A Sense of Doubt blog post #3433 - Hasbro Hates Dungeons and Dragons
I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 1977.
I liked when the game was owned by a small Wisconsin company called TSR.
Just this share.
Hasbro Hates Dungeons & Dragons
D&D never made the money Hasbro wanted
Dungeons & Dragons is the Kleenex or Nintendo of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). It is the go-to game for a lot of gamers, and the go-to reference for everyone else.
That should put it in the catbird seat of pop culture, but it doesn’t. Even with a series coming to Paramount Plus and a poorly explained streaming channel in the works, things look grim for the brand.
D&D is quickly becoming the BlackBerry of TTRPGs. It’s on top now, but it’ll be dead sooner than you think.
Hasbro Hated the Open Gaming License
A few months before the release of Honor Amoung Thieves, Hasbro tried to undo the Open Game License (OGL), which let other designers and publishers make semi-official content for Dungeons & Dragons.
The attempt is understandable. The OGL endangerd D&D because a third party product could make it look bad. Third party stuff is identified as such, but that doesn’t matter because people are stupid. SOMEONE out there thinks Wizards of the Coast, the subsidiary that produces D&D, actually published The Book of Erotic Fantasy.
Once D&D became THE game, the OGL’s returns diminished completely and it became a millstone. The only reason Wizards of the Coast (WotC) reversed course was because Hasbro was scared the community would boycott the movie.
Now Hasbro is stuck with a Creative Commons license. Make no mistake, Hasbro will try to undo this too. Hasbro is not concerned with losing market share or customer loyalty. They have considered these costs and weighed them against the benefits of owning their brand from soup to nuts.
Without a third party license, Hasbro could make movies and toys without having to worry about some weirdo making a questionable adventure or inappropriate character class that makes the news.
D&D’s Upcoming Virtual Tabletop Won’t Save It
Hasbro seems to think they can take D&D digital the same way they did Magic: The Gathering. Hasbro is wrong. Virtual Tabletops (VTTs) got big because of the COVID pandemic, but that bump is temporary.
But Hasbro thinks it can apply video game monetization to D&D, with microtransactions and whatnot. This will not be the cash cow they think it will be. Sure, some players will go all-in. These will be D&D’s “whales”.
But as a whole, the initiative will push players away, especially if they make content digital-only. That would spark a surge in popularity for other games in D&D’s fantasy wheelhouse. EZD6, Pathfinder, and Mörk Borg will all look fantastic next to a fully digitized Dungeons & Dragons.
There Will Be No D&D Cinematic Universe
Dungeons & Dragons obviously isn’t cut out for the movies. Honor Among Thieves was highly praised but not a lot of people actually saw it. The Paramount+ show will probably do better, but there are several other games that would make better TV than D&D.
Vampire: The Masquerade has already had a TV show and will probably get another one. Kindred: The Embraced wasn’t great, but neither was the first D&D movie. Vampire is so ready for its close-up again.
Shadowrun is also due for prime-time (or streaming). It’s had several video games, most of which did well. And it’s an easy pitch: D&D meets Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
D&D isn’t even interesting fantasy. Blades in the Dark and Exalted have far more interesting and unique worlds than D&D’s kitchen-sink fantasy. Eberron is the only Dungeons & Dragons setting that has anything going for it, but it’s apparent they’re putting all their eggs in the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance baskets.
I suppose the D&D movie sounded OK: Lord of the Rings meets Ocean’s Eleven. But other game IPs will sound even better to Hollywood.
iHunt is The Witcher meets Uber.
Viking Death Squad is War of the Worlds meets Thor plus death metal.
Paranoia is 1984 meets Idiocracy, but with more Skynet and McCarthyism.
Honor Among Thieves was NOT the Iron Man of D&D. It will not kick off a Dungeons & Dragons Cinematic Universe.
At best, D&D on TV could be the fantasy equivalent of the Arrowverse. But that will just open the floodgates to other TTRPGs with more Hollywood potential.
D&D Is a Bad Game
Hasbro has no faith in Wizards of the Coast. If they did, they wouldn’t have farmed the G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Power Rangers RPGs out to Renegade Games Studios. Hasbro certainly didn’t want a 5e My Little Pony roleplaying game.
A lot of D&D’s complexity stems from its origin as a wargame, Chainmail, and we’ve been paying for that origin for over 40 years.
D&D is a terrible game, and Hasbro knows it. It dumps too much work onto players and would-be dungeon masters in a time when more RPGs are designed to be easy to play.
Labyrinth: The Adventure Game is both the rulebook AND the adventure module, and is super-easy to run.
Stealing Stories for the Devil can almost be played right out of the box, like a board game.
Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition plays like a party game with take-that card combat, and is fairly easy to prep.
D&D is mechanically outdated in general. The clunky rules and endless character sheets are products of WotC’s refusal to innovate. Meanwhile…
Mazes reinvented result mechanics.
Slayers de-prioritized balance and embraced radical asymmetry.
Sunderwald lets players change the world by writing in the rulebook directly.
And Dungeons & Dragons never ends! Monopoly ends. Warhammer ends. But D&D doesn’t end unless you MAKE it end.
This too has been fixed by other publishers. Unbound, Mork Borg, Cryptomancer, and ARC are meant to sunset. You can jigger the rules to keep those games going, but the default is a satisfying finale. No D&D module provides that.
D&D doesn’t even look exciting. Viking Death Squad, Spire, Apocalypse Keys, and Cy_Borg all take huge visually creative swings while D&D continues to play it safe.
Critical Role Was D&D’s Biggest Promoter, Now It’s Not
Matt Mercer has supplanted Gary Gygax. Critical Role has trained new gamers, and retrained some old ones, to play RPGs a certain way. Their way of gaming is the new normal.
Now, Illuminated Worlds and Daggerheart will actually support that style of gaming. Eventually Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will get world books for one of those new games.
This is all disastrous for Dungeons & Dragons.
Illuminated Worlds and Daggerheart don’t even have to be great games. As long at they’re not bad, everyone will buy them. One of them might even become THE game.
All that said, Critical Role might have stepped in it with Candela Obscura’s quickstart, which uses Illuminated Worlds’ ruleset. Those rules look a little like Forged in the Dark. There are notable differences and the designers credited the influence, but it’s still not a good look.
Then again, Hasbro sent Pinkerton agents to terrorize a Magic: The Gathering YouTuber. Not all PR problems are equal.
Hasbro Will Sell D&D Sooner Than Later
Hasbro is now stuck with a crippling third party license AND a possibly dead-in-the-water media property. Making D&D VTT-first will not be the cash cow Hasbro wants. Dungeons & Dragons Adventures, the streaming channel, probably won’t move the needle.
All that said, their recently announced price hikes might be the brand’s saving grace. It’ll infuse cash into the machine and probably won’t affect sales that much. Still, it’s a stopgap measure. Hasbro still wants to end the open license and make their own media universe without having to worry about books like Kinks and Cantrips.
The upcoming D&D Paramount+ show (or shows, if Joe Manganiello’s project materializes) might be Dungeons & Dragons’ last hope. If it flops, and they can’t undo the new Creative Commons license, D&D won’t be worth the hassle.
D&D never made the sort of cash Hasbro wanted. Unless something goes really right for D&D, Hasbro will probably build the brand up for the 50th anniversary just to sell it off.
And if Hasbro can’t find a buyer with deep enough pockets, they’ll put D&D on life support. There will be supplements and whatnot, but the money that used to go into sponsored actual plays and influencer events will be better spent promoting another brand. Magic: The Gathering and Transformers give them a better ROI.
And that’s how Dungeons & Dragons as we know it will end. Not with another game overtaking it, but with Hasbro refusing to prop it up any more.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2407.12 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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