NeoGrognard

Back in the 80s there was this idea that spread like wildfire though American culture that playing D&D could open young minds to the wicked lures of Satanism. Like many prohibitions on games and entertainment, some of this comes from the old timey ideas that idle hands are the devil’s playground—that if you are not working at something that is important for survival and prosperity, you’ll become a bum.   

A friend of mine, who worked for TSR and Wizards of the Coast, and happened to also be a devout Christian, used to get a lot of guff from some fellow Christians about his love of D&D. He used to tell them, don’t worry, we don’t work for the devil, we are far too disorganized for that.   

By the time I came on board at Wizards in 2000, just after the 3rd Edition launch, I saw what he meant. Though my interview process had taken months, and I had given more than two weeks notice to my former job, I didn’t have a computer for the first week at Wizards. At the same time I had just watched one of the best and most organized marketing campaigns in the history of D&D, and probably its best launch since the release of AD&D all those years ago if not ever. The d20 Licenses (though now much maligned due to the excesses of distributors and individual game stores during the late days of Pokémon and days of Yu-Gi-Oh) and the OGL were both brilliant, and expanded the adventure game industry. The research that Wizards did about the tabletop RPG segment of industry turned the nearly-dead D&D to something that was played again. Make no mistakes, D&D almost died with the “printer problems” of old TSR.   

This is actually one of my favorite ads for D&D. It also misses the point. It’s hard to get friends over to play D&D in the middle of the night, and even if they were there, the yelling and good times would probably wake the kids or the parents. Since the guy isn’t wearing a wedding ring, and hasn’t cut his nails in a few weeks, I can only assume that’s his parent’s basement or he has the kids for the weekend. Bachelors with their own place don’t play in the basement…their gamer area is upstairs.

But almost as soon as it began, the momentum fizzled. You see, unlike back in the days of TSR where D&D was by far their hottest property owned by that company (though I know some of you out there may be partial to Buck Rogers, Dragon Dice, and Spellfire), Wizards / Hasbro have a lot of hot properties. In comparison D&D does pretty well and it is well-loved. On the downside it’s stymied by its lack of digital rights. Hasbro sold all of their video game rights to Infogrames (now Atari) in 2001, and though it bought back many of those rights in 2007, it extended the deal to the Dungeons & Dragons digital rights until 2017. Hey, just seven more years unless a new lawsuit goes anywhere. It further stymied by the fact that its movie rights are probably still held by Sweat Pea Entertainment, or at least its chief, Courtney Solomon, who at least according to the legends of old TSR, bought the rights for a stick of gum and a ton of persistence back when he had too much money and the executives as TSR has a dearth of sense. The video game rights turnover was the key reasons that Peter Adkison stepped down as CEO of Wizards, which was my first real WTF moment at Wizards of the Coast. The movie rights are just frustrating, given the fact that either Michael Bay or Stephen Sommers would be a step up to the two movies we’ve gotten so far (and there is a rumored third movie on the way). Let’s face it; we are never going to see HBO or AMC to make a D&D TV series. But at least we are getting Game of Thrones and Walking Dead.   

This disorganization of the D&D had other, somewhat lesser components. In 2001 Living City was licensed out to Ryan Dancey’s company OrganizedPlay.com (he wanted the entire RPGA) and soon after the magazines were licensed out to Paizo.com. So at this point you have an entertainment brand with two of its major components and two of its smaller components licensed out to four different entities. Over all of which the parent brand has limited control over, because of contractual obligations or a lack of will to exert control.   

And while I think that Wizards of the Coast has done a great job with a pretty fractured brand, it’s competing for time and affection from a bunch of computer clones which throw down the barriers to entry by virtue of their medium. MMOs and other computer RPGs provide persistent worlds that don’t require human adjudication, individual design, or event organization in order to play. And while I prefer tabletop, these forms of entertainment are more efficient than analog predecessors and competitors. They are movies, and TV shows, D&D is the theater. And like the theater it is old, set in its way, and often swayed by the charismatic.   

My theory is that D&D is so big and so ethereal most of us (and maybe all of us) experience it like the blind men experience the elephant in that old Indian parable. But there are so many people who are passionate about it, we are all more certain of our truth than is prudent. I’ve long joke that D&D is a religion of the book. It splinters, it has its heretics and its saints (and sometimes saints that become heretics and vice versa), and people become crazy for the details. Since  fans are so crazy and in love with minutia, normal business people who have to deal with it become crazy almost as a defensive proposition. In a room of fevered beliefs, sometimes the only way to be heard is to be more radical and crazy than anyone else in the room. And let’s face it, that seems to be an easier tactic than learning about all the arcana that surrounds the game and the brand.   

It’s with these assumptions that I can only pretend to tackle the relationship of D&D the game with D&D the brand. But that’s next time.