WotC 2020 Was The Best Year Ever For Dungeons & Dragons

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If that were even remotely true they wouldn't have published EXPLORER'S GUIDE TO WILDEMOUNT let alone entirely rewritten Ravenloft
WizCo doesn't give even half a Duck about older gamers any more. It's all about the kids

Watch the language, please.

This will come as a shock to you, but older people like Critical Role, too. I've been playing since 1979 and it's one of several actual play podcasts I listen to every week.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If you find that WOTC is not properly catering to your taste, Goodman Games is more then willing to take your money in exchange for goods/services!

Goodman Games|Your Source for Adventures

goodman-games.com

The whole reason for Dungeon Crawl Classics (both the 3E adventures and later the game system) is specifically to recapture the feel of early D&D, but with a system that doubles-down on all the old schoolisms. (Random tables! All the time! Weird monsters you've never seen before! And so much player death!)

Folks who don't like 5E, or feel that it's for them, could really do a lot worse than to check out Goodman Games' work.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

WotC and DMSGuild paid for a historian to write pieces from scratch for classic books being re-released in pdf and in print on demand. That IS catering to older fans of that material. That's something they didn't need to do. That's something that is difficult to prove if it had ANY affect on the bottom line or sales. But no, people need a windmill to rage against.

I find myself reading all of Shannon Applecline's write-ups on the old material and, more than once, he's talked me into buying something. So it's helped at least a little.

 

[darjr]

Yea, Shannon is a gem. Also I will note something, it seems that WotC has stopped with these articles. But after hearing Russ’s interview with him, it sounds more like he changed his goals and life.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If their sales numbers say 2020 was a great year for D&D as a product I won't argue with that, but as a hobby I'm pretty doubtful. In my experience the pandemic killed two of my groups, although it did also expand one since once we went digital we could add a couple people who lived further away. It also at least temporarily disrupted most of my favorite D&D-centric online content. One of the game shops I used to play in went out of business. The meetup.com group through which I used to find groups became moribund. I doubt my experiences are wildly atypical.

OTOH, I'm now running four campaigns over Zoom, as opposed to one in person one.

Gaming is certainly different after 2020, as many things are.

Virtual tabletops and other online platforms have seen huge traffic since the pandemic hit the West. Having a late-in-the-pandemic book like Tasha's do so well suggests that people weren't just buying books hoping that maybe they'd get to play. I'd suggest that it means that play was going on, even if it wasn't in person.

That said, I'm sorry about your in-person groups and gaming shop. A lot of mom and pop businesses are in a lot of trouble; we're going to see a lot more chains and large businesses dominate the business landscape after the pandemic, due to all the closures.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Would anything tick off a group of older players more than a 1.5 that took 1e and gave it a "canonical update" for the OSR crowd?

The OSR movement has essentially every possible variant of OD&D, Basic, 1E and 2E. There's a version out there that's OD&D + content from The Strategic Review. No matter how finely you want to slice your old school experience, there's a rulebook out there for you. And it's all compatible with the original adventures (and new stuff being cranked out of Dragonsfoot and elsewhere).

Even for old school players who refuse to play any WotC-era D&D, this is a new golden age for D&D.

 

[Reynard]

My dad, aged 76, is a regular player I DM for. If he lived in the same city as I did, and there was no pandemic, I would be thrilled to run a game for him and his friends.

Just like you get a different vibe playing D&D with kids who grew up with Adventure Time and Minecraft, playing D&D with people who grew up with the Appendix N books, even if they didn't play D&D at the time, has a distinctly different tone. And, of course, life experience colors how each generation plays. (My dad, a Vietnam vet, does not view war and combat as the grand adventure younger players often do, for instance, but something to be avoided and mourned.)

My dad never played D&D when we were kids. He bought us the Mentzer boxed set, ran it for us once and then let use loose. But he was a lifelong CRPG gamer.

After he retired he joined a tabletop group and discovered the joy of "real" D&D for the first time. If he had not been on the opposite coast I would have loved to finally run D&D for him. (this was before I embraced VTT play).

He passed away from lung cancer a few years ago. He left me all of his D&D stuff (much of it 4E material) and his dice.

I'm not sure why I am sharing that story. It's not really relevant, and it doesn't have a point or a happy ending. But here we are.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Kind of funny—-we liked longswords and great swords and could only wonder about the large list of pole arms. It made the game feel grounded in something but it was not a big part of our games.

My brother and I read the long loving articles on polearms in Dragon magazine and thought all the wargamers who started D&D might be insane.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Well, GoS isn’t strictly old modules. There are modern and newer stuff in that book as well. So it’s conceivable they could have released it regardless of making old school players happy. I mean, if that was their main goal, there are better adventures to choose from, like a remaking of Lost City or UK1/UK2 sentinel/gauntlet.

UK1 was Beyond the Crystal Cave, which was remade for 4E.

Lost City is available from Goodman as an OAR module, for folks who want a 5E version of that.

I would love to see the master list of which old school adventures WotC licensed to Goodman and which they reserved for themselves. I suspect it'd be quite informative about their future plans.

If I were going to make another Ghosts of Saltmarsh style book, though, it'd be based around the Desert of Desolation modules. There's plenty of other desert adventures from Dungeon they could add to it, and late 1E adventures seem to be beyond the time period Joseph Goodman is passionate about, based on 20 years of releases.

 

[darjr]

Was Goodman Games given a complete list? I thought it was a short list they keep updating as Goodman Games finishes them.