It's a Good Thing D&D Isn't a Toy

We've previously discussed a time when Dungeons & Dragons was considered as much of a toy as it was a book. The loss of D&D in toy stores was a blow to a hobby that found its footing among a younger generation. Now things have come full circle as the bottom of the toy market fell out from under Wizards of the Coast's parent company, Hasbro.

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay.​

[h=3]Toys vs. Books[/h]We discussed previously how D&D wasn't just classified as a toy in some markets, but produced its own toy lines as well. D&D was carried in toy stores in the early 80s. The game's success in those markets was due in part to Dr. Eric J. Holmes' Basic version of D&D, which streamlined the rules and made them more accessible to a younger audience.

But D&D was as much of a toy as it was a book, and bookstores carried the game too...until they didn't. Unlike the toy market, the book trade often carries a return policy. Random House stopped fronting then-D&D owner TSR's loans against book sales in 1996 and returned a third of TSR's products -- several million dollars' worth. That accumulated debt sunk the company, only to be rescued by Wizards of the Coast.

Things came full circle when Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) was purchased by Hasbro. WOTC has continued to shepherd the D&D brand, which for years labored in the shadow of WOTC's other major game brand, the much more successful Magic: The Gathering card game. That all changed in the past few years.
[h=3]Roleplaying vs. Card Games[/h]The tension between D&D and Magic goes back years, with several failed attempts to cross-pollinate the two brands. It's also emblematic of two different markets: Magic, with a smaller physical footprint, can be sold everywhere from book stores to the big box franchises like Target in the U.S.; Dungeons & Dragons left both the book and toy store market behind to focus on sales through hobby store and the Internet. Thanks to WOTC's new CEO, Chris Cocks, the two brands have finally managed to produce joint efforts like The Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.

Beyond a D&D product, Magic's digital efforts with Magic: The Gathering Arena have blazed a path for D&D esports, which Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner breathlessly reported (and then retracted). It's clear that Cocks isn't playing favorites and sees both brands as fertile intellectual property beyond the original play spaces that spawned them. That's good news for Hasbro, because the market recently bottomed out of places that carry much of their product.
[h=3]Toys Aren't Us[/h]Toys R Us' collapse has sent shock waves through the industry, but it was a tsunami for the two major toy producers, Hasbro and Mattel. Toys R Us accounted for 10% of Hasbro's sales. Brian Goldner explained on the Q4 investor call:

For Hasbro, in addition to losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from Toys“R”Us, the liquidation of an additional hundreds of millions of dollars of their retail inventory sold into the market at large discounts was more impactful to 2018 than we, and industry experts, estimated. It is an unprecedented yet finite event. Prior to its initial bankruptcy filing, Toys“R”Us was our third largest customer in the U.S., and our second largest customer in Europe and Asia-Pacific. In Europe, its bankruptcy added to a market already dealing with disintermediation across retail by online and omni-channel retailers, as well as political and economic headwinds, notably in the UK. According to NPD, the European toy and game market declined 4% last year across the top six markets.
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All this added up to Hasbro revenues declining 12% to $4.6 billion, including a 13% decline in the fourth quarter. The implications for Hasbro go beyond the financial. Nerf, for example, had significant shelf space at Toys R Us, and it loses a major opportunity to showcase its brand with the loss of the toy store.

There was one bright spot in Hasbro's Q4, and it was Dungeons & Dragons. Goldner said the brand delivered "another record year" within the gaming portfolio, and that plans continue apace to expand D&D into digital play. Goldner pointed out in the Q&A that D&D being untethered from toy stores was actually an advantage, as they weren't significantly impacted by the loss of Toys R Us.

D&D has long since become an online brand -- at this point, there are so many resources online that it's entirely possible to play D&D for free -- that gives it an advantage in protecting the game's sales from the downturns in distribution channels. The loss of Toys R Us has put that advantage in sharp relief and Hasbro has taken notice. We'll likely see more focus on intellectual property brands like D&D in the future.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Oh, its true!!

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[MNblockhead]

Oh, its true!!

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I had all the figures (Still have the wizard, but my son ripped his legs off, grrr...) but not the Fortress.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Man, a kid could dream… Back in the day, I had Warduke, Melf, the Titan, and the Carrion Crawler bendy toy. I’ve either kept or reacquired those, and they’ve since been joined by Elkhorn and Kelek. Still love those toys. What strikes me is how colorful and intricate their designs are, especially for being second tier.

If only it were true...

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[JohnGuin]

CNN did an article on how LEGO managed to increase sales after Toys R Us folded: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/27/business/lego-toys-walmart-target/index.html

Gives a path to success that Hasbro may want to investigate.

 

[Tony Vargas]

D&D was born from wargames, through a move to expand the rules for a very niche (mostly white male) hobby. It didn't begin to take on more role playing elements until Dave Arneson expanded the wargaming rules into a role playing setting

Mind you, that was before the first D&D booklet even saw print.

but it still retained most of the mechanical emphasis that one could argue reached its peak in the 3.5 edition, and continued to be a niche hobby for white males in many (most?) areas from everything I have seen, heard, read, experienced, etc. (Tony Vargas's experiences seeming more exception than rule to many).

My feeling is that the hobby varied regionally a lot more in the early & fad years than it does now. Consequence of the internet, I suppose. But, yes, in my left-coast environment, the hobby seemed very accepting, though, of course, also very nerdy (and not a lot of folks were all that accepting of nerds). It has also always seemed that way, to me, by it's very nature. Roleplaying lets you put yourself in very different shoes, that's one reason the non-TTRPG sense has so often been used in therapy, so it's a hobby that develops open-mindedness in the enthusiast. It was also, again, a very nerdy hobby, played by people who were escaping their own experiences of persecution (bullying, ostracism, whatever), so you'd (I'd) have thought, would not want to turn around and inflict the same on anyone else.
(Now, I know - old & cynical, remember - that's not how it works out, that being on the receiving end often makes you that much more likely to dish it out, yourself. But that was how I felt for a long time, and the evidence I've seen to the contrary has been a more recent development.)

“A 1978 survey puts the percentage of female fans at between .4 and 2.3 percent” (Cecilia D'Anastasio).

A 1978 survey would have been before the fad really took off, and a lot has happened in the 40 years since. The 'Girl Gamer' phenom started late in the 90s, particularly via the LARP side of the hobby, and the Storyteller/oWoD RPGs that were the major challenger of D&D at the time. It hadn't exactly been a non-existent trend before that, and it's continued since.

I consider it a revitalization movement as opposed to a resurgence because it is now (seemingly) reaching new audiences who are embracing it in different ways. A revitalization movement is a "deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture” (Anthony F. C. Wallace,1956).

IDK, I've been involved in AL, it's not that different from Encounters, and, while Encounters was noticeably different from the RPGA that preceded it, in that it was much more accessible to new players, that goes back to 2010, and wasn't enough to touch off a resurgence (at least, not in the face of other challenges at the time, and no TT resurgence started yet)

But there's certainly been a deliberate attempt to reach new audiences throughout WotC's tenure (or at least Hasbro's - because GROWTH!$!), that's included attempts to change the attendant culture. 3.x/PF empowered players who acquired system mastery, and might have been coming to the RPGs from the CCG side of TT gaming, which was a radical change from the TSR versions of the game that kept empowerment behind the DM Screen. 4e was calculated to appeal to an audience that was most likely exposed to the idea of RPGs through CRPG and MMORPG sources (whether playing them or just exposure to them), and to be generally more accessible to new players - at the price of badly alienating some of the existing ones.

These audiences appear to be more diverse, both in character and in their expectations from the game. … They are using the same tools to achieve new goals, and leading the evolution of new tools.

D&D today is just not that different from D&D then. Not in how it's played or what it's goals are. The tools used and the people playing it have evolved and become more diverse, because the mainstream society has. Technology has been embraced for a long time, D&D has been laggard in that, now it's catching up. Diversity has been being driven in our society for decades, D&D (well, IMX, has always been part of that) apparently, in yours and others' experiences and areas, has finally caught up with that, at least, officially - a recent adventure featured an off-hand reference to a married pair of men, something mainstream network television did 10 years before.

By spirit of the game I mean that, according to WotC, there is a difference between the way older players approach the game compared to new players. Older players tend to be more mechanically inclined, less open to change, and more likely to play in long standing home games with well-known friends. Newer players tend to be more diverse, more narrative driven, and more likely to play one shots or pick up games with larger groups of relative strangers. “we went from a community that focused on mechanics and expertise, to one focused on socializing and story telling.” (Mike Mearls, 2018).

Prettymuch nonsense. I mean, that happened, but it didn't happen to D&D in the last few years, it happened to the hobby in the 90s. When D&D has tried to embrace that sort of thing, it's suffered backlashes.

5e really walked a tightrope, in that it /is/, mechanically, exactly the kind of game fans of the TSR era want, expect, and are comfortable with: it's DM Empowering, DM-dependent, DM centric... it's all 'bout the DM, is what I'm saying. If I'm running 1e AD&D or 5e, the experience the players get is all on me. The system gets them to the table, but I'm free to run off and do whatever I want with it - because the alternative, playing strictly by the rules, simply doesn't work.
If I'm running 3.5/PF (not likely, too much effort for too little reward, IMX), or 4e, the experience is more heavily shaped by the game /and the players/.

So where I find fault with what you're saying is characterizing it as this new thing. It's not, it's a return to an old thing. A resurgence.

And, while were talking resurgence, D&D is not experiencing it's resurgence in a vacuum. It's part of a broader tabletop resurgence that got rolling a year or two before 5e got it's legs under it. 5e is more a passenger than a driver in this trend.

Poscasts and streaming shows are many new players first exposure to D&D now, and their focus on narrative choice over mechanical resolution has increasingly taken hold. “This change is best described as fifth edition's focus on the story of our D&D games over tactical combat and heavy mechanics.” (Mike Shea, 2018).

That's a nice spin, but there's not really any focus on story built into 5e or its presentation - not any more than any other edition. 5e's not remotely storyteller or FATE or any of the myriad indie games that really /do/ focus on story.

D&Ds mechanics aren't remotely lite, they're just not something you can safely count on to work for you - you need the DM to keep it running smoothly. A DM can leverage that to make story a centerpiece of the experience - and players can angle to get most resolution /away/ from the dysfunctional areas of the mechanics.

One piece of evidence that I consider when saying that this is a revitalization movement is the existence of counter movements. We see this with the explosion of OSR (Old School Revival) games, and the slew of bad publicity they keep drawing amidst controversies steeped in a resistance to change (see discussions on John “RPG Pundit” Tarnowski and Zak “Zak S” Smith) and reliance on an adversarial relationship between players and/or DMs.

Yeah, that's mostly fallen away with 5e. 5e caters reasonably well to the old-school style. The TSR-era grognards do grouse about 5e, a little, still, and they groused about 3.x, too. But the gaping divide, the launch of the OSR movement, and the edition war all coincided with 4e, not 5e.

5e's success is not built on pushing back against the old school elements, but, if not embracing, at least mollifying them.

“Mechanical expertise is an element of the game, but no longer the sole focus. Ideally, it’s a balanced part of all the other motivators. If balanaced correctly, every has their fun. Enjoyment isn’t zero sum.” (Mike Mearls, 2018). This isn't to say that they are all bad, but that they do draw in some of the worst elements of older gaming culture.

“Funny how many of the same “fans” who insist on gatekeeping via rules complexity and lore density also have a problem with women in tabletop gaming.” (Mike Mearls, 2018).

OK, that's just low.

Not that gatekeeping isn't a major feature of our hobby - but conflating it with RL social issues to coattail the #metoo thing, is just... well, it's Mearls. ::shrug::

But, also, 5e is absolutely complicit in gatekeeping.

Maybe I am wrong, perhaps it is a fad, but I don't see D&D as being "short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities." (see Dictionary).

It was a fad, in the 80s, it stayed around as a niche or cult hobby for the decades since, until, now, with the tabletop renaissance it's taking off again.

Short lived? Maybe not, the hobby has had over 40 years of longevity...
Thanks to all us fanatical hobbyists who kept demanding product from TSR and WotC in the intervening decades, certainly not!

But "without basis in the object's qualities?" In the fad years with TSR's incoherent two-prong strategy D&Ds, and today, with 5e. Oh, yeah. Totally.
Oh yeah, big time. D&D was - and is, again - a pretty poor game when it comes to the quality of the system. Many, many games, including may of it's RPG rivals, were much better, mechanically, but never took off, because they just didn't get that 'fad' magic going the way D&D did back in the day.
That's exactly what Mearls is spinning when he goes on about getting away from mechanics.

And, speaking of back in the day the production values in terms of editing & art were pretty marginal, too (though at least the bindings were pretty solid - physically they were pretty good products), and, today, that's kinda reversed, with better editing & art between the covers (even if those covers may not last long, or the ink may smear).

“Over half of the new people who started playing Fifth Edition [the game’s most recent update, launched in 2014] got into D&D through watching people play online,” says Nathan Stewart, senior director of Dungeons & Dragons.

Finally, I have to acknowledge this one.
While podcasts and streaming of D&D games started years before 5e, they were right alongside the internet fallout of the edition war. While you might have found a video of people enjoying playing D&D, you might also find one of rabid nerdragers burning a D&D book in the same set of results.


For a resurgence or revitalization of a franchise with a niche/cult fanbase to work, the owners of the property have to thread a creative needle between making the new stuff acceptable to the existing fans, and accessible to the mainstream. If you make something the fans adore, the mainstream will start to go check it out, find it incomprehensible/weird, and it will fail. If you come out with something that mainstream would eat up, but alienates the fans, they'll tear it to pieces in the public eye and the mainstream will stay away. But if you can make something fit for mainstream consumption, that at least leaves fans unmotivated to burn it to the ground, you get somewhere.
Marvel did it.
Now Hasbro's done it.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

But, @maninthefunnyhat - isn't that insisting that you must have the characters before the movie is made?

Of course.

Lots of movies are made that present characters for the first time. It's not like farmboy, flyboy and princess were household names before 1976. Why the insistence that we must have "D&D" characters?

Okay, put it this way:
Describe Star Wars - but without a single reference to Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Obi-wan, R2D2 or C3PO - none of the places they've been in the past, where they want to go now, or why they want to go there, none of their personalities, nothing they do or say, etc. Do that and you have Star Wars as an adventure module. You have The Empire, Vader as the BBEG #1, Moff Tarkin as BBEG #2, and stolen plans for the Death Star. You don't have Princess Leia, the "diplomat" up to her neck in the Rebellion, you don't have the droid that gets the plans away when Leia is captured, you don't have Luke who intercepts the plans when encounters with Jawas end up putting R2D2 and C3PO in his lap, nor do you have Kenobi living nearby Luke, nor Han and Chewie who can get them all off the planet and on a collision course to rescue Leia, meet up with the Rebellion at last and destroy the Death Star.

WHO has stolen the plans? They can't get to the Rebellion as planned - so where do they go? Why do they go there? To get help? From whom? How can they help? Assume that the module intends that at least one PC with the plans be captured and a later part of the module would then be the rescue of that PC. Who gets captured and why? How do the players get the plans somewhere safe - and where would that be? In the movie the intent was to get the plans to Kenobi, but end up intercepted by Luke. So who is this Luke PC? A jawa? A Sand Person? A resident of Mos Eisley? Is the action even taking place over Tatooine, or is it Hoth, or Endor, or Yavin IV, or Coruscant? Is Kenobi a reclusive former general or is Kenobia a former fiance of Han's, or is Kenobi Fett an enforcer for a crime lord, or is KNO-B a droid wandering lost in a desert?

It could have unfolded with Han and Chewie smuggling the plans on the Millenium Falcon only to be captured. But Han hides the plans in a smuggling hold. He gives orders to R2 to get help, who gets away in an escape pod. R2 is looking for Leia because she's with the Rebellion but because of interaction with jawas meets... Kenobi, an old, retired Jedi. Kenobi is training Luke in The Force to make him the first new Jedi, so he goes to their farm to get brother-and-sister team Luke and Leia. R2 gives the message to Leia. They all go to Mos Eisley and hire droid captain C3PO and go to free Han and Chewie and get the plans from the Millenium Falcon hold before they're discovered... It's the same characters and the same module, but already a very DIFFERENT movie.

The MODULE is nothing. THE CHARACTERS are the movie. Until you populate a blank module with protagonists, with player characters, you don't have a movie of any interest or value. When you populate Star Wars with a disenchanted farmboy on an out-of-the-way planet, a scoundrel smuggler and his furry co-pilot, a princess who's up to her neck in The Rebellion and who sends a droid on a mission to get the plans to a local and reclusive former Jedi Knight and General in the former Republic... THEN you have a movie of interest.

It doesn't matter what module you base it on, or what campaign setting you use for a D&D movie. What matters are the CHARACTERS. You can then drop those characters into adventure after adventure if they are compelling and interesting and it's nearly irrelevant what the adventure is - the appeal is the characters and their actions in whatever situation they DO find themselves in.

 

[Hussar]

Ah, ok, I didn't quite get what you were meaning.

Although, to be fair, there's no reason that the characters have to be written first. After all, Lucas's original characters were pretty far removed from what we got. You could certainly start with the plot of Star Wars and then figure out what characters would be interesting to watch in that plot.

IOW, Star Wars is hardly a character driven story. You could replace Luke with a lot of other archetypes and still tell a very good story.

Yes, character driven is one way to go, but, I do disagree that it is the only way.

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=32740]Man in the Funny Hat[/MENTION]: All of that is a part of what I was trying to convey when I say it would take a staggering work of genius to convert even a good adventure (or adventure path) into a blockbuster movie successfully, said more clearly than I had.

Almost everything you need to make a great story in a different non-interactive medium is missing. Not only does an adventure often not have the protagonists, but even if you had an adventure with Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and C3-P0 as the pregenerated PCs, the dialogue that would constitute the script of the movie wouldn't be there. You'll notice also that the structure of the movie very much doesn't match the structure of a typical adventure. In a typical adventure, all the PC's are introduced to the story at once as some sort of group, and they immediately begin working together on the problem. In 'Star Wars' the characters that will become the ensemble cast are introduced slowly over a series of scenes where we establish their character and slowly drip exposition about the setting in which they occur. And we don't have a first person experience of an adventure. We have many very important establishing scenes where none of the protagonists are present where we establish the antagonists - Vader, Tarkin, Stormtroopers, and the Empire generally.

None of that is insurmountable, but the distance between 'a great adventure' and 'a great movie' is enormous.

 

[Hussar]

Meh, if Star Wars is our bar for "great storytelling", well, that's some low hanging fruit right there. The first movie is slow, plodding and, frankly, boring as all get out in places.

The reason Star Wars was so popular was because of the setting work and background stuff. Science Fiction like no one had ever really seen before. These fantastic shots of imaginary places that just seemed so real.

But character? Really? Put it this way. They remade Star Wars with entirely new characters in The Force Awakens and, surprise, surprise, it's the same movie as Star Wars and everyone loved it.

Then again, I'm perfectly happy with a Transformers level success of a D&D movie. I'm not looking for a D&D movie to be the "next greatest movie". I really don't think it will be. But, if it gets produced and makes enough money to spin off a couple of sequels? That's a fantastic success.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I love Star Wars because it is a piece of my childhood memory, but I haven't seen the last movies and I don't miss them. I was too used to the expanded universe (now with the name "Star Wars legends"). If I want to create my own space fantasy universe the influence is too strong, but as RPGs the jedis and Skywalker are too much the attention centre. I miss more faction of force adepts, not only jedis, siths or linked to theses, and the no-force adepts characters aren't enough interesting for me in SW.

The right key was found in the transformers movie, but the second movie of G.I.Joe wasn't really a complete blockbuster. Jem and Holograms wasn't a success neither. Hasbro has got many franchises to try, to test. Maybe Hasbro needs to create more cartoon shows with its own studios. The remake of "my little pony" is very popular among the new generations, isn't it.

* Maybe there is other option: Toys version of the videogames guest star? How to explain it better? Let's imagine an agreement between Hasbro and Epic Games and there is new skins for Fornite based in D&D characters. Later Hasbro sells the action figures of that videogames characters. Do you understand? For example Ember, new outfit from Season 8.

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