RPG Evolution: The Dragons Come Home to Roost

D&D has long striven to be more than a game, but a brand. Thanks to the game's surge in popularity, those plans are coming to fruition.

Hasbro’s Strategy​

Hasbro’s association with the movie industry has long been a mutually beneficial relationship, in which toy sales surge with each new movie. Star Wars and Transformers are both examples of how Hasbro’s bottom line is impacted by the release of the latest film. Unfortunately, this strategy means Hasbro is reliant on third party schedules to produce revenue, and the pandemic highlighted just how much can go wrong with the complicated process of releasing a movie. No wonder the company wants its own intellectual property that it can monetize for movies and streaming.

This is why Hasbro's strategy has moved well beyond just producing toys and games. Hasbro divides their new approach into four quadrants: Toys & Games, Digital Gaming, Licensed Consumer Products, and Media (TV, Film, Digital Shorts, Emerging Media). Hasbro previously announced plans to execute on this four quadrant strategy with all of its licenses, including My Little Pony, Transformers, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons. Some of those Media plans have been easier to execute than others, with Transformer movies running out of steam, the My Little Pony series winding down, and a Magic: The Gathering series yet to launch on streaming. That leaves D&D.

WOTC’s Strategy​

Wizards of the Coast has always struggled to justify its revenue goals for Dungeons & Dragons amidst high revenue brands like Magic: The Gathering. At one point, each division was given a goal of $100 million in annual sales, a number that was not reachable through tabletop gaming channels.

The solution was digital gaming. D&D tried several times to mimic the Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) space, which it inadvertently spawned dating all the way back to Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Interactive Fiction (IF). The idea was that if the company could own a slice of that digital engagement dedicated to off-brand D&D, they could reach at least $50 million.

It didn’t work. WOTC never had enough resources, the right partners, or the technical know-how to effectively launch a digital ecosystem that would last longer than a few years. Then something surprising happened: D&D became more popular than all the other Hasbro brands combined.

The Dragons Take Over​

The passing of the previous Hasbro CEO created a power vacuum quickly filled by the staff shepherding D&D into the new age. The twin factors of the pandemic and streaming made D&D uniquely suited to a much wider audience, and it didn’t take long before WOTC was responsible for 72% of Hasbro’s total operating profit. In a very short period of time, WOTC went from a barely-mentioned division on Hasbro investor calls to the darling of the company, with CEO Chris Cocks taking the reins as Hasbro’s CEO in February 2022.

So what’s next? Sure enough, WOTC is executing on Hasbro's four quadrant plan for D&D. Let’s break it down:

• Media: The juggernaut most likely to influence the other three quadrants is the upcoming D&D movie. There have been many attempts at making D&D movies that have all been commercial failures. This time around feels different, if only because there was a legal battle waged through proxies on behalf of movie-making behemoths (Universal Studios vs. Warner Bros.) for D&D’s film rights. It’s clear they think there’s a lot of money to be made with a D&D movie. Unlike other movie launches, Hasbro is supporting the movie with the full force of its license. For an example of what this might look like, see the above picture of the D&D Advent Calendar. Speaking of which...
• Licensed Consumer Products: Advent calendars are interesting products because they can contain just about anything, but that thing has to be small. They also require a lot of creativity to produce, as 25 different items is a lot to put into one package. If the D&D advent calendar is any indication, we’re going to see a lot more of beholders, displacer beasts, mimics, owlbears, and gelatinous cubes. There are stylized, iconic images of each monster repeated across everything that’s in the calendar, including stickers, gift tags, pencils, and ornaments.
• Toys & Games: D&D is a game first and foremost, so the release of the next edition (an edition that requires playtesting but holds out the promise for backwards compatibility) is the obvious prime mover in this space. In addition to the aforementioned licenses, D&D toys are starting to show up in the wild. Egg Embry wrote an overview of just some of the D&D action figures available. We can expect a slew of monster toys too.
• Digital Gaming: The big news here is One D&D, which uses D&D Beyond as its base. With 13 million registered users, WOTC is banking on D&D Beyond as a base for propagating One D&D to the masses. For better or worse, this includes changes to the OGL with the likely plan to defragment any digital content that currently resides on third-party platforms. There has been several failed attempts at establishing a digital home base for D&D, so it’s really important they get this right.

Cocks has never hidden his digital ambitions for D&D, and now with the company’s full resources at his disposal, we’re about to see a four quadrant D&D plan in action. Hasbro and WOTC are all in on this plan, with the future edition of D&D, the D&D movie, and its reinvigorated digital platform all unified in an attempt to make D&D not just a game, but a brand expression.

Will it work? Perhaps the more relevant question for current D&D fans is ... what if it does?

 

[Cergorach]

A lot of what you're writing made sense to me, even if I don't fully agree, but this doesn't make any sense at all. I have critiques of all those products, but yours feel like they're based on broad assumptions about them based on you not having read them to me. I mean:

1) Modern Shadowrun - The main issue is simply terrible rules and book writing/editing. Like abysmal. Nigel Findley could still be with us and writing all the lore and they'd still be D- or F grade RPG books because the rules and editing/writing are just THAT bad.

2) Pathfinder 2E - This is pretty great. It's hard to see how anyone could find major fault with the setting, editing, writing, or rules apart from complexity. If you thought 3E was fine, though, I can't see it, as it's south of 3.XE/PF1 in complexity, but still has very solid rules. And whilst I don't want to be a Golarion fan, I am sort of forced to be by how well-written and together the darned setting is. I don't think my group would be up for learning it because of the complexity, but if they were, I'd seriously consider it.

3) New World of Darkness, do you mean the nWoD from 2004 or the far more recent 5th edition? Because the nWoD was 18 years ago and is now basically deceased, so being mad about that seems well, at least a decade too late. The 5th edition there's plenty of hate, but bleached and washed?! Er what? The exact opposite problem has been a lot of the problem with the 5th edition. It's absolutely anything but that, for better or worse. Beyond that it has some pretty bad rules issues, and modern Hunter is just fundamentally conceptually flawed. But shiny and clean it ain't. nWoD maybe you could argue that, but man, 18 years ago and superceded by both 20th Anniversary edition oWoD (basically "3rd edition" of the oWoD, kind of pretending a lot of Revised just never happened and sticking closer to 2E, which I presume you like), which is still being made/added to, and 5th edition.

4) 40K RPGs - I mean, the key difference is the new ones have rules that work a lot better. Other than that I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Both are very accurate to the 40K setting. Neither make any particular sacrifices I'm aware of. I am not however a Space Marine cultist so YMMV.

It feels like this might be more of an issue with your perception of RPGs, than a problem with RPGs.

For me a RPG is a combination of rules, 'fluff', and presentation. As an example, I thought that D&D 4E was very mechanically strong, but absolutely lacked in presentation/fluff, I liked the artwork, but it just crushed any inspiration to DM/play. D&D 5E brought back a balance of good mechanics and good presentation.

1.) I started to dislike SR with 4e, the 'rewrite' for the wireless rules. Eventually cyberspace becoming a magical realm, etc. It's just not the themes but the heavy handed way they chucked it all in. Imho it went from a cyberpunk game with magical elements to a fantasy game with cyberpunk elements. Mechanics in SR have always been 'iffy', from the 1E horrorshow, to 2E mis-use, etc. SR just went into a direction I didn't like at all.

2.) Pathfinder always felt like what D&D 4E should have been, but with a balance between mechanics, 'fluff', and presentation. What I've seen in previews and digital products I bought via Bundles is that they moved away quite a bit mechanically. If people can have a complaint about Pathfinder 1E is that it produced a LOT of product and Pathfinder 2E just feels like a vehicle to sell all that stuff again...

3.) nWoD and 5e WoD I both dislike, both due to the direction they went to. Am I mad about it? No, why should I be? I actually did like the 20th Anniversary versions.

4.) The issue I have with the newer 40k RPGs is presentation. I do not dislike the art, but the whole package just feels bland compared to the previous versions or even the 40k universe at large.

Of course it's my perceptions of those RPGs, but I'm far from alone in that perception. The problem I have with the above editions of the RPGs is that I feel or perceive them to making changes for making changes sake, in an attempt to make the RPG/money printing machine go 'burrr' far sooner then that they needed too. Needing to resell the same thing over and over again.

Let me take a D&D example: The 1993 Forgotten Realms boxed set (later revised in 1996), that really needed an update for 3E (2000)! Not only couldn't you get it easily (2nd hand it was starting to get quite expensive), the boxed set format was now extremely expensive to produce/ship. The 3E hardcover book was imho a good hardcover with an insanely dense amount of text/information stuffed in a single D&D book. They advanced the timeline ~5 years and everything that came before was still pretty useful. Did I like everything that happened in those 5 years? Of course not! But it left more than enough room for me to do my own 'thing'. With 3.5E they didn't revise the book, they just redid the crunch in Player's Guide to Faerûn and advanced the timeline another year. With 4E they advanced the timeline over a 100 years... killing off most of the normal NPCs, making everything that came before 'moot' and imho not really relevant anymore. But it mostly felt like a badly done FR reboot, just reuse all the maps, names, etc. and wipe everything else to fit the WoW-like 4E. Now 5E feels to me like a partial rolling back on WotC's part on 4E, it feels more like previous editions, there's still stuff in there that I dislike, but can easily ignore. 5e FR still build upon the 4E mess though...

Many of those drastic changes to established IPs feel like the publisher flipping the table in the hopes that we forget the previous stuff and blindly buy everything again and again. Instead of concentrating on imho more important aspects of their games. Like mechanical scalability, internal balance and consistency. Or even guidance through their plethora of additions and products... And products like 5E, WoD 20th, SR 20th, etc. show us that publishers actually realize that people like their style of 'old' product and then milk that anniversary again and again, and often go back to their regular IP 'milking' ways (One D&D, SR 5e/6e, etc.).

Notice that I use a lot of 'feels' and 'perceive'? That it's because that's my perspective of the product, with a lot of experience/knowledge of how businesses work with products/services in general. And knowing the difference between a value add and a regurgitation of a product/service at a constantly higher price...

 

[Cergorach]

Yeah, it says that I find blanket derogatory statements about the younger generation terribly lacking in self-reflection and to be completely out of touch with reality. But, yes, your thinly veiled insult is noted and dismissed for all it's worth.

I understand what @Vincent55 is getting at, but he's getting at it in a pretty arsehole way.

Theoretically every generation should be getting more intelligent on average, but folks being 50 won't notice that difference at all. That would take a LOT more generations...

What is happening is that D&D (and RPGs in general) have become more mainstream over the decades and companies like WotC/Hasbro have been altering their products to appeal to the masses. In the same way as computer games have done so. What does that result in? A certain level of making it easier to get into RPGs, by lowering thresholds. That means a larger spectrum of people can play D&D (RPGs), which is great. That means that less intelligent people can play D&D, RPGs, use computers, and play video games...

But imho intelligence does not a good or bad player make! D&D isn't a difficult game, but in the past it often suffered from writers that are horrible at explaining stuff to others. If you have trouble with explaining D&D to less intelligent players, that is not on them, that is on you. What can be a problem is a certain mindset, that has been prevailant among (but not unique to) the younger generations due to companies pushing that: Instant Gratification. They want their thing now, the way they want it. Or get distracted by other things (like their smartphones)... Is that everyone? Of course not! Many older people have the same issues and lots of younger people don't. But when you open the doors wide, you can expect everyone to walk in.

When us 'old' folks started, D&D was pretty nerdy and similar people flocked together to play it. Nerdy doesn't exactly equal intelligence, but I would say that on average, there were quite a few intelligent people playing D&D in those times for extended periods of time. I think the number of intelligent people playing D&D hasn't decreased at all, just that it's become socially acceptable or even trendy to play D&D for other people. I also never subscribed to random people playing RPGs together, it's a social activity and people need to fit and be compatible within those groups. Sure, one offs with a bunch of random people can be fun, you can meet new people that way, but imho it's quite a different experience from campaigns with an established group of (RPG) friends. RPGs are a group activity, where everyone needs to have fun, both the DM and the players. And together you make a fun experience for everyone. If you think your players are all morons, you're DMing them for the wrong reasons and I'm starting to wonder who the real moron is in that equation...

I'm 46, ~35 years of gaming, and I never really liked the 'classic' D&D puzzles. For me they always were the products of mad wizards minds. I usually participated because either the DM spend a ton of time and effort on them or someone else in the party liked them. If someone overdid it I could always request if in the next sessions they could please tone done the 'Mad wizard puzzles'. ;-)

So if you're pushing your puzzles and things and 'the younger generation' isn't interested or constantly distracted, whose fault is that exactly...

Sidenote: Getting 'huffy-puffy' about someone being generic to a degree that is unrealistic, like "It's raining all the time!". You really need to ask yourself, just how smart am I or in what emotional state am I in, that I'm getting triggered by this totally unrealistic generic statement? Does that person actually mean what he's saying? If so, is there really fixing 'stupid' (after all they keep making better morons)? ;-) Or is that person lacking in communication skills or just being an arsehole about it... Or does that person have a point that he or she can't express in a better way...

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

/snip

I was prepared to be annoyed by this, but this is actually a well thought out post. Hmm.

Although:

Theoretically every generation should be getting more intelligent on average, but folks being 50 won't notice that difference at all. That would take a LOT more generations...

What are you basing this on?

 

[Henadic Theologian]

A lot of what you're writing made sense to me, even if I don't fully agree, but this doesn't make any sense at all. I have critiques of all those products, but yours feel like they're based on broad assumptions about them based on you not having read them to me. I mean:

1) Modern Shadowrun - The main issue is simply terrible rules and book writing/editing. Like abysmal. Nigel Findley could still be with us and writing all the lore and they'd still be D- or F grade RPG books because the rules and editing/writing are just THAT bad.

2) Pathfinder 2E - This is pretty great. It's hard to see how anyone could find major fault with the setting, editing, writing, or rules apart from complexity. If you thought 3E was fine, though, I can't see it, as it's south of 3.XE/PF1 in complexity, but still has very solid rules. And whilst I don't want to be a Golarion fan, I am sort of forced to be by how well-written and together the darned setting is. I don't think my group would be up for learning it because of the complexity, but if they were, I'd seriously consider it.

3) New World of Darkness, do you mean the nWoD from 2004 or the far more recent 5th edition? Because the nWoD was 18 years ago and is now basically deceased, so being mad about that seems well, at least a decade too late. The 5th edition there's plenty of hate, but bleached and washed?! Er what? The exact opposite problem has been a lot of the problem with the 5th edition. It's absolutely anything but that, for better or worse. Beyond that it has some pretty bad rules issues, and modern Hunter is just fundamentally conceptually flawed. But shiny and clean it ain't. nWoD maybe you could argue that, but man, 18 years ago and superceded by both 20th Anniversary edition oWoD (basically "3rd edition" of the oWoD, kind of pretending a lot of Revised just never happened and sticking closer to 2E, which I presume you like), which is still being made/added to, and 5th edition.

4) 40K RPGs - I mean, the key difference is the new ones have rules that work a lot better. Other than that I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Both are very accurate to the 40K setting. Neither make any particular sacrifices I'm aware of. I am not however a Space Marine cultist so YMMV.

It feels like this might be more of an issue with your perception of RPGs, than a problem with RPGs.

NWOD isn't dead, its just renamed Chronicles of Darkness and its still getting some support, they are working on a Hedge book for example.

And hot take CoD does actual horror better then WoD ever did.

 

[Cergorach]

Although:
What are you basing this on?

Measuring 'intelligence' is iffy at the best of times.

If we look at something like IQ testing, there's something called the Flynn Effect which pretty much states that average IQ goes up 3 points every 10 years (let's not go into details where IQ testing is flawed, country/culture bound, era bound, etc.). Let's say that at 18 years of age you are around an age to give some kind of measure to intelligence (whether this is accurate or not is of course the question). At 50, we've had 32 years of 'deprecation' and there should be an average 10 point increase in an 18 year old compared to 32 years ago... Could you tell a difference of 10 IQ points through casual interaction with a teenager? Not taking into account the difference between inexperience and experience (something most 50 year olds have a big issue with making that distinction)? If you've been a teacher for 32 years at the same big high school with the same socioeconomic development, maybe you have interacted with enough kids. But would you still be able to make the distinction from 32 years ago and now? Eventually things just become more of the same smeared across a long stretch of time...

I would say that human 'intelligence' has increased over the thousands/millions of years, if we were to cut off a chunk of 32 years from that, would you be able to perceive an increase in intelligence? 1990 'intelligence' vs 2022 'intelligence'? And we're not talking about (technical) advancements. People had issues with operating their VHS recorder then, people have issues operating their smartphone now (without their simple icons)...

 

[Vincent55]

Yeah, it says that I find blanket derogatory statements about the younger generation terribly lacking in self-reflection and to be completely out of touch with reality. But, yes, your thinly veiled insult is noted and dismissed for all it's wor

I apparently can not discuss this on this forum due to rules so i suggest you drop your derogatory comments as you say.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

NWOD isn't dead, its just renamed Chronicles of Darkness and its still getting some support, they are working on a Hedge book for example.

And hot take CoD does actual horror better then WoD ever did.

Good to hear! I don't disagree with said hot take. The best horror stuff I've seen for any WoD is all nWoD. I always wanted to run God Machine.

I've got two hot takes myself:

1) oWoD's problem was they made a superb urban fantasy set of RPGs, with horror theme-ing (just like Anne Rice is really sexy urban fantasy first, horror a distant second), and then in Revised, got upset people weren't always playing them for horror primarily, and threw the baby out with the bathwater until the 20th anniversary when said baby, now no doubt a toddler, was welcomed back with open arms and horror got to go sit in the corner again.

2) The fact that Revised and nWoD both had lower audiences/profiles than the oWoD, and less obsessive ones is in part because they were better horror games, but that isn't actually what the most people wanted, they wanted that sweet sweet urban fantasy.

That's not to devalue nWoD, it was definitely cool and corrected a lot of issues with oWoD. 5th edition just seems like kind of a mess. I was deeply unimpressed with Hunter especially, because it's all generic powers and resources for you to "flavour", and feels like whilst the setting writing and so on is modern, the mechanics could be from the 1980s. What made both previous WoDs stand out from other horror games back in the day was that they weren't like that, they were very strongly and specifically themed.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Good to hear! I don't disagree with said hot take. The best horror stuff I've seen for any WoD is all nWoD. I always wanted to run God Machine.

I've got two hot takes myself:

1) oWoD's problem was they made a superb urban fantasy set of RPGs, with horror theme-ing (just like Anne Rice is really sexy urban fantasy first, horror a distant second), and then in Revised, got upset people weren't always playing them for horror primarily, and threw the baby out with the bathwater until the 20th anniversary when said baby, now no doubt a toddler, was welcomed back with open arms and horror got to go sit in the corner again.

2) The fact that Revised and nWoD both had lower audiences/profiles than the oWoD, and less obsessive ones is in part because they were better horror games, but that isn't actually what the most people wanted, they wanted that sweet sweet urban fantasy.

That's not to devalue nWoD, it was definitely cool and corrected a lot of issues with oWoD. 5th edition just seems like kind of a mess. I was deeply unimpressed with Hunter especially, because it's all generic powers and resources for you to "flavour", and feels like whilst the setting writing and so on is modern, the mechanics could be from the 1980s. What made both previous WoDs stand out from other horror games back in the day was that they weren't like that, they were very strongly and specifically themed.

CoD at least is still solidly horror themed at least, mostly at least, the urban fantasy is still second (and it really doesn't have to be Urban).

One advantage OWOD had over CoD is the metaplot, people here like to slam metaplot, but metaplot keeps folks invested, its one of the reasons for the Forgotten Realms huge success compared to most other settings.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

2.) Pathfinder always felt like what D&D 4E should have been, but with a balance between mechanics, 'fluff', and presentation. What I've seen in previews and digital products I bought via Bundles is that they moved away quite a bit mechanically. If people can have a complaint about Pathfinder 1E is that it produced a LOT of product and Pathfinder 2E just feels like a vehicle to sell all that stuff again...

PF2E is exactly a 3.5E/PF1 successor, with stuff like the trap feats, the massive power imbalance between classes, the analysis paralysis and so on all resolved. It's still a bit more complex and math-y than I'd really like, but it's very good at being an alternate 4E - much better than PF1 was, which was never more than 3.5E with a very specific setting and a very confused set of rules changes which failed to achieve their stated goals.

3.) nWoD and 5e WoD I both dislike, both due to the direction they went to. Am I mad about it? No, why should I be? I actually did like the 20th Anniversary versions.

I guess was confuses me here is that you implied they were bland and "washed", and I'm just not really seeing that with 5e WoD.

4.) The issue I have with the newer 40k RPGs is presentation. I do not dislike the art, but the whole package just feels bland compared to the previous versions or even the 40k universe at large.

I think this is more of a 40K issue generally, not just the RPGs. The previous 40K RPGs kind of leaned a bit towards Rogue Trader/2E takes on 40K, which was slightly but not entirely surprising given it was released in 2008, after the "purge of fun and weirdness" that took place in 3E and 4E 40K (1998 and 2004 respectively). By the time Wrath and Glory (the new one) came out in 2018, it was 20 years since the "fun purge", and 30 since the original Rogue Trader, and the average 40K fan was in their 20s or 30s, and had known only war the fun-less version of 40K. I was talking to such a person recently, in his early 30s, swore blind there'd never been "generic" Imperial Guard, that Cadians, Catachans, Krieg Death Korps etc. had been the only IG ever, only conceding the point when I linked him an article I luckily found showing the full history of IG minis. Anyway point is, GW doesn't like fun or satire or whatever anymore - or didn't in the 20-year period up to about 2018 - and Wrath and Glory reflects that approach, which is much more self-serious.

Ironically 9th edition (from 2020), and were hints of this in 8th, seems to be moving slooooowly away from the "no fun allowed" take on 40K. But it'll be another 10 years before they really do, if they do.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

One advantage OWOD had over CoD is the metaplot, people here like to slam metaplot, but metaplot keeps folks invested, its one of the reasons for the Forgotten Realms huge success compared to most other settings.

Absolutely. At this age I can't pretend that the metaplot wasn't the reason we bought some of the books and were so invested in buying stuff from virtually of the lines (as the metaplot tended to be spread among them). That's not necessarily to say "BRING BACK METAPLOT" or similar crazy talk, but it can be effective in retaining an audience so long as you don't go wrong. If you go wrong you can kind of drive them away.