This seems to be an absurd notion. Why should the most influential and highly successful roleplaying game which is at the height of its popularity be doomed? The reason has – at least in my opinion – a lot to do with corporate capitalism and less with the game itself.
One problem D&D faces is that the people in charge over at Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast don’t seem to understand what Dungeons & Dragons is. They don’t understand the TTRPG culture. For them it’s just another intellectual property that is “under-monetized“. They also think that the popularity of D&D was their doing…
One of the secrets behind D&D 3rd Edition’s success back in the day was the Open Game License. The OGL allowed basically everyone to create D&D-compatible products and sell them if they followed a few simple rules. This was a win-win situation for Wizards of the Coast and the third-party publishers. People had to buy D&D core rules to use the third-party products (at least in most cases) and the third-party publishers could write material for the most well-established TTRPG. A lot of settings designed for other games were released for the d20 System. Everyone was happy. That’s at least the short and simple version.
But then the people in charge got greedy. With the release of 4th Edition D&D came the Game System License. While use of the OGL was free, GSL was not (at least not initially). The GSL also would have forced people to stop using the OGL if they wanted to release D&D-4th-Edition-compatible products. Many third-party publishers were appalled. Eventually WotC gave in and made significant changes to the GSL, but the damage was done and they lost many third-party publishers including Paizo which created Pathfinder to be a direct competitor.
D&D 4th Edition was also not as popular with the fans as WotC had hoped. Common criticism was that it was too much focused on combat which also took way too long to resolve. Another criticism was that the new mechanics felt too much like MMO mechanics. Personally I liked a lot of what D&D 4th Edition tried to accomplish, but ultimately playing it wasn’t a lot of fun for me.
D&D Next was an attempt at getting the fans back. WotC promised a system which both new and old gamers would enjoy. There was even talk of making the game modular in a way that allowed GMs to easy customize the rules to their liking. Unfortunately not much of this made it into the final version of D&D Next which eventually was called D&D 5th Edition. What we ended up with was a game which had a lot in common with 3rd Edition D&D but slightly simpler. It’s probably not the most innovative design out there, but it was enough to get a lot of people back into D&D. Oh, by the way, the OGL was back as well!
Something else helped D&D 5th Edition a lot: actual plays on Twitch and YouTube and particularly the success of Critical Role. Critical Role (as we all know) is a group of voice actors and friends who had started a campaign back in the 4th Edition days. They eventually switched to Pathfinder. When they started streaming their gaming sessions, the decision was made to use the new 5th Edition rules. The rest is history…
For most people it was recognizable that the success of Critical Role was one of the main drivers of D&D 5th Edition’s success. People wanted to experience for themselves what they had watched in the streams. Other popular actual play series helped to fan the flames even more. Eventually Critical Role got that successful that they ran a Kickstarter to fund the production of their own animated series based on their D&D campaign.
Things were great for a while then someone at WotC and/or Hasbro got greedy again. They asked themselves, why all these people were making millions of dollars with their IP? The success of Critical Role or popular Kickstarters from companies like MCDM made them want a bigger piece of the pie. The resolution was quickly found: let’s axe the OGL! What a splendid idea since it worked so great back during the 4th Edition days!
To no one’s surprise history repeated itself. The plans got leaked, people were angry, several third-party publishers decided to move away from the OGL and create their own games including the aforementioned MCDM and Critical Role. So WotC/Hasbro had to pedal back, restored the OGL and even released basically all of D&D 5th Edition under Creative Commons. but again, the damage was done.
I think you can see a pattern emerging. There are so many other missteps I could write about: the fact that WotC had neglected providing proper digital tools for a long time for example. Some people are probably still waiting for the VTT they promised when 4th Edition launched. It also didn’t help that the team at WotC which was partly responsible for the overwhelming success which was Baldur’s Gate 3, a video game by Larian Studios, was fired almost immediately after the game released. WotC/Hasbro was already infamous for firing people shortly before Christmas each year, but in this case it seemed especially brutal. It was also pretty dumb because the CEO of Larian Studios is an outspoken critic of this kind of corporate capitalism who used every opportunity to talk about this. Even without calling out WotC directly everyone got the message.
Recently Wizard of the Coast released their virtual tabletop called Sigil. I haven’t tried it myself yet but from what I’ve heard it definitely needs more work. Too bad it’s not only D&D the higher-ups at WotC and Hasbro don’t understand. It’s also software development. Insiders said that they didn’t understand what a VTT is and how it’s different from a video game. Shortly after Sigil was made available to the public, WotC laid off about 90% of the developers. Ouch. So the VTT is basically dead on arrival, Larian Studios moved on to a new project unrelated to D&D and its highly unlikely they will ever work with WotC again. At this point one could be asking if this is just bad luck or incompetence at WotC and Hasbro.
That’s why I think Dungeons & Dragons is doomed. It’s in the hands of a corporation which doesn’t understand anything about the roleplaying games hobby. They expect that they can treat it like any other IP. They don’t understand that Dungeons & Dragons has always flourished when the whole industry profited from it. They can’t wrap their head around the fact that D&D is more than just a product to many people. It’s not a simple toy, not a video game. And the worst of all, they don’t want to accept the fact that profit margins are small in the TTRPG industry. In my opinion corporate culture and tabletop RPGs don’t mix. D&D would be better off in the hands of a smaller independent company which understand its customers better. But as long as Hasbro controls Dungeons & Dragons its future looks bleak.
