First, huge thanks to
@FitzTheRuke for posting this. Very interesting!
Three numbers that stand out to me:
| 194 | STARTER 2014 LAST MINES OF PHANDELVER | 2014-Jul |
| 8 | STARTER 2024 HEROES OF THE BORDERLANDS | 2025-Sep |
| 35 | STARTER DRAGONS OF STORMWRECK ISLE | 2022-Oct |
Do you have any sense of the number of people new to D&D are coming in and buying stuff? These really strike me as interesting. If we do the math, that's about 24 starter sets per year for Lost Mine (it was replaced by Stormwreck in '22), and 12 per year for Stormwreck. Obviously, way too early to see what might happen with the new starter.
That does match my overall impression that the number of new people coming into D&D has plunged since the lockdowns ended. Curious to hear if that matches your experiences.
Actually, it doesn't quite line up that way. I assume that our distributors (we sourced them from multiple places as the supplies dwindled) must have had quite a stack of the Starter Set when they went OOP, because I think we were able to still get them for about a year.
And I think the increased price, and the decreased content of first the Essentials Kit, then Stormwrack, followed by poorer reviews, kept them selling slower than LMoP while the first was still available. So we've only got about a year worth of DoSI sales with no LMoP, and on top of that, uncertainty about how "compatible" the old material would be with 2024, kept DoSI from doing as well as it would have.
Because, ultimately, while 2023 might have been a bit slower when it comes to New Players, I don't think that the engine has fallen off yet. We have people coming in regularly to try D&D for the first time.
Another factor might be that we regularly teach people to play (that was true at the beginning with 2014, but it took awhile, I'd say until 2023 to get in-store play moving again after the pandemic) and I didn't use Stormwrack to teach new players. I DID use Phandelver! But mostly, I make up a short session that goes over the three pillars better than I can fit into a Learn-to-Play with new material.
I tried out Heroes of the Borderlands for new players, and I think that it's great for them to take home and use to learn (in particular to learn to DM), but I think that I have a better system that works for me when running Learn-to-Play Sessions. It just takes too long to set up HotB - selecting cards and what-not.
I want to get the whole thing done in under two hours! (I wonder where I can find a D&D game that can do that...)
