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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.
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
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. */
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.
Yep what D&D deserately needs is to keep out anyone new who might be interested. Don't worry I won't be joining your game group.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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/
So many wonderful subcultures have been culturally appropriated and destroyed by mainstream invasion.
There are also subcultures that have died off because no one new came in.
Remember that white girl who wore the Chinese dress to prom?
First, no, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Second, what? Chinese culture isn't a subculture. There are more chinese people than westerners.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
So many wonderful subcultures have been culturally appropriated and destroyed by mainstream invasion.
There are also subcultures that have died off because no one new came in.
Remember that white girl who wore the Chinese dress to prom?
First, no, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Second, what? Chinese culture isn't a subculture. There are more chinese people than westerners.
I think he might be talking about https://www.today.com/style/te...
Cultural appropriation. One of the least sane aspects of far leftists, where you are permitted to go nuts on a person because you aren't from the culture, and somehow this beautiful young lady in a beautiful dress isn't actually wearing the dress because it looks great, but wearing it to insult the Chinese.
Some of these people take it the whole way to believing that their culture's food be not "appropriated" This person took a shitfit about bone broth, which apparently using the gelatin contained in bones is Chinese only. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Then there is https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/... A mother who threw her daughter a geisha themed tea party was being abused by these whackos until a Japanese person chimed in and informed them all that Japanese culture borrows aspects from other cultures, and is actually flattered by others borrowing aspects of theirs.
tl;dr version - the person you are replying to is one of those people who loves to keep the "we" and "them" to just "we".
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
...culturally appropriated
Can culture be stolen?? That's a most emphatic "No;" adopting practices from another culture... is flattering ("we think this/that/the other about [your culture] is so cool... ") and should be actively encouraged. It's one of the main reasons why Irish and Italians were able to integrated in America the way they did.
Culture obviously can't be stolen... so if we want to stir up the mouthbreathers with some divisive shit, what are we to do??
Answer: go around casually dropping semantically-meaningless terms like "culturally appropriated."
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
Did games such as Final Fantasy, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, etc have an influence on keeping the genre alive?
Yes, but in the worst possible way. They made games that use miniatures and battle maps popular, and modular dungeons and... well, basically RPGs that are complicated board games.
The real roleplaying happens outside of that. The appeal of pen&paper roleplaying is in the parts that you can't put into a computer game. There have been some computer RPGs that did more than move you from combat encounter to combat encounter with a storyline about as thick as that from Wolfenstein 3D or any other shooter, but sadly most of them turn into walls of texts because they went too far into the "visual novel" direction and they try to deliver a strong story but forget that player choice is more deep than picking options in a dialog tree.
Some of my most memorable gaming moments - as both player and GM - are when the player actions just completely broke the storyline, when players did entirely unexpected things, went sideways and drove a truck through the plot holes to exploit them to their advantage. Maybe 10% of those moments would've been possible in a computer game.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
Well, no more fucking baseball for japs and chiners then.
Funny how they all love blue jeans and heavy metal, but white culture "doesn't exist".
What I find bothersome about the whole Cultural appropriation insanity is that interest in other people's cultures should be the absolute height of learning to get along with others. Yet here, the far left wing kooks demand that a chinese style dress cannot be work by someone who is not Chinese.
Like the two women who had to shut down their burrito cart after they committed the crime of CA https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Ahh, here are responsible citizens ensuring Cultural purity - a listing of Portland Oregon restraunts that practice cultural Appropriate restaurants. https://www.tastingtable.com/d...
And serviscope minor thinks I am talking about a small group.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
I was 100% against 5e as yet another money grab after 4e, and ignored it for a few years. Finally played one evening when I was visiting some old friends, and was instantly sold because of this.
It helped I had people who I knew well and who knew me well and I could ask, "what's the basic stuff I need to know?" They told me, tossed me a character, and I just ran with it. Didn't read the PHB, didn't worry about the rules because it was the D&D I knew and loved, just with most of the bookkeeping removed.
"I want to jump off the roof and motherfucking assassin's creed that guy in the back."
"That's going to be a really high difficulty bit of acrobatics."
"Sure, but don't I have advantage since I have the high ground and the element of surprise?"
"DC 21. Go for it."
And we're done. Roll two dice, take the bigger number, add one number, and we have the answer. Previously it would be rolling a die, adding a skill, figuring out if a height bonus applied, a stealth bonus, a size bonus, what if I have bless, but he's got a displacer cloak so it's -6 and....shit I'm a drow and I get a -2 to everything in daylight....
Now if there's at least one advantage and one disadvantage, they all cancel out, so once you find one of each, you're done. No reason to keep doing bookkeeping, just role the damn die and get on with life.
I can't believe how many hours we used to sit around doing bookkeeping to play this game. Outside of the actual game we'd be going through everything to try to figure out how to maximize our math, reading up on what stacks with what, and what doesn't stack. Coming up with tricks to mess up the enemy's math tricks.
Now it's so much more about the story, and we never worry about "can I do that within the bounds of the rules?" A good DM and the answer is almost always yes. Pick an appropriate skill, figure out if there's advantage or disadvantage, handwave a DC, and lets do it!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Terrible roll, man.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."