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After 40 Years 'Dungeons & Dragons' is Suddenly Popular (cnbc.com)
CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity."
The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of "Dungeons and Dragons" hit shelves, video platforms Twitch and YouTube are leading a renaissance of the fantasy roleplaying board game -- and business is booming. "DnD has been around for 45 years and it is more popular now than it has ever been," said Greg Tito, senior communications manager, at Wizards of the Coast. In each of the last five years, sales of "Dungeons and Dragons" merchandise has grown by double digits.
The company, owned by toymaker Hasbro, attributes this massive sales boom to the launch of the fifth edition of the game in 2014 and to "Critical Role," a weekly show on live streaming video platform Twitch that features voice actors from TV shows and video games playing "Dungeons and Dragons...." "When a new edition for a game like this releases, there is that flurry of activity, people get really excited about it and then, historically, that excitement has waned," he said. "The fifth edition has completely blown that model out of the water. With the release in 2014, it has grown and only continued to grow. Every kind of statistical model we've been able to to use from the history of 'Dungeons and Dragons' has been broken at this point. So, we are in uncharted territory...."
"Critical Role" has become so popular that when it launched a Kickstarter last week to create an animated special based on the characters from the first campaign, it was funded within one hour. The team behind the web series had wanted $750,000 to fund the endeavor. With 33 days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign, "Critical Role" has raised more than $7.3 million from 53,000 backers.
It is now the most-funded film/video project in Kickstarter history.
Over the years Dungeons & Dragons -- and the people who played it -- have usually been played for laughs in TV sitcoms like Freaks and Geeks, several episodes of Community, and an episode of Big Bang Theory with William Shatner, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Smith, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The company, owned by toymaker Hasbro, attributes this massive sales boom to the launch of the fifth edition of the game in 2014 and to "Critical Role," a weekly show on live streaming video platform Twitch that features voice actors from TV shows and video games playing "Dungeons and Dragons...." "When a new edition for a game like this releases, there is that flurry of activity, people get really excited about it and then, historically, that excitement has waned," he said. "The fifth edition has completely blown that model out of the water. With the release in 2014, it has grown and only continued to grow. Every kind of statistical model we've been able to to use from the history of 'Dungeons and Dragons' has been broken at this point. So, we are in uncharted territory...."
"Critical Role" has become so popular that when it launched a Kickstarter last week to create an animated special based on the characters from the first campaign, it was funded within one hour. The team behind the web series had wanted $750,000 to fund the endeavor. With 33 days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign, "Critical Role" has raised more than $7.3 million from 53,000 backers.
It is now the most-funded film/video project in Kickstarter history.
Over the years Dungeons & Dragons -- and the people who played it -- have usually been played for laughs in TV sitcoms like Freaks and Geeks, several episodes of Community, and an episode of Big Bang Theory with William Shatner, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Smith, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
After 43, Kendall isnt. Sad. All that wasted fawning and bloviating.
I was amongst the first wave of D&D players.
I was lucky. I used it as a 'getaway tool' whenever I got stuck in my other mental endeavor, such as programming
Some of those who played D&D were not. They were kinda like addicted to it --- much like the millennials addiction on social media.
Hopefully the subculture can survive an invasion of pinks and vanillas. The big companies will stripmine as always.
I can attest that it's been 45 years. I can remember the original Blackmoor and Grayhawk books being used by a gamemaster at a local game store. Part of the original fun of the game was the gamemasters, trying to juggle the maps and adventures to create a narrative and the players taking that narrative to places the gamemaster had never envisioned.
an animated special based on the characters from the first campaign
Sounds like HarmonQuest, a (partly) animated live D&D series by Dan Harmon (the Community guy). That project was a bit hit-and-miss, some of the guest roleplayers were brilliant (they invited a different one for each episode) while others didn't work out so well. Still, worth watching if you're into that sort of thing. I hadn't heard of Critical Role, I'll have to go watch that now...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I've wanted to play D&D for 20 years, but have never been in a location where a local group was within a reasonable driving distance.
I know roll20.net has been around for some time, but for someone that has literally never been able to even watch a game, watching sessions on twitch are an amazing introduction. It's great to be able to watch and see just how people interact with each other when you're an absolute beginner.
Also: D&D is just group storytelling. Sometimes you just want to watch and enjoy the story playing out.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
We call it dungeons and dinner. They're short sessions but we try to be efficient about it during encounters. Roll attack dice and damage dice simultaneously to save time.
D&Ds resurgence has also been helped by its role in the Netflix series Stranger Things, where the heroes are quite distinctly fans of the game.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Since the release of third edition in 2001, D&D and its derivatives have increasingly dominated the market. Tabletop roleplaying is now such a monoculture that much better games only garner interest in a small fraction of players.
D&D may be emblematic of RPGs, but is far from representative.
Was nothing like previous iterations of the game. They already slash and burned or totally remade the former gameworlds popular enough to warrant republishing (Look at Dark Sun for instance.... Tieflings? Really? What is this, an SSI Dark Sun CRPG?)
Versions 4 and 5 remade D&D even further. The game that is popular today is nothing like the game that nerds played anywhere from 25 to 45 years ago. Same with most of the other RPGs that have seen a surge in popularity. It was the dumbing down of the games that made them popular. Pandering to the masses sells, but it also loses you the most devout followers, who will still buy from you 10-20 years on, when the rest have lost interest and moved on to the socially acceptable game of the year.
Personally after Battletech, Star Wars, Shadowrun, D&D, and a few others all broke my characters or equipment with their 'new editions', I finally threw up my hands, and with many thousands invested gave up on RPGs. The ones we played as a kid when we couldn't afford books were more fun, and if the rules don't matter anyway, there is no reason to play an RPG with rules, instead of just having an impartial GM/DM/ETCM decide if you succeed or fail and use sensible internally consistent dynamics to decide if your gambit succeeds or fails.
Sadly the markets, both nerd and plebs, find hard rules more reassuring and the opportunity to brag about their character compared to another's, even though it is based on a house of cards that changes every few years as the companies decide they aren't making enough money off new sourcebooks and need to rewrite the rulebooks YET AGAIN, leading to a new set of sourcebooks which may or may not cover all your favorite items, equipment, and game worlds, plus any expansion rulebooks that are no longer consistent thanks to their rule changes in the core books.
It's not altogether unlike C++98 vs C++11.
I don't want to play D&D with Al Bore and Hitlary Clinton. There used to be this thing called a "counterculture" back when Nixon was in office. Everything counter to the mainstream view is now considered "extremist" though. So D&D sux... and there's no point smoking weed either.
jr high in the late 70s. Boring then and probably still boring today. Go outside white people and get healthy.
A couple of months back I ran a group through the 5th edition starter set. All long time Magic players and had always wanted to play DnD but had never run into a Dungeon Master. Lots of fun and they were fantastic at playing characters instead of just for points.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
"If every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off of your life, every game of Dungeons & Dragons you play delays the loss of your virginity by seven hours."
-- Marilyn Manson: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, 1998
Used to play D&D. Can vouch for the truth of this statement.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This wonderful XKCD comic appeared very shortly after Gary Gygax, one of the main authors of D&D, passed away.
https://xkcd.com/393/
Their d&d podcasts are great.
Iâ(TM)m glad kids these days are getting a taste of our generations paste times around the 8bit era. Now if they could only improve the graphics.
A lot of creators, many quite large, on both Twitch and Youtube, are roleplaying DnD.
About 10 years ago my nephew played in a group at the local library.
Now, my son in 9th grade, has been playing at his school for 2-3 years as part of a weekly activity block.
He also attended an event by the local college to get college students playing. They had > 100 players. The college was trying to jumpstart a student run D&D club.
You just need groups new people can join. That's why Magic:The Gathering got popular: the places that sold the cards would often organize playing events.
Fear, O puny vermis terrae, for thy expiration hath come: https://twitter.com/Oktodendro... In this long monologue you will learn, among so many other intellectual gems, to your utter stupor and dismay that Africa is a nigga's head the *little horn* of whom is Tunisia with its impudent Gulf of Gabes mouth whose fetid breath has uprooted 3 horns (Tunisia, Libya & Egypt) since 2011. Syria held good and shall avenge herself at Europe's hand, that Great Medusa contemplating her unsightly self in her *somber* third-world future. Furthermore that East and West shall have a most epiloguic intercourse, what cryptocurrencies are, that Macron plays the role of Satan, that the Gilets Jaunes are his tail, a proof that US constitution is of a dictatorial character, a bootlegged Unlimited Detail software renderer prototype together with its C source code, a shortest Unix Shell Quine, a multiplication and division free ellipse rasterizer, that etc. Truly, das ende is neare.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
After all these years there is finally something more cringe inducing than the legendary Lighting Bolt D&D video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxnv8OLRP3A
Critical Role is like trying to watch porn directed by your mom.
so the communications guy says the product he is paid to communicate is bigger than ever, points to some podcast thing where only people who would be interested in the game as evidence
I've noticed more people getting into real life D&D due to the decline in quality of PC & Console RPG / Strategy games.
Most of the recent AAA 'RPG' titles lack any real depth compared to older ones. They're flashy, and very well presented, but are becoming closer to rigid story driven action games with some RPG elements.
Even outside of that we've seen stagnation, and even going backwards in terms of game mechanics with the big titles from Bethesda, with more hand-holding and less responsibility being put on the player. Customization is also more limited in a lot of games today than it was before, compare GTA5 with San Andreas for example, you have much less influence on your character.
The mechanics in the majority of games today are shallow.
Combine this with the general increase in popularity of board games, and a desire players have to actually control their own experience, break from the chains of a rigidly designed story, and actually experiment with things in the world around them without already knowing exactly what the result will be, and it's entirely unsurprising that we've seen a rise in traditional D&D as a massive hole has been left in the market.
Version 3 had lots of changes, eventually becoming 3.5
Version 4 was OK, but came too quick after 3.5. People did not want to buy a whole new set of books.
Version 5 is good and came long enough after 4, and has lasted long enough without a 5.5.
It also helps that websites like roll20.net make it easier to play online.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In addition to what people have noted about the visibility of the game in mass media, people like Vin Diesel, Dwane Johnson, Tim Duncan, and Curt Schilling are breaking the stereotype of who plays RPGs. They make it a lot harder to ridicule people playing the game, and a lot easier for people to consider poking their head into what they previously thought was solely the realm of nerddom.
And while I think a lot of people will consider this heresy, 4th and 5th edition (and pathfinder, to an extent) made it a lot easier for new people to get into the game. 4th with MMO balance and unkillable low level characters, and 5th in the hands of a good DM with the ability to just get out of the way and let people play.
The first few editions were hard, broken, and cumbersome. 3rd exploded with so many add-ons that nobody could keep track of all the prestige classes and new classes, and it allowed the creation of some amazingly overpowered characters. It just became a quagmire of shit, where the only way to have a functional game was to decide ahead of time what select add-ons the group would allow. That's just daunting for a new player.
I took a group of brand new players and got a 4th campaign up and running with no issues. It was not a hard learning curve. I didn't like it, but it was a hell of a lot more accessible than 3.5 was for them. I resisted 5th for a long time assuming it was just another money grab, but finally guested in a game with some of my old gaming friends, and was instantly taken with it. Brought that back and convinced my group to jump from 4th to 5th, and everyone both made the change with ease, and really, really appreciated how good this edition is. I shudder to think about trying to teach someone how to play 1st or 2nd edition at this point. They were really really bad. I have super fond memories, but man, I can't imagine how much better it would have been to start with a more modern version.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Who wants to play the same map every game?
de_dust much? Or in Tetris, who wants to play with the same 7 pieces every game?
Until 'Mazes and Monsters' was made and freaked everyone out, D & D was *massively* popular. Comic books! Action figures! Cartoons! Weekly groups all over the place! It's popular *again* would be a much better headline. Millennial alert: 'If it happened before I was born, it didn't happen!'
tonnes of people will learn about the 5 regular polyhedra. A few will wonder why there aren't more. And a few of those will be motived to learn why.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Did games such as Final Fantasy, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, etc have an influence on keeping the genre alive?
We also had movies like Conan the Barbarian/etc in the 1980's.
But during the 1990~2010 period, science-fiction was more popular because of the millennial shift (for some reason), which diminished the popularity of other genres.
I guess this is simply the return to the equilibrium between all genres being popular that we had as before.
#DeleteFacebook
The kids playing D&D was critical to their success. It helped them to cope with the events around them and come up with successful strategies.
"Suddenly popular"....
I've been playing since the early 90's and have seen a steady increase in players at gaming stores and cons for this whole time. Maybe that's what happens when does realize it's a choose your own adventure game and not the conduit to Satan's demonic asshole that those "well meaning" and "very concerned" hyper religious idiots that called themselves parents made it out to be.
I'm still alive after all these years and still not possessed. How very strange...
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
Pardieu says 'watch out for the Gorvil!'
While I'm happy that more people get into the hobby, D&D isn't roleplaying. Especially since they introduced RAW (rules-as-written) it's should be clear to all the naysayers that it's a tabletop war game with roleplaying elements. Miniatures, battle maps...
This does make it a good candidate for turning it into a computer game and it's not a surprise that D&D has more computer games titles to it than any other RPG system.
I'm very glad I was introduced to roleplaying games by somethign else, and only years later played some D&D. Never liked it (as if you couldn't tell so far) and soon stopped. Tried again with its bastard child Pathfinder and barely got past the character generation.
I hope those starting RPGs via D&D soon meet other games as well. There has been such a great revival of indie games and truly innovative RPGs. I haven't even come around to playing all of them. It used to be that we would play some obscure french system with the only guy with fluent french being the GM. Or something someone brought back from the US because it didn't exist in Europe (that was before Amazon and DriveThruRPG, obviously). We played Villains & Vigilantes, a superhero game where you, your real life identity, is the secret identity of your superhero. I'm still searching for a copy of the original rules book, 20 years after they stopped publishing it (if anyone has it, please answer!). We played Justifiers (the 1988 original, not the recent relaunch). I'm still in love with Fireborn, a game where you play dragons and jump between two timelines. Or The Riddle of Steel which is everything that a Conan RPG should be, minus the name. And so much in the grey area between mainstream and indie - Paranoia, Werewolf (Vampire's less popular brother), Traveller, Earthdawn.
I just wish all these new players that they don't get stuck with D&D and discover how rich the hobby actually is and how much else exists.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
To me it seems pretty obvious that Penny Arcade is directly responsible for this resurgence. Not only because for a few years now they have made non-electronic games like tabletop cool again with a whole show dedicated to showcasing them, but even more because of the very popular webcast of "Acquisitions Incorporated" D&D sessions.
That has interested a ton of people in D&D and I think may be the key reason for the rise you see, because they have shown it is cool, and maybe more importantly shown how fun it can be with a good DM and plot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are so many parallels between a good RPG session and film or TV
Director = DM
Actors = Players
Sets = Maps and or Terrain
Wardrobe = Minis
Writer = Everybody
Craft Services = Pizza Delivery Guy
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I just started watching GOT last season and I gotta tell ya, them dragons are pretty cool. I'm trying to find the minimum number of older episodes to wade through to get the gist of the primary characters without having to deal with the petty squabbling and all the who's related to/at war with/backstabbing who and the minor families.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I have been playing D&D since the 80s and have played every edition. Some friends and I tried playing 1st edition again a few years back. The rules are HORRIBLE. Inconsistent, overly specified & inflexible, convoluted and needlessly complex.
Let's consider a specific example to illustrate. Strength and "Bend Bars / Lift Gates". If I have a strength of say, 17, I have a 13% chance of "bend bars / lift gates". Period. Wait, aren't different bars & gates (and other extreme tests of strength) created differently? How can one number encapsulate all such possibilities? It can't.
What's the equivalent in 5e? DM decides how difficult it is to bend that bar or lift that gate (or ANY OTHER strength-based task imaginable) and assigns it a CR, you roll a D20, add your Str modifier (and potentially Proficiency bonus if you have a relevant skill), and try to beat that CR. Easy peasy, consistent, and infinitely flexible. It's simply a better system.
Ironically you just described 5th edition. It has found a great sweet spot of internal consistency, streamlined play, while still offering depth and being completely flexible. With a basic understanding of the CR system you can just wing it in pretty much any situation imaginable.
3/3.5 (and Pathfinder) was a giant leap forward but things become tedious at high levels. I think 4th edition was the zenith of "dumbing things down", they practically turned it into a formulaic MMO. I actually quit D&D when 4th edition came out and swore it off for good.
But 5e bounced back and found a better middle ground, and rekindled my love of the game. It is a better game system. The whole "it's been dumbed down for the masses, this is beneath my superior intellect" is such elitist r/iamverysmart horseshit.
(This in no way is directed at people who still play and love 1st edition. There is a lot to love there, so much flavour and inventiveness. But you're a special kind of masochist and you know it ;)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I've been playing since 1st edition, and I've always been cooler than you.
You know what I don't play? Fkn sports.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Basically they dumbed down the rules to make it quicker and simpler to appeal to a wider audience. Those who liked the complexity were horrified, but like with Linux these people comprise less than 1% of the population. By dumbing it down*, they made it more accessible to the other 99% of the population. Same as what Android did with Linux (Android uses the Linux kernel if you didn't know). And small growth among the 99% makes a much bigger difference than a huge decline among the 1%.
* (Calling it dumbed down may be a bit harsh. The forte of PnP gaming has always been the group storytelling. Better storytellers (e.g. fiction authors) could weave good stories without any rules to constrain them. But most of us need some help to keep our imaginations from doing stupid things (e.g. Lucas). The D&D rules just provide a framework upon which we can weave our own stories. But too often the rules could get in the way of a good time - witness all the tropes about rules lawyers. By simplifying the rules, they shifted emphasis back to the storytelling, instead of the minutiae of the rules.)
Die in an incel fire.
It is coming back strong in the form of identity larping. You can role play whatever gender you want. You gain experience by finding various ways of being oppressed. You can use enchantments of nazi and racist to scare away your foes. Throwing shit and piss for long ranged attacks is effective. If that doesn't work, a doxing or rainbow missile spell is used.
Rather surprised that there was no reaction to the insanity manifested on Kickstarter. That much enthusiasm to escape from reality? Something is wrong there.
Oh well. At least I can hope that the overfunding will cause the project to implode like Diaspora. Hopefully without any suicides attached. Great idea that went away quietly because Kickstarter money took their eye off the ball... Leaving us with the Facebook problem and the need for the FFF solution.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I got back into D&D a bit after many years listening to the Dungeons and Randomness podcast. Worth a listen.
Finally, I'm doing popular stuff!!!
This is like comic books. People know what it is, but the popularity is very niche. 2017 numbers put 8.6 million US players in past twelve months. 18 months sales ending in 2018 for Wizard of Coast were $31 million. this is like comic books. People know what they are and the idea is popular, but the most popular comic in January shipped 116k units.