Mike Mearls

The man himself. Note: does not actually have a light fixture sticking out of the back of his head.

A designer for Wizards of the Coast who became lead developer for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition in 2009 and co-designer of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, before Monte Cook did what Monte Cook does best and quit in a huff right at the finish line. Billed as the "fighter's advocate" meant to counterbalance Cook's infamous " wizards da best, knuckleheads go home" tendencies, though the latter's significant pull within the dev team left its imprint on the edition.

Politics aside most fa/tg/uys would say he is batting .500 as 4e is generally regarded as a mistake and 5e appears to have achieved tentative acceptance on /tg/. He made a deal with Tzeentch to create the putrid Essentials line but everyone likes to pretend that dark time never happened. He was also the lead designer of The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic which, in what appears to be a theme for his work, produced a roughly 50/50 split of acceptance and RAGE among fa/tg/uys. This book was basically a predecessor to the 4e "martial fighter" philosophy so you can blame him for that too if you are so inclined.

His stated design philosophy is inspired by the first few editions of the game, which found expression through 5e's many "throwback" game mechanics, and the Essentials line's pared-down design. Again, take the good with the bad.

He's also been writing the Unearthed Arcana articles on the official website, offering new game mechanics and ideas. Originally, this included discussions regarding the results of the official monthly surveys, making him the friendly face of 5e's new "look, we're actually giving two shits about what you think" marketing strategy. But, while this started out as a pretty cool thing, over time UA has morphed into more of a monthly advertisement for whatever's next in the 5e supplement pipeline and Mearls has stopped even pretending to care about things he doesn't personally fanwank over, as seen in the infamous September 2017 UA where he all but outright stated that nobody at Wizards gives a shit about the gith before pausing to breathlessly deepthroat the eladrin's fey cock (pun mostly intended). Meanwhile, the quality of Unearthed Arcana content has dwindled from "genuinely interesting new player or DM options each month" to "whatever a Wizards employee wrote on the back of a napkin at Starbucks before the deadline." Perhaps not coincidentally, this was around the time surveys and discussions of their results dried up.

This isn't necessarily his fault, since the glacial pace of new player-option content for 5e and small, insular size of the core developer group is as much the decision of marketing as the design team, but still. Being the face also means you catch the blame for the brain's calls. Skub rages on.