D&D 5E Rob Schwalb and what it was like at WotC during the 5e dev and launch.

[Ondath]

Vin Diesel, Steven Colbert and several others were talking & sharing their experiences before 5E came out. Critical Role started back in 3E/4E. Sarah Connor Chronicles at one point had the terminator playing D&D. Before 5E came out, it was already on an uptick. It just seemed that with 5E's release it really started to come on strong as the latest version apparently was more approachable to returning gamers.

Critical Role was a home game in 3E/4E era. It became a show in March 2015, by which point all 5E rulebooks were released.

Stranger Things was not the end-all-be-all for 5E's success, and 5E was immensely succesful right from the get-go in its niche hobby audience. But things like Google Trends data clearly show that D&D reached mainstream popularity following Stranger Things's release.

 

[Reynard]

Critical Role was a home game in 3E/4E era. It became a show in March 2015, by which point all 5E rulebooks were released.

Stranger Things was not the end-all-be-all for 5E's success, and 5E was immensely succesful right from the get-go in its niche hobby audience. But things like Google Trends data clearly show that D&D reached mainstream popularity following Stranger Things's release.

View attachment 294314

Ok, but now show the sales chart or the number of AL players chart. Do they follow the same arc? Or are we considering Good interest metrics to be a perfect representation of real world behaviors?

 

[Scribe]

Critical Role was a home game in 3E/4E era. It became a show in March 2015, by which point all 5E rulebooks were released.

Stranger Things was not the end-all-be-all for 5E's success, and 5E was immensely succesful right from the get-go in its niche hobby audience. But things like Google Trends data clearly show that D&D reached mainstream popularity following Stranger Things's release.

View attachment 294314

 

[Dausuul]

Ok, but now show the sales chart or the number of AL players chart. Do they follow the same arc? Or are we considering Good interest metrics to be a perfect representation of real world behaviors?

None of us has those charts. Wizards doesn't publish that data. So we proles have to use the proxies available to us.

 

[Reynard]

None of us has those charts. Wizards doesn't publish that data. So we proles have to use the proxies available to us.

But we don't have to.assume they tell the whole story, knowing that we are lacking huge amounts of information. We should avoid making broad sweeping proclamations when.we know we don't have all the info. There are 100 possible explanations for the success D&D 5E found at the time it did, and ultimately none of them matter. It did. Here is where we are.

The only real question is how do we dismantle it so other games have a chance. (j/k)