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.

 

[Morrus]

So what does this even mean?

I feel like you're attempting to troll me about... something?

You said that if they could make a Battleship movie they should be able to make a D&D movie.

I said they already did make a D&D movie. More than once.

Hope the recap was helpful! That was far more effort than the topic warranted.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

>Why didn't the Lord of the Rings trilogy pay royalties to D&D?
>It looks very much like a D&D game, has the same tropes --
>classes, Scottish dwarves, fragile elves -- all the trimmings.
>But D&D got nothing from it because core D&D is too generic to use as a brand.

There's also that pesky little problem of Lord of the Rings coming first, and D&D being largely based on it.

 

[aramis erak]

>Why didn't the Lord of the Rings trilogy pay royalties to D&D?
>It looks very much like a D&D game, has the same tropes --
>classes, Scottish dwarves, fragile elves -- all the trimmings.
>But D&D got nothing from it because core D&D is too generic to use as a brand.

There's also that pesky little problem of Lord of the Rings coming first, and D&D being largely based on it.

Not to mention that TSR settled Saul Zaentz DBA Middle Earth Enterprises v. Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. in 1976, wherein D&D's then owners admitted infringing Saul's purchased rights to LOTR & The Hobbit.

Seriously, tho', the D&D brand is strong in videogames, and in novels. The lack of decent D&D branded movies isn't hurting the brand that much.

And WotC's RPG division is barely a blip in the financials of HasBro. The novels and videogames are (fiscally) far more important to HasBro; WotC seems to justify TTRPG by, "it drives the creative processes that enable the novels & videogames to be good."

 

[GrahamWills]

>Why didn't the Lord of the Rings trilogy pay royalties to D&D?
>It looks very much like a D&D game, has the same tropes --
>classes, Scottish dwarves, fragile elves -- all the trimmings.
>But D&D got nothing from it because core D&D is too generic to use as a brand.

There's also that pesky little problem of Lord of the Rings coming first, and D&D being largely based on it.

The question was meant to stimulate thought -- yeah, I was actually aware of the order of publication. The point was that D&D has added NOTHING to Lord of the Rings; that was the major point of my argument -- D&D brings nothing to the table that will help sell a fantasy work. I've yet to hear in this thread a single concrete thing that is associated with D&D that would make people buy a fantasy work.

Maybe I should have phrased the question this way: "Why didn't the makers of LOTR use more D&D tropes and license D&D to improve their film's appeal?", expecting the answer "because it wouldn't improve anything".

I don't want to sound like I dislike D&D -- far from it. I'd even argue that its generic fantasy nature is a strong reason for its success as a roleplaying game. But the same thing that makes it a success as a game makes it hard to use as a brand. RPGs as a total were a US market of about $40m in 2016. Assume D&D is a full quarter of that (yeah, a bit high) that makes it $10m. Assuming about $10 per person spent yearly on average, that fits in with other estimates of about a million regular players.

So, doing the math:

If I make a generic fantasy film, what fraction of D&D players will come to it who would not otherwise have come? Well, for a start probably only 10% of those people will see any given movie in their genre, so w're talking a max of 100,000 people. I'll be generous and say 50,000 extra people might go and see a movie because it's branded D&D. The incremental profit brought into a movie studio per ticket isn't high -- maybe $3?

So, it's not worth paying more than $150K to add D&D branding to your movie. Or, short answer -- don't bother. Which is why people aren't bothering.

Disclaimer: There are not solid figures on many of the percentages (especially movie profits!) but I think that if you plug in your own favorites data sources, you'll find the same sort of conclusion. D&D is great for roleplaying fantasy, but as a brand, it's appeal is limited to a tiny audience that's not worth pursuing.

 

[mflayermonk]

The question was meant to stimulate thought -- yeah, I was actually aware of the order of publication. The point was that D&D has added NOTHING to Lord of the Rings; that was the major point of my argument -- D&D brings nothing to the table that will help sell a fantasy work. I've yet to hear in this thread a single concrete thing that is associated with D&D that would make people buy a fantasy work.

Classes. The idea of classes does not exist in LoTR and is clearly made in the 1983 D&D cartoon where each of the children is given a class in the opening title sequence "Ranger, Thief-Acrobat, etc". That is a concrete thing that would make people buy a fantasy work.

 

[Rygar]

The question was meant to stimulate thought -- yeah, I was actually aware of the order of publication. The point was that D&D has added NOTHING to Lord of the Rings; that was the major point of my argument -- D&D brings nothing to the table that will help sell a fantasy work. I've yet to hear in this thread a single concrete thing that is associated with D&D that would make people buy a fantasy work.

Maybe I should have phrased the question this way: "Why didn't the makers of LOTR use more D&D tropes and license D&D to improve their film's appeal?", expecting the answer "because it wouldn't improve anything".

I don't want to sound like I dislike D&D -- far from it. I'd even argue that its generic fantasy nature is a strong reason for its success as a roleplaying game. But the same thing that makes it a success as a game makes it hard to use as a brand. RPGs as a total were a US market of about $40m in 2016. Assume D&D is a full quarter of that (yeah, a bit high) that makes it $10m. Assuming about $10 per person spent yearly on average, that fits in with other estimates of about a million regular players.

So, doing the math:

If I make a generic fantasy film, what fraction of D&D players will come to it who would not otherwise have come? Well, for a start probably only 10% of those people will see any given movie in their genre, so w're talking a max of 100,000 people. I'll be generous and say 50,000 extra people might go and see a movie because it's branded D&D. The incremental profit brought into a movie studio per ticket isn't high -- maybe $3?

So, it's not worth paying more than $150K to add D&D branding to your movie. Or, short answer -- don't bother. Which is why people aren't bothering.

Disclaimer: There are not solid figures on many of the percentages (especially movie profits!) but I think that if you plug in your own favorites data sources, you'll find the same sort of conclusion. D&D is great for roleplaying fantasy, but as a brand, it's appeal is limited to a tiny audience that's not worth pursuing.

I'm going to have to disagree with your premises here.

• You seem to be basing brand value and potential revenue on the current estimated total number of RPG players. That's not really reflective of the brand value. From an RPG standpoint, the "Player value" is relative to the total number of people who have ever played and enjoyed D&D, not the current population.
• There is also the population that was invested in the novel lines that had no interest in the RPG, as I understand it, Dragonlance confused the hell out of TSR because the RPG had low sales while the novel line sold extremely well.
• There is also the population that became invested in the video game lines, Gold Box games to MMO. Some of the D&D video games were so popular that even today they're regarded as classics and being remastered and sold.
• Then there's the population that can be swayed by D&D's established narratives rather than a one-off movie with a story no one has heard of. No one has to go make up a storyline and hope it works, they can pick from a fair number of storylines that already have solid metrics showing their likely demographic penetrations and go to market with a cohesive established story.
• Then there's the population that can be swayed by D&D's established world's with backgrounds, ecologies, etc. All of which have stood 40 years of vetting so are unlikely to be regarded as making no sense.
• Then there's the name recognition, there's very few properties with the name recognition "Dungeons and Dragons" has. Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and now Game of Thrones. Pretty much anyone and everyone you might pick blindly from a crowd can tell you something about all of these properties.

Dungeons and Dragons as a brand has a lot of value. Given its history, name recognition, and numerous product lines that had high popularity, you're certainly underestimating by a very large factor.

 

[Shasarak]

The question was meant to stimulate thought -- yeah, I was actually aware of the order of publication. The point was that D&D has added NOTHING to Lord of the Rings; that was the major point of my argument -- D&D brings nothing to the table that will help sell a fantasy work. I've yet to hear in this thread a single concrete thing that is associated with D&D that would make people buy a fantasy work.

Maybe I should have phrased the question this way: "Why didn't the makers of LOTR use more D&D tropes and license D&D to improve their film's appeal?", expecting the answer "because it wouldn't improve anything".

In my mind the main thing that DnD offers is its IP and stories which are things like Drizzt, Elminster, Beholders and Mindflayers which would make the LotRs movie much more interesting and at the same time drive most LotRs fans more bonkers then a barrel full of Dwarves.

 

[mflayermonk]

I think you may be confused. LotR doesn't look like D&D. D&D looks like LotR.

JRR Tolkien would have flat out refused to have a world where people worshiped a pantheon of gods and gained magical powers from that worship.