My only explanation for Mearls' bizarre behavior is twofold:
- From Mearls' standpoint: Iron Heroes was a great success.
- Heads rolled all over the floor while 4th edition was actually on shelves.
The second part is obvious. While 4th edition was in stores and failing to attract customers, the head of D&D got fired every year. Actually having a product on the shelf is a
terrible idea because that gives you objective chances for failure. But the first part also requires attention: Mike Mearls abandoned Iron Heroes as a loose leaf pile of incoherent ramblings that didn't accomplish any design goals and had contradictory and non-functional subsystems that were inelegant, unbalanced, fiddly, and game destroying - and he got a popularity
boost at the time. There was
nothing salvageable in that piece of shit, and he was able to con a fairly substantial number of people into claiming it was a step in the right direction on the grounds that it had popular sounding design goals and the notpology that he had stopped working on it when he left the company "before it was finished" was somehow supposed to make it OK.
So Mike Mearls seems to clearly be pulling, well, a
Mike Mearls. The plan here is to just keep "working on it" indefinitely. Mearls is going to keep doing polls to try to find out what the most popular design goals appear to be, and leave those design goals attached to the document that is left for release. Because here's the thing:
eventually the company is going to get tired of his bullshit and release the fucking thing with or without him saying it is finished. His plan thus, is to have them release it
without his seal of approval.
Then he figures that he's going to get booted out of the company like all the previous heads did while he was working there. But he's going to have a generic excuse that 5e was released "before it was done", and thus everything
you liked was meeting popular design goals and everything
you didn't like was just a place holder that big meany head corporate executives rammed through because they released it in an "unfinished" state.
The thing is: I don't actually know if he can fool many people this way a second time. I'm almost certain that he can get
enough suckers to buy into it that he'll still have supporters on RPG.net, which might be enough that he can still release niche products. Mike Mearls has put a lot of craft into his own celebrity status. Much more so than like Rob Heinsoo - so if
he shits out a 3rd party retread of his own design failures like 13th Age, it will probably pay the grocery bills.
Sad to say: I don't see how Mike Mearls can fail to succeed at his personal goals on this one. Iron Heroes came out 8 years ago. How long did it take before even a plurality of people acknowledged that there wasn't any hidden genius in that fucking abortion?
-Username17