D&D General D&D In The Mainstream - Again!

With the latest mainstream article* (this time the New York Times for the third time!) from a major news outlet covering the resurgence of D&D, I thought I'd take a quick look at similar articles which have appeared on the radar of major newspapers and broadcasters recently, including The Guardian, the BBC, the Washington Post, and more!

*Note, this article was written in Nov 2019, but I intend to update the list below as more such articles appear. Last updated Sep 2022.

Image from NYT, depicting live-streamed D&D show "Rivals of Waterdeep"​

Just yesterday, the Washington Examiner joined in. Forbes also covers the game fairly regularly. It's pretty amazing that this hobby is now appearing in mainstream media on a regular basis. There's a major mainstream article every couple of months now, it seems. The articles are usually very similar -- the surprising revelation of the "rise" or "resurgence" of D&D, and reports that D&D is now 'out of the basement', a few words from somebody at WotC about how the current year is the best year yet, and perhaps an interview with a gamer or two explaining why they think D&D is resurgent now, as well as quotes from a celebrity gamer.

The New York Times was surprised about the popularity of D&D twice this year - this week on D&D's resurgence, and back in April on "why the cool kids are playing Dungeons & Dragons". The Times looks at the strangeness of D&D becoming cool, while the Washington Post wonders how D&D became more popular than ever. IGN explains the recent surge in popularity, and the Guardian tells us we're no longer nerds because D&D is cool now (update: and then again in November 2019, July 2019, May 202, and then in September 2022). The BBC covers the phenomenon, as does Australia's ABC.

It'll be fun to see what comes next, if D&D's resurgence becomes no longer 'news' but accepted fact, and the outlets get to report on more focused aspects of the hobby -- hopefully the coverage won't die down. It's come some way since 2004 when the BBC asked "What happened to Dungeons & Dragons?" They've certainly got to stop being surprised at the resurgence soon! (*edit -- as of July 2022, nope, they're still surprised!)

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UPDATE -- January 2023, during the height of "OGL-gate", D&D has featured heavily. I have made a separate OGL-gate list here.

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• The Guardian: From satanic panic to billion-dollar business: how Dungeons & Dragons conquered the world (Sep 29, 2022)
• The Telegraph: How Dungeons and Dragons became cool (July 1st, 2022)
• The New York Times: Who’s Playing Dungeons & Dragons These Days? The Usual Fans, and Then Some (May 21st, 2022)
• BBC: Covid-19: 'Dungeons and Dragons got us through lockdown' (July 3rd, 2021)
• LA Times. Turning to Dungeons & Dragons to escape a real-life monster — COVID-19 (Jan 13th, 2021)
• The Metro. Why now is a great time to start playing Dungeons & Dragons (Nov 4, 2020).
• LA Times. D&D nerds (like me) are donning virtual armor and venturing online amid pandemic (Oct 9, 2020).
• The Washington Post: Amid a pandemic and a racial reckoning, ‘D&D’ finds itself at an inflection point (July 24, 2020)
• The Guardian: Dungeons & Dragons in lockdown: as my universe contracts, this game expands whole worlds (May 19, 2020)
• Variety: Inside Joe Manganiello’s Epic Dungeons & Dragons Campaign (May 6th, 2020)
• CNBC: How Critical Role helped start a Dungeons & Dragons renaissance (March 14th, 2020)
• USA Today: Dungeons & Dragons had fallen on 'troubled times.' The role-playing game's fifth edition changed everything (Jan 14th 2020)
• New York Times: In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent (Nov 13, 2019)
• CBR: How Dungeons & Dragons Quietly Took Over Pop Culture (Aug 25, 2019)
• New York Times: Why the Cool Kids are playing Dungeons &/ Dragons (April 6, 2019)
• The Times: Dungeons & Dragons cool? Stranger things have happened (July 12, 2019)
• BBC: Dungeons & Dragons: The revival of a 'geeky' pastime (May 26, 2018)
• The Guardian: No more nerds: how Dungeons & Dragons finally became cool (July 13, 2019)
• ABD News: Dungeons & Dragons resurrected from basement into mainstream (July 5, 2019)
• IGN: Dungeons & Dragons Creators and Celebrity Players Explain Its Recent Surge in Popularity (October 2, 2019)
• Washington Post: How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever (April 18, 2019)
• The Guardian: 'It's cool now': why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again (Nov 29, 2019)
• The Star: When did Dungeons & Dragons suddenly become cool? (Jan 5, 2018)
• The New Yorker: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons (Oct 24, 2017)
• WIRED: The Media Still Owes Dungeons & Dragons an Apology (yes, they were saying this back in 2015!)
• Vice: How Dungeons & Dragons Went Mainstream (Sep 3, 2015)

With a bit of Googling, you can also uncover a ton of local news outlets which have covered the game, such as the Liverpool Echo, the Oxford Observer, the Washington Examiner, or the Chicago Daily Herald, as well as many comic book and general geek sites. D&D is everywhere! Even the Cyprus Mail!

I'm sure there are more! Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

The Fumble: Major Newspaper Surprised By How Often It's Been Surprised By Renewed Popularity of RPGs

As part of its 2019 retrospective series, the Peoria Times-Mail-Picayune recently featured a surprising article expressing surprise at how often it's been surprised over the past year by the surprising resurgence in popularity of tabletop role-playing games. "One of the biggest stories of the...

www.enworld.org

 

[Aaron L]

So the D&D game is taking some of the same place the local bar (pub) took in generations past?

I can buy that. Though I am seeing a lot more people play D&D at my local bar, combining activities.

That would be AWESOME!

Well, at least it would have been awesome for me back in the day when I actually went out to the bar.
But I'm happy for others who get to enjoy it now!

The explanation is just my best guess, really; I've never been what you would call attuned to popular culture or the way "normal" people think and interact. Most of the time it's like watching bugs crawling around on the other side of a glass wall for me... not meaning that I see other people as insects, but that they might as well be a completely different species of creepy crawly things for all the more I understand the way they scurry and skitter around the way they do.

 

[Rygar]

Um...

You've listed 5 far left politics sites, and 2 that actually try to produce news. I'd argue that this is more damaging for the brand than helpful, because if people start associating the product line with political parties than the sales will drop until they match the prevelance of the political parties.

What we should be shooting for is to get coverage from places whose primary product isn't clickbaiting political content. Otherwise, this is a indicator of trouble, not success.

 

[Morrus]

Um...

You've listed 5 far left politics sites, and 2 that actually try to produce news. I'd argue that this is more damaging for the brand than helpful, because if people start associating the product line with political parties than the sales will drop until they match the prevelance of the political parties.

What we should be shooting for is to get coverage from places whose primary product isn't clickbaiting political content. Otherwise, this is a indicator of trouble, not success.

Keep politics out of it, please. You know the rules.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Do we have any mass media professionals around who can comment on the odds of some of this publicity actually being paid advertising?

Because as @OldGeezer69 notes, some of it sounds like advertising. And as @Morrus notes, the articles are a little, hmm, boilerplate?

Hey gang, Daniel here.

I can't speak to the Dungeons & Dragons articles with the New York Times, but I can tell you how the Zweihander Grim & Perilous RPG article on Forbes.com came about.

Rob Wieland is a contributor/reviewer for Forbes.com, Geek & Sundry, ScreenCrush and several other media outlets. He is on the Andrews McMeel Publishing publicity list, thus he receives PR for our games. As is common with PR, we send out books to all our media contacts. People in our PR list are not obligated to provide anything in exchange – we have no expectations of a review.

A few weeks after PR dropped for the Zweihander RPG Phone PDF, Rob reached out to me personally on Twitter, indicating he was going to do a review for Forbes.com, and needed some key pieces of art. Like any good reviewer, Rob is a consummate professional, and didn't indicate whether the review would be positive or critical. We honestly didn't know what to expect, and didn't ask. We buckled up for what was to come next.

Rob's review on Forbes.com keyed in on the most important elements of Zweihander RPG: its history, the game's intent, the value in randomly determining a character's traits and what the game does differently than Dungeons & Dragons. Very happy to see that he was able to distill down a 667-page omnibus into seven short paragraphs.

Embrace The Chaos Of The Grim And Perilous Zweihander RPG

Zweihander characters aren’t made; they are rolled. Gamers hungry for a game where characters must hold on for dear life through a deadly learning curve until they can truly call themselves adventurers will find a lot to love in the Zweihander RPG.

www.forbes.com

 

[Vanveen]

Here's the thing--the "boom" in Dungeons and Dragons is an echo of the first boom--a baby boom, actually.

The game took off in the early 1970s largely because of a demographic bulge of early-20s Americans, many of whom were going to college (a "petri dish" for the spread of the game). We're seeing that now with the Millennial generation. Yes, the oldest ones are in their late 30s--but the overwhelming majority are 24, 25, and 26. In fact, 26 year olds outnumber every other American age. (Check out Pew for more detail.) They don't have kids, still have casual friend groups (from college, first jobs, and casual Meetup-style activities), have a little disposable income and few time commitments (no kids on sports teams, for one thing). It makes a LOT of sense that D & D--and hobby boardgaming--is huge right now. It was in the 1970s too, as the Baby Boomers gradually entered adulthood.

"Thirtysomething," the TV show, was a fictional and actual watershed. There was a very real feeling in the early 1980s that youth was passing and now you were, well, thirtysomething, with kids and a job and hey! where did that old Woodstock feeling go, man? Right about that time roleplaying took off anew with Generation X, which disguised the fact that the rest of the industry was in freefall because the Boomers had mostly turned to other pursuits. (Yes, some stayed, but there were so frickin many of them that of course some would stay.) The biggest casualty: wargames. It just took TSR a few more years to die.

 

[ad_hoc]

Here's the thing--the "boom" in Dungeons and Dragons is an echo of the first boom--a baby boom, actually.

The game took off in the early 1970s largely because of a demographic bulge of early-20s Americans, many of whom were going to college (a "petri dish" for the spread of the game). We're seeing that now with the Millennial generation. Yes, the oldest ones are in their late 30s--but the overwhelming majority are 24, 25, and 26. In fact, 26 year olds outnumber every other American age. (Check out Pew for more detail.) They don't have kids, still have casual friend groups (from college, first jobs, and casual Meetup-style activities), have a little disposable income and few time commitments (no kids on sports teams, for one thing). It makes a LOT of sense that D & D--and hobby boardgaming--is huge right now. It was in the 1970s too, as the Baby Boomers gradually entered adulthood.

"Thirtysomething," the TV show, was a fictional and actual watershed. There was a very real feeling in the early 1980s that youth was passing and now you were, well, thirtysomething, with kids and a job and hey! where did that old Woodstock feeling go, man? Right about that time roleplaying took off anew with Generation X, which disguised the fact that the rest of the industry was in freefall because the Boomers had mostly turned to other pursuits. (Yes, some stayed, but there were so frickin many of them that of course some would stay.) The biggest casualty: wargames. It just took TSR a few more years to die.

Do you think if 5e was like 3e or 4e we would be seeing a boom like this?

 

[Vanveen]

Do you think if 5e was like 3e or 4e we would be seeing a boom like this?

Yes, actually. Barrier to entry isn't the rules, REALLY. It's finding a DM, first, and having time and friends to play--which every edition after 3rd has considered a top priority to solve. As I often say, 5e (anything after 2e) is not necessarily a better game, but it's a much better product.

My perspective as someone who does behavioral marketing is that rules complexity is the red herring--EVERY edition of D and D is too complicated. If you're willing to engage complex rules at all, you're in. There are a lot more millennials willing to do that, because there are a whole lot more millennials. I might add that 5e has a lot more marketing money spent on it, which any pro will tell you is how you make a thing work.

Yes, 5e is a lot "simpler" or "more streamlined" than older editions. That's about YOU, pal. People getting into this game don't care if the water is 8' deep or 20' deep. It's still too damn deep. They're people who are willing to jump into deep water. And without a DM it doesn't matter how deep the water is. In other words, YOU are the one who can make complexity judgments about rules. They can't and they don't care.

And all of you are too young to remember BECMI, probably the best balance of options and simplicity ever devised. You don't know enough about rules and game design to recognize this, which means you yawp about "edition wars." But if you're considering RPG systems based on rules and you understand the foundational matrices of RPG design, that's probably the best one. Really.

Now here's the mind-blower: the best rules system, like the best computer operating system, is seldom the one that wins. Why that is, is beyond the scope of this post--and also the secret to success at work.

 

[Umbran]

And all of you are too young to remember BECMI,

No, we aren't all too young. In fact, lots of folks on the site have played BECMI.

At the moment, you sound like you are about to start ranting about walking to school in the snow, without shoes, for six miles, uphill both ways... and maybe telling people to get off your lawn. It doesn't come across as superior understanding or wisdom to belittle the opinions of others due to their age, dude. Especially when, on the internet, you don't know if someone is a dog, or older than you.

How about, instead of this "I know better than you, whippersnapper!" you leave space for rational people to actually have different, but still perfectly valid, opinions about what makes a game good? I think you'll end up with a better discussion that way.

 

[Vanveen]

You're missing the point, wistful vampire. What you chose to address is by far the least interesting part of my post. In fact, I'll give it up now. Yes, I was wrong. So many people on this thread recognize old rule sets!


The real issue is the witlessness of so much of RPG discussion. I dunno, maybe I'm the idiot for thinking it could get better. But when some gatekeeper swoops down and advances the crappiest straw man argument I've ever seen--the whole uphill in the snow both ways thing...dude...--I have to wonder if people are able to think, or to read.

Go ahead, reread my post. A-a-and, think about it a minute. My real point is a) a lack of historicity in most of these discussions and b) the fact that the complexity of any rule set is IMMATERIAL to the popularity, reach, etc. of a roleplaying game. Which makes edition wars, the sedulous business of the witless, completely irrelevant. Can you dig it? Can you...get it?

Of course, you may be a dog.

 

[CleverNickName]

Oh, we get it. You have a good point, but your tone screwed it all up.

You start with "Here's the thing," end with "you may be a dog," and fill the space between with gems like "all of you are too young," "you don't know," "as I often say," "strawman argument," and "I wonder if people are able to think, or to read." You shouldn't be surprised if people respond with hostility or dismissal.