How did “Dungeons & Dragons” win?

WHEN “STRANGER THINGS” returns for its final season next year, hundreds of millions of people around the world will be abuzz with talk of Demogorgons, the Mind Flayer and Vecna. As a result, they will also be talking about “Dungeons & Dragons” (D&D). The hit television show, which often features its young heroes playing D&D, draws its lore and monsters from the fantasy role-playing game, in which the goal is to form a party of adventurers and go on quests.

Since its invention 50 years ago, D&D has been seen as a niche, geeky pastime. But recently the game has made the jump from nerd culture to popular culture. It has been adapted into a Hollywood film and a video game. The movie, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves”, grossed more than $200m. “Baldur’s Gate 3”—the bestselling game of 2023 on Steam, a PC gaming platform—made an estimated $660m. According to Wizards of the Coast, the firm behind D&D, the game has more than doubled its fan base in the past five years, from 40m to 85m globally.

“Dimension 20”, a show in which comedians and gamers play D&D, recently sold out at Madison Square Garden in New York. In 2023 more than 12,000 flocked to the Wembley Arena in London to watch “Critical Role”, a group of voice actors, play D&D. Their online show, in which they do the same, has amassed some 900m views on YouTube.

“Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern”, an immersive theatre production, invites attendees to help players make decisions by voting on outcomes on their phones. Currently playing off-Broadway, the show is set to go on tour across America. It also begins a run at the Sydney Opera House on December 15th. David Carpenter, the show’s co-creator, says that every performance is unique: the game relies on 20-sided dice, which, combined with audience input, can yield about 300,000 different iterations.

Gary Gygax, a game designer, and Dave Arneson, a graduate student, based D&D on war games—small-scale battle simulations used as military-training exercises—but added fantasy. You can play as one of around a dozen “character classes”, including barbarians, druids, fighters, monks and warlocks. Chance, however, is paramount: the dice determine whether actions fail or succeed. A “dungeon master” guides the story and play-acts as side characters and monsters. A game session might involve raiding a dragon’s hoard or a day’s shopping at the town market, where a successful “charisma roll” may bag a bargain on a rare item.

Gygax’s and Arneson’s initial ambition was to reach war-gaming fans, says Jon Peterson, who writes about the history of role-playing games. Yet D&D soon became famous, then notorious. In 1979 James Dallas Egbert, a student in Michigan, went missing. The media focused on D&D, suggesting that Egbert disappeared because he believed the game’s fantasy world was real. (Egbert was suffering from mental distress unrelated to D&D and eventually committed suicide.)

A moral maelstrom swirled around the game. In 1982 Irving Lee Pulling, another student, committed suicide, and his mother blamed D&D. She set up a campaign group, Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, and brought together Christian organisations to lambast the game as a purveyor of “demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic-type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning…and other teachings”.

The “Satanic panic” proved that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Sales boomed; Steven Spielberg included a D&D scene in “ET”; the game was acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. By then the popularity of D&D was waning, as other forms of entertainment, such as console games, pushed to the fore.

Canny branding helped revive D&D. In 2014 a new edition of the rules, designed to demystify the game for newbies, was released and became hugely popular. Groups such as “Critical Role” have also played, well, a critical role, by showing people how the game can unfold in varied and gripping ways. The covid-19 pandemic was a turning-point, too, argues David Ewalt, a journalist who writes about gaming. Cooped up at home, people spent a lot of time watching TV. But once they tired of screen time, they turned to immersive experiences. In 2020 Wizards of the Coast reported D&D had its best year yet, with 33% growth in revenue year-over-year.

As “Stranger Things” attests, a generation of storytellers who grew up playing D&D are coming of age. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of the TV adaptation of “Game of Thrones”, both played D&D as teenagers; Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man” and creator of Disney’s “The Mandalorian”, has also attributed his creative chops to the game. “People learn something about how to administer fantastic worlds and shepherd characters through them from playing this game,” says Mr Peterson, the game historian.

D&D fans are responsible for some of the world’s biggest franchises; cumulatively their work has entertained people for billions of hours. There has arguably never been a better (or more lucrative) time to be a geek. But as Jason Tondro, a designer at Wizards of the Coast, wonders: “Are we still nerds if we’re cool?” ■