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.

Comments

It's a niche product that now is accessible

[GrandCow]

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.

Re:It's a niche product that now is accessible

[MightyMartian]

I wouldn't call that a strong GM/DM, I'd call that a shitty GM. A good GM rolls with the punches when players go off script.

Stranger Things

[bstarrfield]

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.

Re:Washed Through By The Mainstream

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Probably caused by Magic

[Maelwryth]

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.

Marilyn Manson on D&D

[DNS-and-BIND]

"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.

Then Death appeared to the party

[Antique Geekmeister]

This wonderful XKCD comic appeared very shortly after Gary Gygax, one of the main authors of D&D, passed away.

https://xkcd.com/393/

Schools & Libraries

[tbuskey]

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.

Re:D&D v3+

[mark-t]

You know that you can still buy pdfs of the old rules, right?

Out of print does not mean that you can't play it anymore or that you cannot introducce new players into the game.

I still play 1st edition, personally.

Re:Washed Through By The Mainstream

[Ol Olsoc]

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".

D&D and RPGs

[Tom]

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.

Spare us the "in my day..." cliche, please

[Wraithlyn]

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.

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

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 ;)

Re:5e is simpler

[apoc.famine]

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!