Dungeons & Dragons is so popular these days that it tops best-selling book lists, but there was a time when D&D was viewed more as a toy than a book. So which is it?
A Toy?
Dungeons & Dragon's original target audience was wargamers, which co-creator Gary Gygax knew well. As the game grew in popularity its audience expanded, accelerated by the release of
Basic Dungeons & Dragons. Dr. J. Eric Holmes
contacted Gygax with a proposal:
When Tactical Studies Rules published the first DUNGEONS & DRAGONS rule sets, the three little books in brown covers, they were intended to guide people who were already playing. As a guide to learning the game, they were incomprehensible ... When I edited the rules prior to the first edition of the D&D Basic Set, it was to help the thousands (now millions) of people who wanted to play the game and didn’t know how to get started. Gary Gygax acknowledged that some sort of beginner’s book was badly needed, and he encouraged me to go ahead with it.
This decision paid off. By 1976 TSR has sold ten thousand copies of the basic rules, with the likelihood of ten times that thanks to sharing and photocopying. Shannon Appelcline explains just how well it was selling by 1978 in
Designers & Dragons:
The result was a best-seller that got out into the mass market, just as Holmes hoped. By the end of 1978, Gygax said it was selling 4,000 copies a month — precisely what OD&D had sold in all of 1974 and 1975. Within three years, Gygax would talk about there being “500,000 D&D players” thanks to the Basic Set.
That "mass market" included toy stores in the early 80s D&D was carried by toy stores,
as explained on a RPG.net thread:
By '82 and '83, you could find TSR games next to Monopoly in department stores and some discount stores, and my little town got it's first dedicated game store. It was a real, massive 80s fad, like Pac-Man, or Rubik's cube. Around '85, the same local Kay-Bee was selling off big stacks of TSR box sets for $2, like Dawn Patrol, Top Secret, Gang Busters, and the 1981 Gamma World 1st edition reprint. Oh, and liquidations of stuff like AD&D monster cards, and action figures, and the boardgames like Snits' Revenge and Awful Green Things.
D&D would go on to create its own toy franchise, announcing its Toy, Hobby & Gift Division in January 1983 at the Hobby Industries of America Show.
A Book?
D&D didn't just appear in the now-defunct toy stores like KB Toys and Toys R' Us, but also in defunct book stores like Waldenbooks. TSR negotiated an exclusive book with Random House, as Ewalt explains in
Of Dice and Men:
In 1981, Gygax made a distribution deal with Random House, the biggest publisher in the U.S., putting the game into tens of thousands of bookstores. TSR followed up the deal with more kid-friendly products: a revision of 1977’s Basic Set, the beginner’s game that covered character levels 1 through 3; and its first follow-up, the Expert Set, covering levels 4 through 14.
Just as the company branched out into toys, it also branched out into fiction, and had come to increasingly rely upon sales of its fiction line to prop up the rest of the company. It worked for a while, until the downturn in 1996:
But at the end of 1996, the market collapsed, and TSR’s distributor, Random House, returned millions of dollars’ worth of unsold hardcover books. On the hook to refund Random House, TSR entered 1997 over $30 million in debt, and with no cash to publish or ship new products.
Appelcline picks up the thread:
It was the book trade, however, that was the final straw. Random House had been fronting TSR loans against book sales for some time. Meanwhile, TSR’s book sales had sunk over the years. They were seeing less and less actual cash from the book trade because more money was going to pay off their unpaid loans. Trying to get ahead of this debt was the main factor behind TSR making a big push into the book trade in 1996. This push included sending massive reorders of Dragon Dice into book stores and increasing hardcover publication from 2 books a year to 12. Both of these expansions flopped, and because bookstore sales are ultimately returnable, TSR was the one left holding the bag. As 1996 ended Random House informed TSR that they’d be returning about a third of TSR’s products — several million dollars’ worth.
When TSR fell behind on its payment to its logistics company, they locked down all of TSR's products and refused to print more. TSR was in debt without enough product to buy its way out. These losses eventually ended up causing TSR to sell to Wizards of the Coast. The book trade, that had so massively expanded TSR's reach, nearly destroyed it.
Does it Matter?
The book industry has changed since TSR was sold. The few remaining bookstore chains, like
Barnes & Noble, have expanded their tabletop game offerings considerably, including board, card, and miniature games. But however D&D may be found in bookstores,
sales data suggests the game sells well. D&D books has topped the
Wall Street Journal's non-fiction best-seller list, Amazon's Science Fiction & Fantasy category, the
New York Times' Games and Activities list,
Publisher's Weekly's hardcover non-fiction list, and
USA Today's best-selling books.
Xanathar's Guide to Everything became the fastest-selling D&D book in the game's history.
Given all these accolades, it's easy to surmise that D&D is more book than toy. And yet,
the game was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2016:
In the 1970s, serious war game players Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson added the concept of role-playing to the strategy games they enjoyed. They thus created an entirely new way to play, allowing older gamers to immerse themselves in fantasy worlds not unlike children’s imaginative play. The game soon became popular, and other firms published similar games built upon related mechanics but often employing different fantasy settings, from historic battlefields to outer space. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and its imitators actually changed the nature of play.
In the end, D&D is more than just a toy or a book, fiction or non-fiction. It's all these things and something else entirely that "actually changed the nature of play."
