Dungeons & Dragons is booming online, but not in the way you think

When Polygon rolled into this year’s Gen Con in Indianapolis we couldn't find the Dungeons & Dragons booth. Turns out that the nation’s largest tabletop gaming convention — started by Gary Gygax, the father of D&D, himself — didn't have one. But it's not because D&D is falling on hard times. Quite the opposite, says lead designer Mike Mearls. It's because D&D is gaining popularity someplace new — online, through streaming services like Twitch and YouTube.

"It’s been almost a year since the Player’s Handbook launched, and over a year for the Starter Set," Mearls told Polygon, "and we’re definitely ahead of projections."

While he can’t share numbers, suffice it to say that D&D 5e is selling like hotcakes.

"In fact, we just hit our fourth print run of the Player’s Handbook. For us, that’s a challenge. How do you keep this up? What does that mean for the audience? More people are interested in D&D than we thought. Who are these people? What do they want? How do we keep them around?

"It’s a very good set of problems to face."

Castles in the cloud

Wizards of the Coast always has a massive Magic: The Gathering tournament at Gen Con, and this year was no exception. But traditionally they also have big D&D installation, usually bits and pieces of a castle. One year, rumor has it, they even had it manned by archers who would fire into the crowd.

This year? Nuthin. There was a sizeable play area, with dozens of tables filled with folks rolling d20s in earnest, but it was manned by a third party contractor.

"We're not actually with Wizards of the Coast," they told Polygon. "Lemme try and call Mike for you."

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Turns out, Mearls was caught in the crowds.

"When I think of Gen Con, going back to 1999 and up to today, the board game presence is just far bigger than it ever was," Mearls told Polygon. "Compared to 10-15 years ago, it’s board games now. I’d almost go as far as to say it’s a board game show. That’s probably overselling it.

"When you think of the typical Gen Con experience for a lot of people, they go to the exhibit hall. The main hall is enormous. You could spend two days there. But when you think about the interaction you can have in the exhibit halls, that’s perfect for board games. Look at the booth for Fantasy Flight or Mayfair. They have all these tables where you can play games. If I want to learn a board game, I can just sit down — especially the way they’re designed now. They're simpler, faster. Some play in one hour.

D&D isn't quite so pick-up-and-play, Mearls said. So over the past year he's had to rethink how to reach the most people. In his opinion, Gen Con isn't the best place for that anymore.

"I’m sure someone will say this is wrong," Mearls said. "I’m sure I missed something, but I didn’t see any RPG companies or publishers pushing an RPG game with tables set up for play in the exhibit hall. People just understand that it is too hard to teach someone those games in 15 or 30 minutes. You’re getting an experience that’s so watered down that it isn’t really helping you become a big fan of it.

"Not only that, but it can be Sunday of Gen Con, I’m completely enervated, I’m totally out of it, and I can still teach you how to play Ticket to Ride. I can’t run a good RPG.

"We made a decision a couple of years ago, that we’d rather people not play D&D at all than come in and play with a DM who hadn’t had a chance to read the adventure, who’d run way too many hours of D&D at the show, whose voice was gone, stuff like that."

So where is Mearls putting his precious resources, if not on the floor of the nation's largest tabletop gaming convention? On Twitch.

Cult of personality

That's right. The original role-playing experience is moving online at an incredible pace, and Mearls is just trying to keep up.

"We’re kind of riding a wave of RPGs, tabletop RPGs," Mearls said. "There’s a bit of renaissance taking place. Because we finally now have online tools. Not necessarily virtual tabletops, although those help. But just things like video chat and streaming games on Twitch and YouTube and stuff like that.

"I think that technology, people are really starting to figure out how to use it beyond just streaming games like Hearthstone or Dota. We see more and more people using that to stream their tabletop sessions. Then you have a group like Geek and Sundry that has their roleplay show on Thursdays. I was watching that last week. It was really cool, as a guy who works on Dungeons & Dragons, to open up my Twitch app on my iPad and see Dungeons & Dragons in the first row."

"If you’re a good DM and you think your group’s entertaining, why not try streaming? ... That’s something that’s really interesting to see, how that helps spread tabletop RPGs. And especially Dungeons & Dragons."

It's ironic then that just in the past few years Wizards of the Coast effectively gave up on its online tools, which launched with the fourth edition of D&D in 2007. The long-awaited virtual tabletop was licensed to Smiteworks, and is now available on Steam, while the electronic resources for DMs was largely wound down.

"For us, that was a hard lesson we learned from fourth edition," Mearls said. "We launched those PC resources just in time for tablets and smartphones to become a thing. Then we migrated it online so you could use it on the web. I wasn’t involved with the decision-making process at the time, so I don’t know how we ended up there, but it was like, let’s use Silverlight. That’s the platform we used. Turns out Silverlight doesn’t work on mobile.

"Let’s not put ourselves in a position of trying to be tech experts and instead figure out where the audience is going."

Don't split the party

More than anything though, the most positive news Mearls has been getting from the D&D community is from the surveys he runs through the WoTC website. He's learning that his players are younger than ever before, which means that D&D is growing in just the right kind of way to build the next generation of role-playing aficionados.

And, most importantly Mearls says, people are responding well to how they're publishing content.

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"This has been a bit different from what people are used to in the launch of an edition," Mearls said. "We came out with the core rulebooks, one each month for three months, and then we had the campaign at launch, Tyranny of Dragons, levels one through 15. We did Princes of the Apocalypse — again, levels one to 15 — and that was in the spring. Now we’re gearing up with Rage of Demons. The product attached to that is Out of the Abyss — level one to 15 — another campaign.

"We’ve stayed away from the march of the splat books, the new character classes, new spells, all that stuff. It’s thrown some people for a loop. But what we’ve seen is a very strong response to the game overall. People seem happy with it. That’s always good.

"It seems like we’re reaching a bigger audience than we have in the past."

For the granddaddy of role-playing games, Mearls says that the future is bright.

"The biggest message I want to get out is this idea that D&D is doing very well, but we’re not resting on our laurels. We see every year as starting over. It’s up to us to win back everybody. We’re never going to assume that if you liked what we did last year, you’ll like what we did next year. That’s a recipe for complacency and complacency is the first step toward undermining all the success we’ve had in the past."