Mike Mearls.

Adam “let’s role play a sexual assault...as a JOKE” Koebel.

Is that surprising to you? Often people are guilty of similar idiocy to that which they call out. This is a law of humanity dating back beyond history. But that doesn't mean they were wrong to call out the person in the first place, nor that the other person was not wrong. I mean, if I'm a police detective, and solve murders, and put a bunch of murderers in jail, and one day I commit a murder, and go to jail, people are totally entitled to laugh at the irony or poke fun at me, but they're not entitled to say "Well I guess those murderers weren't wrong after all!". Which appears to be your logic. If that's not your logic, I can't find any other logic between linking the two so perhaps you can elucidate?
 





As they say folks should let sleeping dogs lie. I wish Ray would do an interview there we could get a taste for his vision for D&D 5e, how he plans on putting his mark on D&D.

Yes, I'd be very interested to hear that. He's been playing D&D longer than I've been alive, I note, and created some stuff for it early on (including DL15, which was mentioned earlier in this thread in an unrelated discussion, I believe - it's basically an early Krynn sourcebook). Rather disappointingly he doesn't mention Torg or Underground, or working in a senior role at Mayfair games at all. In many ways that seems more relevant than the stuff he did mention.
 


Nikosandros

Golden Procrastinator
I would like it if more older settings (such as Greyhawk and Mystara) could be opened on DM's Guild without waiting for some official book that may or may not be ever published.

I'd also love to have DM's Guild be opened to older editions, but I realize that this is extremely - to say the least - unlikely.
 

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