Over Half Of New D&D Players Got Into Game From Watching Online Play

[MENTION=7706]SkidAce[/MENTION]:

There's actually an official podcast ( http://criticalrolepodcast.geekandsundry.com/ ), so you don't need to do that yourself anymore.

schneeland said:

[MENTION=7706]SkidAce[/MENTION]:

There's actually an official podcast ( http://criticalrolepodcast.geekandsundry.com/ ), so you don't need to do that yourself anymore.

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What!?! Maybe I will actually get into it then, thanks for the tip. I know people like the fact that they were a group long before the LP but it seems to make it harder for me to get into it. Critical Hit started almost from scratch, which I found interesting.

Oh, and recently Wotc has started releasing Dice Camera Action on their Dungeon Delve podcast, which I appreciate. It is a lot harder to make any money off podcasts but they are often so much more convenient.

http://dnd.wizards.com/dungeon-delve/podcast-hub
http://majorspoilers.com/category/critical-hit/

happyhermit said:

What!?! Maybe I will actually get into it then, thanks for the tip. I know people like the fact that they were a group long before the LP but it seems to make it harder for me to get into it. Critical Hit started almost from scratch, which I found interesting...

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Yeah, that's a little tricky. For me that was a plus because the group had already bonded and had at least a basic idea of what they were doing, but it does come with the drawback of some things less clear. That being said, if you want the experience of a fresh campaign, the next Critical Role campaign will start in 2018 (probably early to mid January). You, of course, miss out on some background from the old campaign, but I understand all who shun the time commitment of ~500 hours to catch up.

SmokeyCriminal said:

So yeah, porn stars got me interested in D&D, and I started playing to get girls.For the times they are a-changin'...Please don't judge me.

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That's not much different that every other gamer who realized that goth girls were playing Vampire and the Vampire LARP at the height of "Vamps are sexy, but not sparkly yet."

I also guarantee that quite a few grumbles are by gamers who said "I bet we could do D&D TV if we just had a cable station, or used something on the Internet ... Nah! D&D isn't a spectator sport. Forgetaboutit!"

I know I was. For a lot of these people who have been playing for 20 or more years, they feel a bit miffed. They've been in this hobby for a long time, many of them trying to make it catch on, being picked on for doing a nerd hobby. And then they blink and suddenly young, attractive people are making money for just slapping up a camera up in their basement and doing a live stream

I've seen responses range from "How come I wasn't the lucky one! I'd love to get paid to give my friends a good game," to "How come we finally get a lot more ladies to jump on board when I'm too old to date them." (There we go with the girls thing again.) Yep, you put a good chunk of your life into something and when you see someone else get all the praise and glory, I bet it stings.

Me?

I'm just getting a kick out of being the cool old guy who is seen as a mentor and has lots of new friends who are cool in their own right. Better late than never.

Li Shenron said:

I know this is really a small issue if any at all, but yet I find it mildly disturbing that so many people watch others play D&D instead of playing it themselves... it's kind of similar to the rise of "eSports" and their possible inclusion even in the olympics. And also my kids are starting to watch people play Minecraft on youtube instead of playing it themselves! It's ok to watch occasionally to get some inspiration, but if it's more often than the real thing then it raises some questions...

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As someone who got into gaming years before Youtube (or the internet....)...this reminds me of the fact that I spent years reading about D&D before I played it. I went from 1e to 2e without ever playing a game. Admittedly I did a lot of "development" and map-drawing, but...there might be similar forces at work.

I read part of this article earlier, and it did intrigue me enough that I'm going to try watching some D&D. Never done so. It might be interesting, or it might not. I don't generally watch sports either.

Nellisir said:

As someone who got into gaming years before Youtube (or the internet....)...this reminds me of the fact that I spent years reading about D&D before I played it. I went from 1e to 2e without ever playing a game. Admittedly I did a lot of "development" and map-drawing, but...there might be similar forces at work.

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That reminds me of my own "how I got into D&D" story. I bought the 3e rulebooks not to play in tabletop games but because I was participating in the development forums for Bioware's PC game Neverwinter Nights, and needed to know the rules in order to participate meaningfully in the discussions. I learned 3e inside and out from a game-design perspective long before it occurred to me that, hey, I've got the books, maybe I should try and find someone who plays the game.

It was an interesting gateway into tabletop gaming, but I fear that it rather warped my perspective on the game. Analysing the ruleset as a codified system gave me a lot of system knowledge from well before I ever picked up a d20, but also made me rather a rules-lawyer at the table, and while I've had a lot of fun taking a more relaxed approach with other, more freeform systems, when it comes to D&D I've never really managed to relax into playing fast-and-loose with the rules, or feel truly comfortable as a player when DMs do so.

I haven’t played D&D in a group but I still feel involved i.e. lurking on websites like this one.
Been listening to Drunks and Dragons for years - it’s my go to podcast. I’ve picked up several 5e books along the way so WotC are getting their $$$ too.
I guess im a role playing fan not a player. ^^

This is great news! Just a few years ago I was decrying why, if such things as chess could be spectator sports, why not D&D? I am thrilled to see it has become a big thing!


My only hope is that the gaming quality has improved since when I watched some of the videos so that prospective new players don't come away with skewed ideas of what a "typical" D&D game session or group is like, because the couple I saw were... well, let's say that while the voices the players used could be great (as this was one of the video series with professional voice actors playing) and while the DM seemed wonderful, the players themselves didn't seem to give a fig about trying to understand how the game worked, didn't take anything seriously and treated it all like a bad joke, and were far more concerned with pulling goofy stunts and doing funny things to try to get a laugh than with actually portraying characters, like making up illogical cultural traits of their character's background in order to justify doing something ludicrous...

This kind of stuff leaves a very bad taste in my mouth as I have a friend or two who loved to "play" this way, and it was so disruptive they would drive me so crazy and make me so upset (as well as upsetting all the other players) that I refuse to play with them anymore. One of the worst examples was a certain player who totally derailed a 1st Edition Temple of Elemental Evil campaign I was trying to run in the late '90s. He was playing the party's main warrior, a Cavalier-Paladin dedicated to Pholtus, and e few sessions in during a big battle against the bandits at the Moat House, right in the middle of the battle when it came to his turn he declared he was pulling out his dagger, screamed "F--- Pholtus!" and slit his own throat. The rest of the players were shocked (to say the least) and two more PCs died as the rest of the party frantically did their best to escape the fiasco. And all the while the player just sat their grinning and explained "I just got bored with the character, so what's next?" The next session he made his new character, a Chaotic Neutral Dwarven Fighter (which we all subsequently learned was his favorite character to play... identical CN Dwarf Fighters) who, in his first session, walked into the store run by the Assassins (whom he decided were "bad dudes" because I played them as pretty slimy types, but he had no reason to believe they were anything more than slimy used car salesman types), bought some black paint from them, walked outside and painted "Fag's Lair" on the outside wall, walked back inside and said "You two fags? It says so outside!" and threw the bucket of remaining paint on them. The proprietors of the shop sent their stable-hand to catch the dwarf, and as the hand was chasing the dwarf, the dwarf stopped in the middle of the road, pulled out a handaxe, and threw it at the guy... hitting him in the head and killing him dead. And then the player was shocked and outraged when he was arrested by several of his just recently met fellow party members and personally escorted to be handed over to Rufus and Byrne. During the night as he was sleeping I had the player make several saving throws, and told him that in the morning his cell was found empty except a few drops of blood (you simply don't go around antagonizing higher level Assassins like that.) He was again outraged that he wasn't allowed to get away with what he did, complaining that he was "just playing his character" since he was "Chaotic Neutral", because apparently his only understanding of what the Chaotic Neutral Alignment meant was what was explained in the 2nd Edition PHB (and whoever wrote that description had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, and deserves a good known upside the head for probably breeding at least hundreds of other players using it as an excuse for making disruptive characters like that.) I explained to the guy that Chaotic Neutral did not mean insane, it meant a character like Conan who wasn't concerned with Good vs Evil but didn't like people telling him what to do... and even if the Alignment did mean what he thought it did, it still didn't mean he could get away with doing anything he wanted simply because he was "following his Alignment!" He was pissed because the Chaotic Good Thief had pilfered 5 gp from someone earlier in the game and he hadn't gotten in trouble for it, and I tried to explain that was because the Thief hadn't been caught, while he his Dwarf had openly committed murder in broad daylight in the center of the main street of the village of Hommlet!

He never did understand what I was trying to explain to him, and thought that I was just being unfair and mean to him by not letting his Dwarf get away with murder. Because his character was Chaotic Neutral he believed that meant he should be able to get away with doing anything he felt like simply because he was "playing his Alignment" and so he was immune to any consequences for his actions (his entire reason for playing CN at all was because he thought it was a blank check to get away with doing anything he wanted... which was apparently his only reason for playing D&D at all, despite us trying many times to explain to him what the rest of us wanted out of the game)... as if explaining to NPCs or the other PCs that "it's OK, I'm Chaotic Neutral so I can get away with doing this kind of thing!" was a perfectly valid excuse for everything up to and including open, unrepentant murder in front of multiple witnesses. He thought it was "unfair" that other players could "get away" with playing Lawful Good characters without their characters being "punished" for what they did but he couldn't "get away" with playing Chaotic Neutral and acting completely randomly bizarre and disruptive... or at least his bizarre, distorted idea of what Chaotic Neutral meant (and I will never forgive the 2E PHB for warping the concept of CN for so many people... and that was honestly probably why I despised 2E for such a long time, despite having started playing with that Edition.) He would always get indignant when other players called him out for acting like a jerk, trying to say he was "just playing his Alignment" and using that as an excuse for acting like a prick and doing things just to hurt of players' characters.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. But the kind of playing I saw in the videos I watched just reminded me so much of the way that guy played I stopped watching them. I am extremely glad to learn that most other D&D play videos seem to be nothing like that! I don't want to think that a whole generation of new players are coming into the game thinking that his is how most people play D&D.

I'm still relatively new to D&D playing. I grew up getting shut out of my friend's groups because I was the only girl and I would "throw the dynamic off." I kept trying, though, and eventually (YEARS later) found a group that would let me in. Then the DM got a girl friend and that was the end of the group because no one else knew how to DM. Watching other DMs is how I'm working up the courage to give it a go myself.

Parmandur said:

[*]D&D's most profitable year ever was 2016, and 2017 may surpass it.

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Not to take away from the online play viewing aspect of this topic (which is very interesting) but I found this part interesting as well. Most profitable year wasn't the launch year. That's huge growth!