D&D 5E (2024) DnD 5e designer [Mike Mearls] explains how INDIE RPGs are taking over

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn't Indie RPGs like 10% of the market? How does one grow that without killing D&D?

Because it's not a zero sum game.

I have a coworker who is on an apparently pretty popular actual play series and they never even brush up against D&D or anything like it.

There's a whole world of RPGs out there that have nothing to do with D&D and which have almost totally distinct audiences.

You don't need to kill Monopoly off to have a successful board game (see: Catan) and you don't need to worry about D&D for your RPG to be a success.

 

[mattcolville]

Couple of things he said.

Indie RPG Kickstarters/ crowd funding over 100k got 50 million dollars.

Lead up to developing 5E they went from 50 million to 10 million.

The data is freely available to anyone paying attention. You can just add up a bunch of publicly available numbers and get a pretty breathtaking total of revenue generated by rpgs that are not D&D. I think folks generally don't care though. Why should they?

To me, and I suspect Mike would agree, if you want to understand the hobby business, revenue is not the only thing you should be thinking about. For one thing, D&D makes a lot more money than 5E does. 5E is book sales and there's no growth there and there never will be. You just need to hang around and wait for some kid to do something alarming or wait for a global pandemic and suddenly there's an influx of new users. But that's not a growth strategy.

But what are people actually playing? That seems pretty important to me. And I think there are good and useful ways to find out! They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

To me, that is a real indicator of market share.

Anyway, anyone's who's been around long enough remembers a time when RPGs were doing well, lots of independent companies able to make a go of it, while D&D was doing not-well.

 

[Zardnaar]

The data is freely available to anyone paying attention. You can just add up a bunch of publicly available numbers and get a pretty breathtaking total of revenue generated by rpgs that are not D&D. I think folks generally don't care though. Why should they?

To me, and I suspect Mike would agree, if you want to understand the hobby business, revenue is not the only thing you should be thinking about. For one thing, D&D makes a lot more money than 5E does. 5E is book sales and there's no growth there and there never will be. You just need to hang around and wait for some kid to do something alarming or wait for a global pandemic and suddenly there's an influx of new users. But that's not a growth strategy.

But what are people actually playing? That seems pretty important to me. And I think there are good and useful ways to find out! They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

To me, that is a real indicator of market share.

Anyway, anyone's who's been around long enough remembers a time when RPGs were doing well, lots of independent companies able to make a go of it, while D&D was doing not-well.

GenCon D&D /Pathfinder was number 1 and 2. If you count individual editions separately D&D was 1-5.

And yeah 60% of income is digital. Just under 300 million combined recently iirc.

 

[John Lloyd1]

They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

I don't think GenCon is representative of general tables (for percentages). I had a look at the GenCon 2025 tables:

Game	No. of Sessions
Other	54.88%
Dungeons & Dragons	20.32%
Pathfinder	7.54%
Call of Cthulhu	3.35%
Starfinder	2.96%
Avatar Legends: the RPG	2.18%
Shadowrun	1.96%
Dungeon Crawl Classics	1.86%
Root: the RPG	1.74%
Marvel Multiverse RPG	1.69%
Pirate Borg	1.51%
Grand Total	100.00%

This is nowhere close to Orr Group figures (from Roll 20) with D&D 5e at 50-60%. I don't think the figures would have changed that much since 2021.

Gen Con 2025 Events

https://wiki.roll20.net/Orr_Industry_Report

 

[saviirkad]

I don't think GenCon is representative of general tables (for percentages). I had a look at the GenCon 2025 tables:

Game	No. of Sessions
Other	54.88%
Dungeons & Dragons	20.32%
Pathfinder	7.54%
Call of Cthulhu	3.35%
Starfinder	2.96%
Avatar Legends: the RPG	2.18%
Shadowrun	1.96%
Dungeon Crawl Classics	1.86%
Root: the RPG	1.74%
Marvel Multiverse RPG	1.69%
Pirate Borg	1.51%
Grand Total	100.00%

This is nowhere close to Orr Group figures (from Roll 20) with D&D 5e at 50-60%. I don't think the figures would have changed that much since 2021.

Gen Con 2025 Events

https://wiki.roll20.net/Orr_Industry_Report

Looking at the GenCon link, that appears to be how many tables they made available but not how many tables were needed.

For instance Airlock is listed as having 33 tables, but fewer than half had taken seats.

Edit, another example: Pirate Borg is at the bottom of the list. It had 1,008 spots, of which 942 were filled. Meanwhile, Daggerheart had 2,032 spots because it had bigger tables, of which 2,026 were filled.

And because I figured I was already checking, D&D filled 13,189 seats out of 16,860 and Pathfinder was 3,460 filled out of 4,292.

Unless I'm fully misunderstanding what this site is saying?

 

[John Lloyd1]

Looking at the GenCon link, that appears to be how many tables they made available but not how many tables were needed.

For instance Airlock is listed as having 33 tables, but fewer than half had taken seats.

True, but getting the number of seats is more effort than I wanted to spend on getting the figures. I have already spend too much time fixing the formatting. It doesn't include the cancelled tables, which is better than nothing.

 

[saviirkad]

True, but getting the number of seats is more effort than I wanted to spend on getting the figures. I have already spend too much time fixing the formatting. It doesn't include the cancelled tables, which is better than nothing.

Yeah, fair. I spent time figuring out what to cut away to just get the Available/Total seats, but that only worked when I copied just the one game, and I'm not going to do that for all the games.

For what it's worth, looks like the total seats taken was, rounding up a bit, 48,000. So for the games I looked at, the breakdown was (roughly):

• D&D 28%
• Pathfinder 7%
• Daggerheart 4%
• Pirate Borg 2%

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, fair. I spent time figuring out what to cut away to just get the Available/Total seats, but that only worked when I copied just the one game, and I'm not going to do that for all the games.

For what it's worth, looks like the total seats taken was, rounding up a bit, 48,000. So for the games I looked at, the breakdown was (roughly):

• D&D 28%
• Pathfinder 7%
• Daggerheart 4%
• Pirate Borg 2%

The key takeaway here is that Pirate Borg is awesome.

 

[mearls]

But what are people actually playing? That seems pretty important to me. And I think there are good and useful ways to find out! They used to publish, and I assume they still do, a list of all the RPG event tables booked at GenCon and which game system they were booked for and that is very revealing.

To me, that is a real indicator of market share.

100% this. I did a deep dive into Gen Con events, looking at them over a six or seven year period. I'll try to remember to dig it up tomorrow and post some interesting tidbits.

When I worked on D&D, the core challenge was getting people to play the new thing. If we did an adventure or a sourcebook, our goal was to design and market it in a way that got DMs and players to pick it up and start using it. If you play a thing, by definition you need to recruit 2 to 5 other people to take part. That drives so much growth.

During the 4e era, I'd bet good money that more people were playing 3.5 D&D over Pathfinder or 4e.

These days I think third party publishing is also a good metric. Dragonbane is a real sleeper hit, IMO. There's a lot of content being made for it. It's easy to overlook how easy it is to fire up a campaign for a game that has a bunch of PDF adventures at low prices.

 

[Saracenus]

Wow, I posted the link to this because it was refreshing to hear someone talking about the TTRPG space as something beyond a zero-sum game and that worrying about D&D 5/5.5e is a waste of time and effort that could better spent making your own work the best it can be.

I wish I could have spent more time summarizing Mike's pearls of wisdom but I had a bunch of medical appointments today and thus, I was only give a couple that stood out to me. One that I would add to the list:

• The D&D design team is actually reaching out to the gaming public again. They are communicating directly with fans via Cons and responding to respectful critiques.

I agree with Mike that I did not have WotC mending fences with the Gygax family and looking to publish material by Luke Gygax and his team for Greyhawk on my 2026 bingo card. But here we are.

As a personal aside it is far easier to state what you are against than what you stand for. If something is bothering you about the game you love, figure out how you would do it differently (and hopefully better) and put your soul into that. Create something, it has never been easier to do! 5/5.5e is in the creative commons and there are plenty of indy games that encourage tinkering and publication.

@mattcolville I find this vid and the one you did with Teos and Shawn over at Mastering Dungeons had some of the same vibe about building an audience for your design philosophy/ideas and then create something that punches all the gaming buttons for you and the people that are your audience.