The game itself works by having a group of players each take control of a fantasy character – warriors, magicians, thieves and more – while another player takes on the role of Dungeon Master, leading the group through an adventure story. Players make creative choices about what their characters will do, and dice are rolled when faced with challenges to decide how things play out.
While the game’s strength is rooted in imaginative play and shared storytelling, the world of D&D has not ignored the changes in the way fantasy adventuring has evolved.
Streaming success
One of D&D’s keys to modern relevance has been its adoption of global streaming platforms, such as twitch.tv, which is typically associated with watching others play video games. It has now become a platform used by performative D&D players to broadcast their D&D tables to the world. The most successful, Critical Role, raised over $15 million in April 2019 to crowdfund an animated series based on their streaming show.
“The thing that made me believe in Twitch was a brand study about a year and a half ago that said, for the first time ever, watching people play had surpassed friends recommending the game as the way people learned about the game and got into it,” Cocks says.
In 2018, 7500 different broadcasters streamed liveplay of D&D. Some of these groups, featuring Hollywood actors like Matthew Lillard, True Blood’s Joe Manganiello and Daredevil’s Deborah Ann Woll, have built fan followings in the millions.
“You can actually see these funny, and in many cases pretty, people you know playing,” says Nathan Stewart, the head of the Dungeons & Dragons business unit at Wizards of the Coast. “When the best storytellers in the world get together and tell these stories it really does inspire you and bring it to life.”
In many ways the resurgence of D&D is reminiscent of radio, which lost its way for a while in the face of more technologically advanced competition, before refocusing on what it did best as part of finding its place in a different world.
D&D has undoubtedly benefited from amplification by other mainstream pop culture successes like Nine’s The Big Bang Theory and Netflix’s Stranger Things, where the characters are keen players.
The huge success of fantasy TV shows like Game of Thrones has also consigned the idea that the genre is only for nerds to the dustbin.
Head of publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons Liz Schuh is also convinced that the slower, non-digital nature of the game has played a big part in making it attractive again.
“We’re constantly bombarded with headlines and tweets and breaking news and information flow,” she says.
“With D&D you sit down at the table and put all of that aside. You’re focused on telling a story together that has nothing to do with all of that external stimulus.”
Whatever the cause, the retail stats don’t lie. Jaime Lawrence, brand manager at Australian games stores Good Games, says D&D is the fastest-growing product line in its stores today.
It held a ‘National Dungeons & Dragons Day’ across all its stores in May to show off the game to new players, and found queries to participate were beyond its initial expectations.
“There aren’t many products in the tabletop gaming arena that get to those proportions,” Lawrence said.
D&D’s blend of encouraging gamers to spend time offline with real world friends, while using the online domain to connect and expand its fan community, speaks to a complex modern dynamic. The digital realm can be whatever a business needs it to be if it finds the right way to engage with it.
