By Duncan Stoddard
The 8 foot tall mute creature moves his hands, up, down, and around to his friends, nervous words conveyed through quiet flickering of fingers.
“Here? No, not here. They don’t live here,” his metal friend answered.
The giant wheezed quietly in relief, knowing dangerous creatures of night and day didn’t roam these woods.
—
Little memories and excerpts like this are what makes Dungeons and Dragons (often abbreviated as D&D) special to many people, even more so in recent years with the 5th edition of the D&D ruleset release in 2014. With the system’s simplicity and larger in-game support for roleplaying, it was the perfect storm in the RPG world. Players had only really had number crunching and combat focused systems in recent years, so this 5th edition really hit an untapped market.
In the world of RPGs, there’s really a field that all RPGs can be fixed on. This has an axis running from “crunchy”, meaning a lot of math or “number crunching”, a larger amount of rules, and more mechanically based support for just about every action a player could take, to the other end, “soft”, meaning a system that is much simpler in ruleset, involves less math, and only covers basic actions, as the rest can be easily adjusted by the players and their GM, or Gamemaster, the player who enforces rules and helps drive story.
The other axis on this graph is for the game’s purpose, whether the ruleset is focused more on roleplaying and story, trying to create a world where a group can collectively tell a story of heroism and tragedy, or if it is focused on mechanics, the pluses-and-minuses, the thrill of perfectly building something so that it functions exactly how you want it to, outclassing everything in its field of expertise. Typically, if a game leans to the crunchier side, it also leans towards the mechanical end of things, and vice versa.
That “vice versa”, and this graph, is imperative to understanding 5th Edition’s success. Taking their excellent marketing, social media and media presence, combined with their timely understanding of the (somewhat dead) pen-and-paper RPG market, 5th Edition landed in 2014, making ripples throughout the RPG community, and in only a few short years, 2017 became the year with the largest sales years for Dungeons and Dragons since it was bought from TSR Inc. by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.
Most RPGs released throughout the 2000s and early 2010s were games like D&D 3rd and 3.5 editions, Pathfinder, and Shadowrun, all systems that leans towards mechanical focus and crunchy system. This had just come from the 90s, with Vampire: The Masquerade and other affiliated White Wolf games, which had much heavier, emo and “gothic punk” tones to them, and with a much higher focus on story, usually containing a low to mid range system in complexity. The 2000s in RPGs were a rejection of the more emotional, edgy, soft systems of the 90s, and because of that, they leaned heavily into their crunch and mechanics.
2014 was the big throwback, after the release of 4th edition in June of 2008. 4th edition was heavily influenced by video games, was controversial at its release, and is still considered one of the worst editions of D&D. Realizing that crunchy systems had become the new Vampire, Wizards of the Coast made 5th edition one of their most roleplaying focused systems yet, offering a middle ground to all RPG players. With an easy to understand, but larger depth of complexity, this “new-and-improved” system with heavier roleplaying support than past editions, 5th Edition blasted onto the scene.
Being under such a massive brand name in RPGs, 5th Edition had home court advantage. Being excellently designed to fit perfectly into the middle of the RPG field, it was extremely accessible to all RPG players, veterans and newbies, story focused or crunchy. It was hard not to like it, with all the heart and charm of many people’s basement dwelling RPG days, while still being a well designed, modern take on an old classic.
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Wizards of the Coast wasn’t done. They published 5th edition, and with generally good reception. Knowing that social media and internet presence was the new battleground for any large scale company, they got to work.
In 2015 came their most recognizable success within the world of marketing and media: Critical Role. A group of friends and voice actors had a Pathfinder game they’d been playing, a home game where the GM, Matthew Mercer, had been creating this wild and vast world for his friends.
Geek and Sundry, a geek/gaming blog and YouTube channel, caught wind of it, and through the help of it’s creator, Felicia Day, the group of friends was invited to livestream their game for a worldwide audience, and worldwide audience it was. They had 115 episodes in their first series/campaign, ranging from 2.5 to 4 hours each.
After the end of their first campaign, Critical Role announced that they were starting a 2nd campaign. Streaming live, on January 11th, 2018, they started their stream with 102,000 people tuning in live to watch these voice actors start their newest adventure.
135,000 people tuned in to the start of that first episode, and there’s good reason why. Using 5th Edition as their system, they’ve received monetary support from D&D Beyond, a website created by Wizards of the Coast with online resources, data storage, and archives of D&D rules and info to ease play. With the voice acting abilities of the cast and the praised storytelling of Matthew Mercer, the first campaign held emotions and story that touched the hearts of many fans. Using their newfound cash, the sales success of the first campaign, and huge fan support, the Critical Role cast launched their second foray into D&D livestreaming.
That 135,000 viewers start, and their continued success, with 3.9 million views for that same first episode on YouTube, averaging 1.1 million views per episode on YouTube sealed Critical role’s success. Without a doubt, Critical Role has had a huge impact on pop culture, normalizing the participation in RPGs, and popularizing 5th edition, with supplementary features for the game produced by Matthew Mercer being lauded as favorites and almost need be additions to the game.
5th Edition was the success story the RPG community needed, bringing back to light the idea of roleplaying games; no longer just a bunch of fat, basement dwelling 35 year old men, with dead end jobs getting together to escape their sad reality, but a sophisticated form of modern storytelling. The RPG community is booming, with hundreds of people discovering the hobby every day, new systems popping out from well known studios, veterans of the community, or new kids on the block. Starfinder, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, Genesys, Warhammer 4th Edition, and upcoming mech RPG Lancer are only a few coming out in recent years. 5th Edition opened a door into a roleplaying game revival, a thriving and beating community, and a land of creativity. All it took was a good market, a couple failures, and the advertising ability of modern media to revive a hobby and a community.
Tiger Times Staff
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