Is Tabletop Gaming D&D's "Sideshow"?

Recent struggles with Marvel's comics brand have made it clear that Marvel's properties are more valuable to as a multimedia franchise than the comics that spawned them. Could that happen with Hasbro and the Dungeons & Dragons brand?

Marvel's Template​

Marvel's comic woes have come recently into the spotlight thanks to controversy over diverse superhero comics struggling to make sales. Asher Elbein at The Atlantic sums up the problem:

Marvel may publish good books, but without full commitment from the company, many of those books are being set up for failure—and allowing Marvel’s audience dwindle.

Elbein questions Marvel's commitment to keep these books alive in their fragile early stages:

For all of the cultural preeminence of Spider-Man or The Avengers, the superhero-comics industry remains a sideshow. The media conglomerates that own DC and Marvel use both publishers largely as intellectual-property farms, capitalizing on and adapting creators’ work for movies, television shows, licensing, and merchandise. That’s where the money is. Disney has very little incentive to invest in the future of the comic-book industry, or to attempt to help Marvel Comics reach new audiences, when they’re making millions on the latest Marvel film.

Rob Salkowitz at ICv2 sees a parallel problem with the Star Wars franchise, in which Marvel failed to capitalize on Rogue One:

Turns out that not only were there no new or existing titles in Marvel’s very limited Star Wars comics line that tied in to the franchise, we won’t even be seeing an adaptation from Marvel in stores until later this month. This is after plans for a prequel comic announced last year at C2E2 ended up falling through with scant explanation. And now, with The Last Jedi publishing strategy taking shape, Marvel once again appears to be getting crumbs from the table, not a full serving. That is unfortunate, considering what Marvel could bring to the table.

Marvel's inability to bolster comic sales tied to mega-franchises raises the question of what might happen if the upcoming D&D movie is successful.

Oh Yeah, the D&D Movie​

Hasbro's closest analog to the Star Wars franchise is its success with Transformers, drawn from the toys, comics, and cartoons. The movie series has grossed more than $3.7 billion worldwide and encouraged Hasbro to follow Marvel's model of becoming directly involved in moviemaking:

As Paramount prepares to release “Transformers: The Last Knight” in June, Hasbro is already looking beyond Planet Cybertron for new cinematic universes to build. Thanks to a vast store of intellectual property, the company can afford to think big — Marvel-size big. And it is starting to take a more active role in producing and financing some of its projects.

Dungeons & Dragons' cross-media franchise potential has been a topic of discussion at Wizards of the Coast and parent Hasbro for some time. We previously covered how Hasbro, envious of Marvel's success in turning its superhero properties into a lucrative transmedia juggernaut, gave each of its brands the goal of $100 million annual sales. The problem was that each of Wizards of the Coast's brands were viewed in isolation, which left Dungeons & Dragons, "a $25-30 million business" according to then D&D Brand Manager Ryan Dancey, in dire straits. The Dungeons & Dragons team hit on the idea of using the online Dungeons & Dragons Insider (DDI) to grow the brand to $50 million and potentially $100 million. It didn't happen.

And yet there are still companies who believe the D&D brand is worth millions. The Dungeons & Dragons movie was a subject of a series of legal actions that went back and forth between two media titans lurking behind the scenes, Universal and Warner Bros, waged by their proxies through Sweetpea Entertainment and Hasbro. Warner paid $4 million for Sweetpea Entertainment's D&D rights and was willing to pay an additional $1 million in legal fees. The D&D movie is now moving forward.

A Counterargument​

Is D&D "just a sideshow" for Hasbro? Perhaps it's more accurate to position D&D's tabletop success as less important to Hasbro than its overall selling potential. D&D, after all, is expressed in a wide variety of brands across video game, boards games, and tabletop -- 6 million people in total (not an hour), according to WOTC.

In short, D&D has long since outgrown its roots as exclusively a tabletop role-playing game, which means the success and failure of the game is ancillary to its value to Hasbro as a brand. That might change if the new D&D movie is successful and the tabletop game becomes a quaint reminder of years past that, at best, doesn't embarrass the larger brand. According to Salkowitz, that's already happened with Marvel's comics:

The only real explanation here, aside from office politics, is that, to Disney (and perhaps to Marvel itself), Marvel equals superheroes sold to superhero fans through comic shops, full stop. They are the legacy story platform for MCU properties and an occasional source of PR headaches, getting just a small enough slice of the Star Wars pie to avoid embarrassing questions. In this view of the world, whatever sales advantages Marvel or its retail partners could gain by more fully exploiting the Star Wars universe in comics form is not worth the potential branding muddle that it might cause as Disney grooms its carefully segmented audience on the path from cradle to grandparent.

By most accounts, Fifth Edition revived the Dungeons & Dragons brand as a tabletop game. Although WOTC has sharply scaled back its development team for D&D, it has a new CEO who is openly supportive of the tabletop game. D&D even got a shout-out during a recent investor call, a rare occurrence.

It might not even matter. The D&D tabletop game will live in perpetuity thanks to Pathfinder, the Old School Renaissance, and the fact that gamers have enough material on the Internet that they can play entire campaigns for free without purchasing a single book.

 

[Shasarak]

If they can make a movie for the Battleship game then they should be able to make one for DnD.

Right?

 

[Jhaelen]

If they can make a movie for the Battleship game then they should be able to make one for DnD.

Sure they can. The real question is: Can they make a _good_ movie for DnD?
That's where I have my doubts...

 

[aramis erak]

Mike, I think you're missing something, and something that is, to me, pretty obvious...

The various OSR games don't replace the Branded D&D - if anything, they strengthen the market for branded D&D as the "only thing almost everyone plays."

Star Wars, 40K, WFRP, Star Trek... these are (by hasbro standards) niche, at least play wise, and most players also play D&D.

Hasbro, via the OGL, has destroyed any but the strongest multi-media license any real chance to take the "King of the Tabletop Market" from D&D. The OGL strengthens D&D by destroying the potential for finding players who can all agree on a system.

 

[TrippyHippy]

D&D doesn't have a solid "brand." It's a rules system that's attributed to a lot of different settings and games, but there's very little brand value for it in multimedia.

That's just not true. The number of actual players is a tiny minority, but 'D&D' is a worldwide, household name.

 

[Morrus]

D&D doesn't have a solid "brand." It's a rules system that's attributed to a lot of different settings and games, but there's very little brand value for it in multimedia. There *could* be, but that would require WotC to actually embrace digital trends for once rather than trying to shoehorn everything into the existing publishing model.

Take the 2000-era D&D movie as an example. It was marketed as being a D&D experience, but in reality it was just another generic fantasy movie with b-list actors and cheap special effects. They weren't translating a great adventure onto the big screen or anything, and they certainly weren't trying to bring to life any of their well-known and exciting settings. So we ended up with a cheap Dragonheart wannabe who was 100-upped by LotR the very next year.

So I guess my take-away here is that D&D is never going to be a brand that stands on it's own, unless it really starts to focus on associating more than just rules with the name. But if it does that (perhaps by making FR the official setting, and everything else is to be a subtitle of D&D), then it devalues the role it currently plays in gaming -- that of a rules system that supports a lot of stuff.

It looks a lot like that's exactly what they're doing - conflating the FR (lots of content, no external brand value) with D&D (less content, high external brand value). I suspect the only reason there's still a distinction is because of us tabletop gamers; if it were only movies/books/videogames, and there was no tabletop RPG, I suspect by now the two terms would have been pretty much merged.

 

[schnee]

Perhaps. They might do the DC success route rather than Marvel aka original D&D movie.

You mean, 'make terribly-written grim dark nonsense, hidden behind good trailers, that leaves the fans with a bad taste in their mouths'?

No thanks.

 

[mflayermonk]

If they can make a movie for the Battleship game then they should be able to make one for DnD.

Right?

I'm ready to hear Rhianna sing a D&D song.

As for the D&D movie, they might be better off rolling out a young adult fiction line (ala Warner property Harry Potter) and then getting a movie going.

 

[schnee]

Take the 2000-era D&D movie as an example. It was marketed as being a D&D experience, but in reality it was just another generic fantasy movie with b-list actors and cheap special effects. They weren't translating a great adventure onto the big screen or anything, and they certainly weren't trying to bring to life any of their well-known and exciting settings. So we ended up with a cheap Dragonheart wannabe who was 100-upped by LotR the very next year.

I want a movie series based on each edition of the game.

OD&D - Barsoom meets Land of the Lost meets Wizards (the animated movie) meets Three Hearts and Three Lions. And lots of character names that sound like modern ones spelled backwards.

Basic - One epic dungeon crawl, with random monster encounters, hauling out loot, leveling-up montages, and approximately one character death (followed by an immediate replacement) every twenty minutes. The stylistic choice of the characters not having names, and referring to each other by their profession (or race) is seen as in poor taste given the current political climate.

AD&D - Twenty-four people trudge around looking for adventure, eighteen of them being hirelings with Ranseurs, Glaives, Glaive-Gusarmes, Halberds, and Gusarme-Volges, that regularly die horribly and get replaced at the next tavern / drinking montage. The last ten minutes is a series of jump-cuts showing everyone dying messily in the Tomb of Horrors.

AD&D 2E - It's a series of vignettes. The same actors and characters, but they spend 30 minutes in Dark Sun (an homage to Fury Road), Planescape (see: Fifth Element), Ravenloft (see: Near Dark), and Spelljammer (see: Titan A.E.). This movie ends up getting the most fan acclaim but loses all sorts of money.

AD&D 3E - Michael Bay takes over, and says "those Wizards were totally under-powered and never got enough screen time. Let's make them really cool!" and he manages to make the entire 2:30 runtime a special effects extravaganza of meteor swarms, chain lightning, swift maximized twinned sonic rays of scorching, and Clerics buffing themselves. The final battle is a Goliath hurling planets at a Kobold until they both get bored and leave.

AD&D 4E - The only movie where the Fighters actually have as much screen time and ability to drive the plot forward as the Wizards. In an odd stylist choice, however, it's filmed entirely from an Isometric perspective. This one got very contentious reviews. The Blu-Ray release was quietly scrapped.

...

 

[Andrew Goenner]

Am I the only one taking umbrage at the comment about D&D living on through Pathfinder? I'm certain it will live on just fine through 5E, the vastly superior game.

 

[Morrus]

Am I the only one taking umbrage at the comment about D&D living on through Pathfinder? I'm certain it will live on just fine through 5E, the vastly superior game.

It's a legal distinction, not a personal jab. One of Ryan Dancey's cited reasons for creating the OGL was so that the D&D tabletop game - no matter what happened to it- would be able to live on independently of any specific publisher. Essentially, it made the game legally immortal, and Pathfinder is the most visible example - although undoubtedly not the last example - of taking that and running with it. Now there are hundreds of legal D&D clones of all different editions of the game; the game can't go away now. Excepting the actual brand name, of course, which is the main protected bit.

Remember that all came from a perspective after the downfall of TSR, when it really did look like D&D was going away. The OGL ensures that can't happen. Whatever happens to WotC, D&D will stick around.