It's a Good Thing D&D Isn't a Toy

We've previously discussed a time when Dungeons & Dragons was considered as much of a toy as it was a book. The loss of D&D in toy stores was a blow to a hobby that found its footing among a younger generation. Now things have come full circle as the bottom of the toy market fell out from under Wizards of the Coast's parent company, Hasbro.

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay.​

[h=3]Toys vs. Books[/h]We discussed previously how D&D wasn't just classified as a toy in some markets, but produced its own toy lines as well. D&D was carried in toy stores in the early 80s. The game's success in those markets was due in part to Dr. Eric J. Holmes' Basic version of D&D, which streamlined the rules and made them more accessible to a younger audience.

But D&D was as much of a toy as it was a book, and bookstores carried the game too...until they didn't. Unlike the toy market, the book trade often carries a return policy. Random House stopped fronting then-D&D owner TSR's loans against book sales in 1996 and returned a third of TSR's products -- several million dollars' worth. That accumulated debt sunk the company, only to be rescued by Wizards of the Coast.

Things came full circle when Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) was purchased by Hasbro. WOTC has continued to shepherd the D&D brand, which for years labored in the shadow of WOTC's other major game brand, the much more successful Magic: The Gathering card game. That all changed in the past few years.
[h=3]Roleplaying vs. Card Games[/h]The tension between D&D and Magic goes back years, with several failed attempts to cross-pollinate the two brands. It's also emblematic of two different markets: Magic, with a smaller physical footprint, can be sold everywhere from book stores to the big box franchises like Target in the U.S.; Dungeons & Dragons left both the book and toy store market behind to focus on sales through hobby store and the Internet. Thanks to WOTC's new CEO, Chris Cocks, the two brands have finally managed to produce joint efforts like The Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.

Beyond a D&D product, Magic's digital efforts with Magic: The Gathering Arena have blazed a path for D&D esports, which Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner breathlessly reported (and then retracted). It's clear that Cocks isn't playing favorites and sees both brands as fertile intellectual property beyond the original play spaces that spawned them. That's good news for Hasbro, because the market recently bottomed out of places that carry much of their product.
[h=3]Toys Aren't Us[/h]Toys R Us' collapse has sent shock waves through the industry, but it was a tsunami for the two major toy producers, Hasbro and Mattel. Toys R Us accounted for 10% of Hasbro's sales. Brian Goldner explained on the Q4 investor call:

For Hasbro, in addition to losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from Toys“R”Us, the liquidation of an additional hundreds of millions of dollars of their retail inventory sold into the market at large discounts was more impactful to 2018 than we, and industry experts, estimated. It is an unprecedented yet finite event. Prior to its initial bankruptcy filing, Toys“R”Us was our third largest customer in the U.S., and our second largest customer in Europe and Asia-Pacific. In Europe, its bankruptcy added to a market already dealing with disintermediation across retail by online and omni-channel retailers, as well as political and economic headwinds, notably in the UK. According to NPD, the European toy and game market declined 4% last year across the top six markets.
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All this added up to Hasbro revenues declining 12% to $4.6 billion, including a 13% decline in the fourth quarter. The implications for Hasbro go beyond the financial. Nerf, for example, had significant shelf space at Toys R Us, and it loses a major opportunity to showcase its brand with the loss of the toy store.

There was one bright spot in Hasbro's Q4, and it was Dungeons & Dragons. Goldner said the brand delivered "another record year" within the gaming portfolio, and that plans continue apace to expand D&D into digital play. Goldner pointed out in the Q&A that D&D being untethered from toy stores was actually an advantage, as they weren't significantly impacted by the loss of Toys R Us.

D&D has long since become an online brand -- at this point, there are so many resources online that it's entirely possible to play D&D for free -- that gives it an advantage in protecting the game's sales from the downturns in distribution channels. The loss of Toys R Us has put that advantage in sharp relief and Hasbro has taken notice. We'll likely see more focus on intellectual property brands like D&D in the future.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[S'mon]

One would hope that something like Princes of the Apocalypse or Waterdeepragon Heist would make for some pretty darn entertaining TV.

I'd think best of all would be some of the Paizo APs like Rise of the Runelords and Reign of Winter. Maybe 1 TV season per AP. Would cost a bit though. You could slow it down to 1 book per season at a pinch.

 

[D1Tremere]

But exactly what D&D is does not translate to the screen well. The average game of D&D has almost no story or plot, and what plot it does have is greatly outweighed by the amount of time it spends on its main aesthetics of play - tactical skirmishes, loot boxes, character advancement as a mini-game. None of that translates well to non-interactive mediums, and attempts to write D&D as if it was a story invariably create adventures that are bad RPG elements.

Simply put, there is no D&D adventure path that makes a great story, and to the extent that there might be, Hasbro/WotC doesn't own many of them. Further, the vast majority of obvious IP to try to adapt to a non-interactive medium would strike the majority of viewers as being simultaneously derivative and yet at the same time requiring far too much exposition to get into the story.

The two you cite are notable in that for the most part they aren't what D&D is either.

The best chance of getting enough money put into something like Dragonlance so that it is going to be worthwhile (never mind that the audience has just seen a fantasy show featuring people riding on dragons) is to show that the brand isn't toxic. Consider for example that one of D&D's biggest exposures lately was 'Ready Player One' and neither the author of the novel nor the director of the movie saw fit to put any bit of what D&D actually is into the text of their work. The novel hand waves away the exploration of the dungeon completely, and the movie drops the entire concept. I think you vastly underestimate the amount of work of genius that would be required to adapt what D&D is to a non-interactive medium.

I personally am the kind of guy that enjoys watching live streams of people playing video games, and yet despite 30 years playing and obsessing over RPGs, I find watching someone else play an RPG too boring to endure. If you can't hook me on the idea of making an episodic TV series that reflects what D&D is then I'm not sure there is actually a market for that big enough to cover the expenses of producing what would be simply put the most expensive TV series of all time - vastly more expensive than even 'Game of Thrones'.

It is perfectly fine if you do not like watching, say, critical role, acquisitions inc., or dice camera action, but I believe that such streams largely dispel the outmoded concept that D&D is about "tactical skirmishes, loot boxes, character advancement as a mini-game."

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

I have to admit, I don't agree that Adventure Paths would make for bad TV or movies. The AP's have more than enough plot and character in them to make some pretty decent entertainment. I find it rather sad that some people would look at D&D - a storytelling game - and decide that the stories that gaming creates just wouldn't pass muster on either the big or small screen.

Well, they just don't. And they won't without significant adaptation.

There are tons of problems.

Take for example the relationship between the protagonist and the viewer, and the player and the player character. When you start play in D&D, you know who you are and what you want to do. There is no need to establish this character to you, and its for most player's not a major priority of play. But when you are making a movie, when you introduce a character the first thing you need to do is in some way establish who this character is and how their mind works to the audience.

Consider also the dynamics of play between an RPG and the dynamics of character interaction in a movie. In an RPG, you generally have 4-8 protagonists sharing equal limelight. How many movies can you think of with 4-8 protagonists sharing equal limelight? There aren't many that come to mind, and movies where they've been able to pull that off, such as 'Avengers: Infinity War', they did so by having over a dozen prior movies establishing a relationship between the character and the audience via conventional movie scripts and stories. The core party dynamic that is the experience of D&D is tough to pull off well, and ensemble cast movies are pretty rare.

Consider the problem of exposition. When you play D&D, there are a ton of things you already understand about it, especially if you've been playing a while. And, since the game is going to go for 400 hours, you don't mind sitting through over the course of that campaign 40 or 80 hours of exposition to fill you in on what is going on. But in a two-hour movie, even 20 or 30 minutes spent on exposition is going to seem really clunky and it takes a genius for script writing to not make all that exposition boring. In reality, you're probably going to want to spend at most 2-3 minutes on exposition per act in a two hour movie, so 6-15 minutes depending on how things are working. And that's on top of 3-5 minutes introducing each protagonist in the party. Managing to do this in a way that is satisfying and doesn't feel rushed and doesn't feel contrived is going to take a work of genius because an adventure module isn't going to tell you how to go about doing this, and mostly won't have it as a concern.

Remember, an adventure path is meant to be played over the course of hundreds of hours. That's a totally different experience than a movie or even a book. But to the extent that you can adapt that, a movie is going to absolutely be the hardest to accomplish. The easiest format to adapt a D&D adventure to is the long episodic format of TV, and the definitive example for fantasy in my opinion is 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'. (And consider the disaster that was trying to adapt that story line to a movie.) If you have 20 or more hours to tell your story in, then you might be able to build to a party dynamic with 4 or more protagonists on screen at the same time to which the audience can relate, and have enough exposition to build understanding of the setting without feeling like everything is an info dump.

What I am not saying is that you can't have a story in D&D. What I am saying is that the format is so radically different from linear, non-interactive, scripted, short duration mediums that it would take a work of genius to adapt those stories to another medium. And what I mean by that is that works of genius aren't something that you can just commission because you want one. You can't just decide, "We have this IP we want to cash in on. So we'll commission a work of genius that will fully do justice to our IP." You instead have to wait until that spark of genius comes along, and a script exists that demands to be made.

So, my proposal in this is if you want to make a D&D mass media product:

a) Use a long episodic format.
b) Since D&D has special effect and set requirements that are vastly more expensive than most episodes of (the very low magic, highly human centric, quasi-medieval) 'Game of Thrones' make it animated to reduce the production costs.

There are additional problems. D&D adventures have a lot of combat that if translated to the screen would be mostly repetitive. Consider even the adaptation between Chronicles of the Dragonlance the novels, and Chronicles of the Dragonlance the adventure modules. The vast majority of what you experience as players playing those modules is not faithfully translated to the novels or represented in them. While some of the fights that appear in the adventure modules do appear in the novels, the longer the story goes the less overlap there actually is and the more the action tends to occur 'off stage'. This is what I mean about how what D&D is doesn't translate to other mediums because a tactical skirmish game doesn't translate to non-interactive medium. I don't mean that there isn't a story at all in D&D, but I do mean that there doesn't have to be a story in D&D and even when there is a story it's a smallish part of the experience.

I'm not even convinced 'Princes of the Apocalypes' or 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist' make for a great D&D story, much less that the story is such a major part of the attraction of them that they'd easily translate to another medium. This isn't to say that they are bad adventures or devoid of story, but just that story is only a small part of the aesthetic appeal of a good adventure. Consider an adventure like I6: Ravenloft, widely considered one of the best if not the best ever written. While in the hands of a good and highly imaginative DM, you'll get a few good story scenes out of that adventure, the story framework is really pretty thin. It would take a work of genius to pull that story out of the adventure and make it the central focus and not feel clichéd to an audience jaded by many vampire stories. But to a player of the adventure, even the thin story is suitable because they are in it, making choices, immersed in the experience. The story of picking your way through the maze that is Castle Ravenloft is a fun one, it's just not a story that readily translates to say a movie. I mean how many movies do you know where the map of the building is a major character, if not the major character, of the story?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

Among the top franchises of all time:
Transformers (based on toys)

I would consider Transformers a reasonable counter-example, although for the life of me I cannot understand how such thoroughly stupid and poorly written movies continued to make money after the first one. I can grant the nostalgia on the first one, and as a kid who owned transformers and had watched the series every day after school, I was super-excited to see Optimus Prime (with the original voice actor) on the big screen as well. But yeah, just goes to show that you don't have to make art to make money.

Jurassic Park (originally based on a book, now just kind of about dinosaurs)

Yes, but the original based on the book is far and away the best movie, and is arguably a work of genius - this is Spielberg and John Williams we are talking about. The glass of water scene is one of the most iconic in movie history, as is the first view of the dinosaurs with Williams soaring track, and 'objects in the mirror...'. It's not a perfect movie by any means, but it's utterly iconic and the process of adapting the book is aided by the fact that Crichton is very much a novel to screen sort of author with a long history of bringing his material to the big screen and a somewhat proven track record. Any money made in the series afterwards was mostly cashing in on the original movies success, much as for example a 'Star Wars' movie is going to make money mostly by being 'Star Wars' regardless of (as we have seen) the quality of the movie as a stand alone story. (Granted, if that well looks like it is running dry.)

Pirates of the Caribbean (based on a theme park ride)

While you make a good rebuttal with Transformers, this one on the contrary absolutely makes my point. The original 'Pirates of the Caribbean' is absolutely a work of genius, with a script that mostly just works, some of the best fight cinematography of all time, and iconic immortal character work by Johnny Depp, and again one of the best scores of all time. That this work was inspired by a theme park ride is both stunning and largely irrelevant. Compare the original with other attempts by Disney to do the same thing, such as the dreadful 'Tomorrow Land'. Striking gold like 'Pirates of the Caribbean' is not easy.

Fantasy does decently (Potter, Game of Thrones, LOTR). Will it work? Maybe. We'll see.

Sure, but in those cases you were dealing with IP that was already a massive cultural phenomenon - some of the biggest selling book series of all time, if not THE biggest selling book series of all time. Table top RPGs are extremely niche by comparison.

Remember, we couldn't even get Acererak into 'Ready Player One', and really, doesn't show up much in the novel either if you think about it. The great majority of the time in the dungeon is spent playing Joust, and the adventure is handwaved away by the author.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

So, I think I didn't explain the point very well.

That's ok, I'm probably not either.

The underlying IP doesn't really matter. Whether it's a toy (Transformers), or a theme park ride (Pirates). Even ones that you might think have some basis in a "story" (Guardians of the Galaxy) don't- that's not based on any particular comic, but just the work of several script writers channeling their ideas about the characters (notably Gunn, later, and Dirty Dozen).

I understand what you're saying about the experience of playing D&D being hard to translate into a movie- that's true. But that's orthogonal to the business of movies today. That's why we see movies like Battleship, or the Tom Cruise Mummy, or Angry Birds, or CHIPs, or Ouija,* or an attempt to start a Power Rangers franchise, or ... you get the idea.

I think we may be closer on this than you think. Remember, my original objection was to the idea that we shouldn't make something like 'The Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon' because "that's not what D&D is". I'm objecting to the idea that what we need to try to do is make a movie that really communicates "what D&D is", either from the context of the story created by D&D play or at the meta level of what it is like to play D&D. Honestly, the best movie that conveys "what D&D is", is the hilarious but wholly nerd-centric "Gamers II: Dorkness Rising", and while I adore that movie I don't think anyone would pick it as something that is going to expand the reach of the brand or promote D&D IP to the wider audience.

More bluntly, the success will be predicated on the script, director, and cast, Period. Just like any other movie.

Yes, exactly.

EDIT- Maybe the disconnect is the whole "genius" thing. Movie-making at this level isn't a work of genius. It's an insane, collaborative effort like steering the Titanic, and, more often than not, the ship hits the iceberg at some point. The vast majority of any "genius" will get sanded away in multiple script revisions and "notes" from all involved, not to mention test screenings and reshoots. Suffice to say that it is not genius, but the confluence of competence at all levels- a good script, a good director, and good actors, combined with a little showbiz serendipity. Sometimes, it's a wonder that any of these productions ever get made.

By genius I mean that hard to pin down creative spark that cannot be summoned by all the money in the world. It's that thing that means a movie isn't guaranteed to be a hit - much less good - just because you spent an enormous amount of money on it, just because you hired 'proven' talent, and just because you have a great IP to work with. Genius is that thing that separates movies that become beloved IP that seem largely timeless from box office bombs that do not or even summer blockbusters hardly anyone ever watches again. Yes, movies are a massively collaborative effort, and yes it sometimes takes multiple sparks of genius from multiple people working on the film to make a great movie. Star Wars had a lot of things going for it, and it's entirely possible it would have been received as a rather cringy movie had not it also had John Williams elevating the movie and giving it gravitas with one of the greatest pieces of music composed in the 20th century, but its equally possible we'd not have so much love for that music had it not accompanied a beloved adventure from our childhood.

My underlying point is that D&D is not an IP with a track record of success, and I am far from happy that they are rushing to make another movie based on the brand for all the wrong reasons. Every time a D&D movie fails, it makes the odds of getting quality visual productions based on D&D that much harder. So I'd much rather ease into this using formats that are suited to it, using adaptations that ground the movie in something the audience can relate to, than try to take on expensive high risk productions like bringing D&D as an experience to the screen. And frankly, right now Paizo has all the best AP material, aside from Dragonlance (with its massive budget requirements), and there work on things like the recent 'King Maker' video game suggests they are now going in the right direction in leveraging that IP in the long run, where as the golden age of D&D based content is long in the past and seems unlikely to resurrect any time soon.

 

[tomBitonti]

TLDR version: Those misdealings have caused alot of missed sales & financial pain.

Sure. But they don't have anything to do with what Toys R Us was selling. Financial miss-dealings are a hazard to all corporations.

I agree that there is a misfortune in this case to the sellers that operated through Toys R Us. But that is a specific misfortune which ought not to be used to make general points such are made by the article.

Thx!

TomB

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Warner doesn't need D&D to create its own fantasy saga. They could use "the warlord" comic by DC for example.