We are watching a bright and special time in the Dungeons & Dragons industry pass away before our eyes.

Around the start of the 2010s, we saw the dawn of a new golden age of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Since then, huge numbers of new players have found Dungeons & Dragons thanks to Stranger Things and actual plays like Critical Role. These new fans discovered a vibrant and thrumming TTRPG industry. There was the D20 fantasy family of games, dominated by D&D 5E, but rich with other games published under the OGL and the fertile depths of the Old School Renaissance. There were other mainstream publishers with storied brands, such as Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, and Shadowrun. Lastly, there was a flourishing indie TTRPG scene that revolutionized what a TTRPG was, such as Apocalypse World. It is interesting to note that the two last points were both direct consequences of  the end of previous “D&D Golden Eras” - the mainstream publishers appeared in the late 80s\early 90s as AD&D faded to near irrelevance, and Old School Renaissance appeared as a reaction to D&D 4th edition splintering the fanbase.

This influx of gamers created a rising tide that lifted all boats, but especially the boats focused on D&D. Novice gamers started out playing D&D 5E, and a percentage went on to discover other great games. Because of the OGL, countless companies and designers could make money creating for D&D 5E. Because of the increasing number of gamers, even strange, freaky, or weird TTRPG ideas could find an audience - have you heard of Apollo 47 Technical Manual the RPG? Interestingly, Indie and non-traditional RPG designer communities appeared as a counter-movement to D&D dominance in the 2000s, and that is still active.

But recent developments make clear that this current radiant golden age of D&D is ending, as surely as the steam engine ended the age of sail, or hobbits bearing a ring ended the Third Age of Middle-earth.

The Doom of Our Time as D&D fans Approaches

In the wake of the Open Gaming License scandal of this past winter, a number of companies have successfully launched new D&D replacement TTRPGs intended to move them past the possibility of Wizards of the Coast ever threatening their businesses ever again. Some of the games grossed millions in crowdfunding campaigns. All have been positively reviewed.

Some cite the success of these games, which are intended to replace 5E/OGL content for the companies involved, as signs of the continued health and growth of the D&D section of  the TTRPG industry.

Rather, they are signs that the D&D industry has peaked, and may be about to enter a decline.

Why?

After the Open Gaming License crisis of 2023, I became pessimistic about the damage the attempt to kill the OGL had done to the D&D market. Others told me that the result of the crisis would be the blooming of a thousand flowers. Discouraged from using 5E by Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to kill the OGL, we would all get amazing new TTRPGs that would take the space of D&D.

Maybe every single one of those new D&D-replacements is going to be amazing. Maybe every one will be so fun and so captivating that lawns will go unmowed, pets unfed, and diapers unchanged because we are all so busy playing one of those games.

The problem is the TTRPG business is devilishly difficult. Only very rarely does the creation of a phenomenal game actually lead to financial success.

And the death of the OGL and the creation of these games has fundamentally changed the D&D-centric industry in such a way that it will be harder for those companies that only base their product on D&D to make money in the future. A difficult business is about to become more difficult.

Consider the state of the D&D industry a mere eighteen months ago; countless publishers, from MCDM and Kobold Press to Wizards of the Coast, were all making 5E material; it was easy to purchase D&D products from multiple publishers because if you were running 5E, you could use the work of all these companies at your table; this made it easier for companies to share customers.

The new D&D-replacement TTRPGs birthed by the OGL crisis are about to make that sort of customer sharing much, much harder. MCDM is publishing a TTRPG where you roll 2D6 to hit. Pathfinder’s 2nd edition remaster has no alignment and changed ability scores. Critical Role has dropped 5E like a dead cockroach and is playtesting its own new fantasy game, Daggerheart, which uses 2D12s, and a horror game named Candela Obscura.

And of course, there is the rising Godzilla that is “6th” edition D&D, which scientists say will attack our shores in the spring of 2024. So far, there is no hint of an OGL for whatever that game will be.

The problem is, 5E was not just a game. It was a monopoly while also being a massive community of players. Countless companies could thrive making products for that community, while, in the process, also feeding the monopoly.

These new D&D-replacement games are a shattering of that monopoly. Instead of countless companies working to make your 5E game better, they are now asking you to become MCDM, or Darrington Press Daggerheart, or Paizo, or D&D 6E players. The D&D community is again entering an era of division, faction, and balkanization.

The companies that base their products on D&D are now asking fans to choose sides. It also means that it is going to become more difficult for them to share customers. How interested will a Pathfinder fan be in an MCDM product? Or “6th” edition? History suggests these sorts of barriers depress sales - which is bad news for companies who depend on monopolies but far better news for consumers, who get to choose products better suited for their tastes, without having to adapt the product that tries to be everything for everyone, and thus is not suitable out of the box. Look at the case of MCDM, which seeks to fill a specific niche inside D&D-oriented games - it pushes away from Dungeon Crawling, and tries to focus on epic fantasy - something D&D was not as well equipped to do, but still tried.

All This Has Happened Before

In the 1990s, TSR, the first company to publish Dungeons & Dragons, embarked on publishing setting after setting after setting for the game. By 1997, over a dozen settings were sold by the company. Fans stopped being fans of D&D, and instead became fans of a particular setting, and would only buy products for that setting. Due to severe mismanagement of the company and no innovation of their flagship product to keep up with the times, in 1997, TSR was near death as setting releases had plummeted from the hundreds of thousands of copies in the 1980s, to a mere 7,152 copies sold for the Birthright campaign setting in its first year of release. D&D was only saved from a terrible fate by Wizards of the Coast and their fat stacks of cash. They purchased TSR in the summer of 1997.

Some might say it is unfair to compare the different settings of the 90s to the different systems of today. Settings and systems are different, after all. And I do agree with the point. Switching systems if the system is as complex and crunchy as D&D is a BIGGER ASK than switching settings, therefore this change should have a LARGER IMPACT ON SALES of products that are focused on replicating D&D, including the complexity of the system.

However, soon after Wizards purchased D&D and released 3.0 and the OGL, D&D recovered its position of dominance. Everybody was jumping on board with the D20 system, even old and established TTRPG properties, like World of Darkness (Monte Cook’s World of Darkness), L5R and 7th Sea (Rokugan D20 and Swashbuckling Adventures), Call of Cthulhu D20, etc. In time, this golden age would come crashing down with the advent of 4th Edition D&D, when Pathfinder fractured the playerbase and the D&D industry - as 4th Edition did not have an OGL, and a lot of players preferred 3rd edition to 4th edition.

And this cycle of dominance and then fracture, where people leave D&D to do their own thing is all happening again. Once more, the D&D audience is fracturing at the seams, and it will hurt sales and growth of current D&D.

To focus only on MCDM, this current BackerKit is likely the most successful campaign the company will ever see Every campaign after this will struggle to get the same sort of sales numbers as people slowly bleed away to the competition. Paizo will say check out our competing fantasy game. WotC will batter us all with a punishing wave of marketing trying to convince all of us of the newness and hotness of D&D 6th edition. (May it be both new and hot! But I have my doubts…) And fans will bleed away.

Furthermore, what will happen to the YouTube channel that is the foundation of MCDM’s success? Matt Colville is a master communicator and was a major evangelist for D&D in his channel’s heyday. He is passionate, intelligent, and inspiring. If Dungeon Masters could go into the locker room and get a pep talk from their coach in the middle of a game of D&D, that coach would be Matt Colville.

How much time is Colville going to devote to D&D now that it is essentially his competition?

In the past year, he has put out less than 20 videos on his channel. Those videos now range widely in topic, from TV reviews and interviews with language scholars to some D&D content, and a discussion of the creation of his new RPG. Go back five years, and Colville was putting out video after video after video of fantastic advice about running D&D, usually with 5E as the default. He dispensed some of the best advice on D&D I have ever seen.

But it appears his content is fundamentally shifting, and he is asking that his audience go with him somewhere new.

Let’s look at MCDM’s recent efforts from the point of view of Wizards of the Coast. It is all ruin, disaster, and calamity. Master communicator and D&D fanatic Matt Colville has gone from convincing people to try D&D, and explaining how best to play D&D, to instead asking his 439,000 subscribers to stop playing D&D and play his game instead.

Not to mention that Critical Role—a huge reason for the recent surge in popularity of D&D—will possibly stop their support of D&D at the end of their current campaign, and might ask their 2.1 million YouTube subscribers to start playing Daggerheart instead (although Daggerheart has been getting a general “Meh” reaction from playtesters, so it’s possible this system change won’t happen any time soon if at all). I will not mention that, lest it further trouble the sleep of the D&D people at Wizards of the Coast… (What if 2.1 million people simply don’t buy “6th” edition?)

In summary, all these events are interfering with the developments that created the current golden age of Dungeons & Dragons. A potential removal of D&D from Critical Role would likely hurt everyone involved, but mostly D&D. For years, Critical Role’s pitch was “Watch voice actors play D&D!” (A concept even my 80-year-old Aunt Sonja understands.) Now, the pitch is “Watch voice actors play TTRPGs!”. While not a very complex concept to explain (even to an 80 year old) it’s not as punchy as “D&D”.

But what is Candela Obscura? (If asked, Aunt Sonja might guess Candela Obscura was a potpourri scent.) The brand recognition that drove people to Critical Role is gone. A note on Critical Role’s Candela Obscura - this won’t ever be their bread and butter. This is a limited game meant to be used the same way as other one shots were:  a side story, something else the cast can try, and to show TTRPGs can be more than just D&D, and that some stories are better told with other RPGs. There is also a discussion to be had on whether fans came to Critical Role because the group was “playing D&D”, or because “a group of already popular and famous voice actors” were doing something unique.

Simultaneously, the splintering of the D&D 5E community will make it harder for new designers who specialize on D&D material to break into the industry, and harder for D&D-focused established companies to attract new customers. Growth in this specific part of the TTRPG field will slow, but it’s doubtful it will affect non-D&D-centric designers or companies at the same (or any meaningful) level.

What the Future of D&D Might Look Like

And if I’m right, and this is how the golden age of D&D dies, certain things follow naturally from these events. Here are my predictions—Prophecies?—that I may be held accountable for my rashness in writing all this down. I may be wrong, but if I’m right, the following things seem likely to pass:

• “Sixth” edition will not do as well as 5th edition. Even more firings will follow. Wizards, which struggled to know what to do with D&D when it was a success (No Honor Among Thieves Starter Set? Really?) will be flummoxed by what to do with it when it is perceived as a failure.
• No MCDM RPG crowdfunding campaign will ever do better than this initial campaign to fund its TTRPG. To be fair this is to be expected, as corebooks sell better than supplements, and it’s unlikely that those who never got the corebook will participate in the supplement campaigns. Likewise, official D&D supplements always make a pittance in sales compared to the sales of the corebooks.
• Kobold Press’s post-OGL game, Tales of the Valiant, has been criticized for being too similar to 5E. For Kobold Press, I see two futures. Perhaps they will slowly bleed fans in the same way that MCDM will. But if D&D “6th” edition is too different, and people really don’t want to move on from 5E, Kobold has positioned themselves to be the next Paizo, and Tales of the Valiant, the next Pathfinder.
• The frequency of million-dollar D&D-centric Kickstarters will decrease. This will not affect non-D&D RPGs million-dollar Kickstarters, as they have made their 1 million without a player base at the level of D&D.
• Attendance at major gaming conventions might plateau - but other factors might play a role, as well. Still, what we will likely see is a reduction of the percentage of D&D in con-play, and instead have a more diverse offering of D&D-inspired RPGs - the same way that Pathfinder competes with D&D in slots at convention games.
• D&D will become less interesting. Less exciting. Less creative - this is a downside of a game that relies on third-party publishers for quality, innovation and creativity, and whose main publisher rests on the laurels of selling any corebooks needed to operate those excellent supplements. And despite all the new systems, it will also grow less diverse as it becomes even harder to make money in what started as a D&D community broken into factions.

And so this specific golden age sputters out.

Unless something truly dramatic and game-changing hits the D&D industry.

What could change this grim future? I suppose a group of publishers coalescing around a single system might change matters.

Or something truly inconceivable, something like giving “6th” edition D&D an OGL, or putting the rules in the Creative Commons.

And after last month’s blood sacrifices upon the altar of profitability, who is even left at Wizards with the power and experience to advocate for such a thing?

It has been a grand era to be a D&D gamer, one which we have been fortunate to live through. Unless you are an older gamer, and have been around to live through a couple of them already.