Dungeons & Dragons has 15 Million Players in NA Alone; Storyline Is "The Da Vinci Code meets Gangs o

Parmandur · May 9, 2018

JohnnyZemo said:
Well, we know the launch stream is going to be called the "Stream of Many Eyes," which (best guess) means that a beholder or beholders will be involved. The Gangs of New York reference makes me wonder if Xanathar will be important to the plot in some way.

Whelp, the Xanathar is the Beholder pictured in the announcement, so signs point to maybe.

Coroc · May 9, 2018

[MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION] #147 That cannot be, i slew him on my Computer 100 times back in the nineties of the last century so he got to be a death tyrant by now if he reappears!

Jay Verkuilen · May 9, 2018

Gibili said:
What ever the quality of the raw data or the stats derived from it, if the underlying trend is that the hobby is attracting a larger and broader audience,

My guess is that they're taking the most charitable interpretation they can make of the numbers they have, which would suggest they have some double counts and people who played once or twice and aren't "regular players".

But forget about that.

Just look at the fact that their books are routinely pretty high sellers on Amazon should say that a lot of books are being moved. As of today, Xanthar's is #132 in Books, the PHB is #43, and WotC's RPG team is the #86 author in the top 100.

As to why D&D is having its moment right now... I dunno, but here are some speculations. There have been a lot of things that pushed it slowly towards the mainstream: WoW did a pretty brisk business for a while. Star Wars has had a substantial renaissance (dubious IMO but they sell well). Fantasy movies used to be cheesy and campy swords and sorcery tales full of T&A, but Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies opened those doors up. Harry Potter sold a lot of books---J. K. Rowling is the #1 author on Amazon---and a whole lot of girls bought those books.

I think we have to be careful to make the D&D renaissance seem inevitable with the Goggles of Hindsight though.

vecna00 · May 10, 2018

Parmandur said:
Exactly, 3.x was good and successful, but the point in question was why there weren't articles, posts, etc. like we are seeing now with 5E: because it wasn't this big, riding this sort of wave. Things have changed.

I'm only 10 pages deep here, so if this was answered later, my apologies!

My guess as to why we're seeing these articles would be due to WotC being owned by Hasbro. Large, publicly traded companies release this kind of information to instill confidence in their shareholders. I don't know if WotC was a public or private company, so I don't know if this was something they used to do. It could just be that there is a better flow of information these day if they did release this info, or maybe we actually care about such a thing these days.

But my money is Hasbro, like many large companies, do this this sort of thing a lot. Hell, look at the large video game companies, they have quarterly earning's calls where they release this kind of data.

Staffan · May 10, 2018

vecna00 said:
I'm only 10 pages deep here, so if this was answered later, my apologies!

My guess as to why we're seeing these articles would be due to WotC being owned by Hasbro.

Wizards has been owned by Hasbro since September 1999 - so, before the release of 3e. They did post some "Look at how well we're doing" back then, although usually in a less formal format - things like designers posting "The first printing of the PHB sold out way faster than expected so we're going back for a reprint already." You also had designers and other company representatives take part directly in discussion on message boards, mailing lists, and even Usenet, but that was more of an informal thing.

vecna00 · May 10, 2018

Staffan said:
Wizards has been owned by Hasbro since September 1999 - so, before the release of 3e. They did post some "Look at how well we're doing" back then, although usually in a less formal format - things like designers posting "The first printing of the PHB sold out way faster than expected so we're going back for a reprint already." You also had designers and other company representatives take part directly in discussion on message boards, mailing lists, and even Usenet, but that was more of an informal thing.

Was it that long ago? *looks* Holy crap, I thought it was like mid-2000's when it happened.

Dungeons & Dragons has 15 Million Players in NA Alone; Storyline Is "The Da Vinci Code meets Gangs o

Parmandur

Book-Friend

Coroc

Hero

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers

vecna00

Speculation Specialist Wizard

Staffan

Legend

vecna00

Speculation Specialist Wizard

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