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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He introduces/re-introduces himself (three cheers for the original Dungeoncraft!) in today's release of the online version of Dragon: Issue 31 cover
I absolutely loved Ray’s original Dungeoncraft articles about world building. They really inspired me. I still have a word doc of all of the articles that I copied, pasted and combined together from the D&D website many, many years ago.
 





Winniger seems like he'll do a good job here, so this makes me happy. Even putting aside the "incident", Mearls was involved in (which however you spin it, is pretty crummy, and I suspect damaged his relationships within WotC), I was always uncomfortable with him on 5E, since one of his early 5E-related articles (I don't know if it's still up, suspect not) basically threw 4E "under the bus" in a not horrible but kinda crummy and cheap-seeming (to me) way (I get that 4E insulted previous editions too, but that was dumb and trying to be funny/clever, and this was much more direct).

Also looks like Perkins and Crawford really like Winniger, which bodes well.
 

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