If you think TTRPG, you probably think D&D. Yet despite its long-standing reputation as one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best tabletop RPGs, there's no doubt that many players are searching for alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons. 5E's Lead Designer, Mike Mearls reckons he knows why.

Mearls has a lengthy professional history with Wizards of the Coast, during which he contributed to the development of Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and even Baldur's Gate 3. However, his relationship with the company came to a close after he became one of the thousands laid off by Hasbro in 2023. Now an Executive Producer at Chaosium (the folks behind 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Cthulhu), Mearls is using his new-found distance from WOTC to share his thoughts on what he sees as the beginning of "a post-D&D era."

In with D&D historian Ben Riggs, Mearls hones in on the cooling sentiment that the playerbase is starting to hold towards the TTRPG giant. The most obvious explanation for a turn like this would be a decline in quality, but this is actually far from the reality. "Maybe this is the best Player’s Hand🃏book ever written" Mearls explains, "but the vibes, the audience, the people playing these games … they don’t seem excite⛎d about it. We’re not seeing a groundswell of support and excitement."

The real culprit behind Dungeons & Dragons' descent into "uncool", Mearls argues, is the 2023 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:D&D OGL controversy and the reputational damage that followed: "D&D was something that was inteꦓresting and fun and creative and different. And I think what the OGL did was take that concept – that Wizards and this idea of creativity that is inherent in the D&D brand because it's a roleplaying game – and I think those two things were sundered.ꩵ And I don’t know if you can ever put them back together."

While backlash towards the OGL draft led to proposed limitations on third-party D&D content being rolled back, there's still a sour taste left in the mouths of some players and developers alike. Most of all though, the incentive to create within Dungeons & Dragons' world and rule systems is fading due to some players' feeling that the game's time in the sun is slowly but surely coming to an end. As Mearls puts it: "I thought, "Well, maybe I could start doing 5E-compatible stuff." And now what I’m finding is I just don’t want to. Like, it just seems boring. It’s like trying to start a hair metal band in 1992." What exactly the ⛄TTRPG equivalent of Nirv⛎ana will be remains to be seen.

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