WotC 2020 Was The Best Year Ever For Dungeons & Dragons

Azzy said:

It's even older than that... The 1e PHB had quite a few polearms (many of which no one used and wouldn't be feasable in a dungeon crawl, anyways). And then the 1e UA happened—now MOAR polearms! And an appendix in the back is a disertation on polearms (with illustrations of each type)!

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Pole arms are actually much more useful in a dungeon that a huge axe. Keeping crawly things away from you while you poke them to death is a lot easier than trying to avoid chopping your friends in half with wide swinging blades.

Kurotowa said:

Polearms are an old, OLD meme. The AD&D 2e PHB had eighteen varieties of polearm in it, covering a wide array of weights, damage types, speed factors, and damage dice. It including compelling iconic options like the glaive-guisarme, the guisarme-volge, the hook fauchard, the lucern hammer, the partisan, the ranseur, and the spetum.

No one used any of them. Swords were cooler, better, and you never found a magic fauchard-fork anyway. But the amount of page space given to a laundry list of polearms in the PHB and supplements like the Arms & Equipment Guide took on legendary status.

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Parmandur said:

Desert of Desolation.

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Hasn't a 3rd party done that yet? In which case it does seem like WotC are keeping it for themselves.

Paul Farquhar said:

Hasn't a 3rd party done that yet? In which case it does seem like WotC are keeping it for themselves.

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Nope, nothing yet. Goodman Games has let it slip when promoting their reprints that WotC has two lists: the list that Goodman Games can choose from, and the list WotC has on the drawing board for themselves. There are a couple other decent possibilities that I can think of. Mayne it won't come to anything further, but I wouldn't place any wagers.

Parmandur said:

There are a couple other decent possibilities that I can think of.

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Dungeonland/Land Beyond the Magic Mirror? WotC could do Fizban's Bumper Fun Book of Parody Adventures.

darjr said:

Those goalposts wheels are squeaking.

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When did CR become a phenomenon? Can you give me an exact date?

The CNBC article goes into it: How Critical Role helped spark a Dungeons & Dragons renaissance.

It as this neat infographic



By that, it looks like in 2017 DnD is having a very nice spike, but it isn't that far beyond where it was prior until the end of that year. And that was coming of 2016 where the first season of STRANGER THINGS came out and CR started to build steam
But it's not until 2018 that things really spike and keep going up

Both for DnD and CR as the second campaign really boosted the presence, with billboard ads and the extra accessibility of being able to start watching without needing to watch 400 hours of content
That's the year everything changes. That's when they decided to do EXPLORER'S GUIDE TO WILDEMOUNT. And probably move away from nostalgia based products to a product line aimed at the newcomers

Oh, let me make unreasonable demands on your time, then throw out a bunch of charts that are only tangentially related, then make an extreme GUESS about someone else’s choices that, kinda sorta makes sense except it’s couched to verify my biases and erroneously justify my guess. Yea that should do it.

Btw that chart shows the trend begins PRIOR to 2016, but is also vauge enough to not be really useful for either argument about pinning down some arbitrary date.

Disgruntled Hobbit said:

When did CR become a phenomenon? Can you give me an exact date?

The CNBC article goes into it: How Critical Role helped spark a Dungeons & Dragons renaissance.

It as this neat infographic

View attachment 137319

By that, it looks like in 2017 DnD is having a very nice spike, but it isn't that far beyond where it was prior until the end of that year. And that was coming of 2016 where the first season of STRANGER THINGS came out and CR started to build steam
But it's not until 2018 that things really spike and keep going up

Both for DnD and CR as the second campaign really boosted the presence, with billboard ads and the extra accessibility of being able to start watching without needing to watch 400 hours of content
That's the year everything changes. That's when they decided to do EXPLORER'S GUIDE TO WILDEMOUNT. And probably move away from nostalgia based products to a product line aimed at the newcomers

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Interesting insight, @Disgruntled Hobbit . It wasn't what I wanted to hear, but it's pretty much the state of things. My dream of WotC launching a Mystara 5E product line isn't very likely.

For better or worse, there has been a large influx of new players into the hobby since 2018, and WotC can't afford to ignore them. Yes, they could court these new players with older, classic D&D stuff that they might have missed out on in the 80s, but it's safer to give them what they have already come to expect on their favorite D&D livestream shows, podcasts, and blogs. So if we're curious about what the next D&D product might look like next year, we should go watch a few episodes Critical Role, Force Grey, MissAdventures, and Maze Arcana. These shows, and the people who watch them, seem to be driving the industry right now.

Paul Farquhar said:

Dungeonland/Land Beyond the Magic Mirror? WotC could do Fizban's Bumper Fun Book of Parody Adventures.

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The Lost Cavwrns of Tsjocanth (oh, look...Tasha), the Forgotten Temple of Tharizfun, D1-3, Q1, Night Below, City of Skulls...