D&D 5E D&D Up 35% In 2020 While Virtual Play Rises 86%

In this article from the Los Angeles Times, WotC's Liz Schuh shared a couple of interesting statistics: D&D revenues increased 35% in 2020 over 2019; and online play is up 86% (for obvious reasons).

Turning to Dungeons & Dragons to escape a real-life monster — COVID-19

With little else to do, the COVID-19 pandemic has given D&D players a reason to gather virtually to go on heroic quests in the increasingly popular role-playing game.

www.latimes.com

The LA Times published a similar article a couple of months ago. See my big list of articles about D&D in the meanstream!

 

[Schmoe]

I definitely prefer in-person, but online hasn't been all bad. I had one game that tried to meet every month, and we struggled to do that sometimes due to real-life scheduling, so it was more like every 6 weeks. That's a lot of downtime between sessions. We kept the same schedule at first after moving to roll20, but eventually decided to move to every other Wednesday after all the kids are in bed for a shorter session. It's actually worked out pretty well, and we get more gaming in.

Once COVID is behind us I'd like to return to 1/month for in person, with a shorter virtual session in between. And it's also nice to know that we have virtual as a stand-in if we can't make a face-to-face session work.

 

[Ancalagon]

I unfortunately lost some players when the pandemic hit. They tried to power through it for a few weeks, but it quickly became clear to them that it just wasn't the same experience. The in-person social interaction was crucial to them, so it became a matter of it just not being worth it. I'm not sure if they'll change their mind anytime soon now that it looks like we're still going to be remote for at least the majority of this year.

I had to stop a campaign - I was running a UVG game, and it requires a lot of player investment, that my players weren't up to doing because of the remote playing, the stress of the pandemic. So instead I'm running a more casual GLOG mercenary game, and it's going well.

 

[Erich the Fuzzy]

They could call it something like "Advanced 5th Edition." I'm sure that would get greenlit by Legal.

Well, at least it would let them stop paying royalties to Arneson, amirite?