My kooky Dungeons & Dragons Conspiracy Theories Part 5.

We all know 2024 is going to mark the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. We know the new Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual are coming in 2024. Every other company that does fantasy TTRPGs has dropped or is planning to drop a game to compete with the “new” D&D.

We also know that Hasbro seems to be taking more of an interest in D&D in terms of its Intellectual Property (IP.) This has little-nothing to do with the actual RPG that is D&D and has everything to do with action figures, video games, and collectibles. D&D the game is the last thing on their minds. The D&D community is not pouring nearly enough money into the game.

My favorite D&D cartoon character, Hank the Ranger, the action figure was selling at our local Game Stop for $24.99! I also saw Dicelings, D&D Monopoly, and a whole host of other products out there for the holidays all with the big red & on them. That’s where the money is now. Hasbro wants to capitalize off of the brand name D&D in the hands of regular people off the street.Will it be enough to pull Hasbro out of the financial hole they’re in? It remains to be seen.

What has the D&D Community done for WotC lately?

Throwing the shills out the window. (Y’all know who you are.) What we’re left with are a lot of decentralized, bickering, often chaotic gamer types who contribute about a third of the amount of money WotC would really like to be getting from us. Their releases since Candlekeep Mysteries have been met with a resounding “meh” at best by the fans.

The fans, some of us, still protest WotC every chance we get. I think someone at Hasbro must be half-ass paying attention as the D&D Team seems to have moved into their own shiny new HQ and are calling themselves “D&D Studios” now. If they’re moving away from WotC completely, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Now they just need new leadership.

#StoptheSub may have finally gotten through to Hasbro/WotC, at least the fans that didn’t sell out the minute SRD 5.1 went CC-BY-SA back at the end of January 2023. There were also several (shills) content creators who when back to promoting all things D&D the minute all the free goody boxes started rolling in the door with all that cool merch in them. 2024 will inevitably see more shilling of the beloved WotC merch no matter how bad it is.

Don’t believe me? #DeckofManyDelays, #DeckofManyErrors.

Some people must think we’re awfully stupid down here in D&D fan land. (Yes, I’m still a big D&D fan, despite the game itself going rapidly down the drain.) The Book of Many Things may have made an appearance on D&D Beyond and has sold digitally, but the physical $100 card sets are nowhere to be found. Or if you have them, they’re probably a janky, poorly cut, flimsy mess of a tarot deck in a very expensive package. Even the simps who shill for WotC D&D had to have noticed by now. It’s bad from all reports so far.
The company who makes Magic: the (bloody) Gathering can’t get a set of cards right? Seriously, WotC, let me talk to you and set the record straight. I’ll be nice about the interview. Promise. (*Oh, wait. They never respond to my email requests for interviews.)

I think for a company who is aiming to go strictly digital, this incredibly costly mistake with the Deck of Many Things boxed set is a brilliant strategic move. Sucks if you ordered the physical deck. However, it proves to big poppa Hasbro that the future of D&D is digital.

The future is here, thanks to Digital sales!

I sincerely hope someone at Wizards of the Coast got their lunch eaten over #DeckofManyDelays. If that wasn’t a deliberate screwup, I’d be expecting to get canned over that move. A company that is known for a card game royally F’d up a gift set containing cards. Is this not the definition of incompetence?

The only saving grace, which may have been intentional, is that WotC/D&D Studios can go to Hasbro and point at the digital sales, which cost far less to produce and are easily fixed when something goes sideways. Sure, things printed on books and cardstock are expensive. Maybe that’s just not the route to follow going forward. Look how bad they screwed up the #DeckofManyFailures.

Haven’t you heard? There’s this slick new Virtual TableTop (VTT) being produced for D&D using the Unreal Engine. It’s kinda like that video game Baldur’s Gate 3 that everyone is talking about. It’ll let you play D&D with friends from anywhere in the world on your state of the art laptop. (Maybe console and mobile eventually.)

Back in 2023 WotC had concerns about printing and even had to raise their prices on D&D products across the board. The big brains at D&D Studios were worried about their massive print runs for the core books way back in May of 2023. This article from EN World points out the concerns. But digital products remain unphased.

Even lowly D&D Beyond rolled out a VTT for their highest paid member tier. It’s called D&D Maps and it actually works. The shills didn’t have to do an alpha test on Maps to tell us how great it was going to be. The new VTT was reviewed by some shills, and it was reported to be the same as the D&D 2023 Showcase… I digress. D&D Maps is supposedly great if you have access. D&D Beyond is planning to expand it with chat and a dice roller, just like a real VTT.

Needless to say, I think WotC/D&D Studios/Hasbro are looking to phase out physical books as much as possible even on the core books. They’ll probably sell them in a slipcase for around $200 if I had to guess. The digital books will be on D&D Beyond for a fraction of the cost of the collectibles, though. Now, imagine if they have a printing snafu like they did with #DeckofManyDelays.

Imagine a world where official D&D was all digital, no physical products. Imagine how much money D&D will rake in with Artificial Intelligence Dungeon Masters, on their own subscription based VTT with plenty of microtransactions for extras. They will be using AI art and writers in no time. The next thing will be AI DMs running the same dozen or so modules ad nauseum 24 hours per day, daily. Physical D&D? Hasbro will probably throw us a bone and put out a red box boardgame with minis and cards with a D&D label on it.

I would hazard a guess that 2024 is looking bleak for the rest of the TTRPG Hobby as well.

There are probably a dozen or so game companies all gunning for Paizo’s stake in the industry. When are we going to figure out that no one really competes with D&D on its level? Pathfinder is the next largest fantasy TTRPG on the market and it brings in a fraction of what D&D makes per year even with WotC messing up the game and cheesing the fans off.

Who scoops up the ball after Pathfinder flops? Who’s the next biggest company in the TTRPG field? Chaosium with Call of Cthulhu? Goodman Games with Dungeon Crawl Classics? Troll Lord with Castles & Crusades? Who’s going to be the next big thing after Pathfinder?

Will Darrington Press wow us with Daggerheart? I’m not holding my breath based on Candela Obscura. Mercer’s crew took Blades in the Dark and put their own minor spin on it. Is Daggerheart going to blow anyone’s mind? Maybe Critical Role really gets behind it instead of D&D, but let’s not forget their ratings could easily fall off. If CR goes away or slows down due to Daggerheart, will another Actual Play (AP) become the next big thing? CR becomes a trickle of a funnel for Daggerheart and WotC finds a new group of shills to draw people D&D, maybe?

Speaking of Aps, I hear Matt Colville is coming out with his own take on 4th/5th Ed D&D. Will it be the coolest thing since original Forgotten Realms? I’m not holding my breath to be honest. I’m sure it’ll be cool, but overall, just another name on the list.

I reluctantly have to add Shadowdark from The Arcane Library onto the list of contenders. I love this game and I have a fondness for its creators, but do I think it’s a Pathfinder 2E killer? Could it even compete with D&D? After a million plus dollar Kickstarter, Shadowdark has been relatively quiet despite the fan community putting out a flood of modules and most of us don’t even have our physical copies yet. It’s an awesome Old School Renaissance game, but can it compete with the big guns?

What about Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press? It’s basically trying to beat 5E D&D by… being 5E? From what I’ve seen, I could be playing 5E. Then again we said that about Pathfinder 1E when 3E D&D died. TotV technically released in 2023, but it’s still going to be a very much 2024 game.

Pathfinder 2E Remastered will be there for us.

Speaking of Pathfinder, have you heard the one about the game company that sold out entire warehouses of their core rulebook in January/February only to turn around and sell four new, remastered core books less than a year later. Like, Paizo just turned on a shop vac and emptied our wallets already in 2023 and will do it again in early 2024. I haven’t heard much about the remastered books and what I have heard didn’t exactly get me excited.

These Remastered things are $59.99 per physical book plus another $19.99 for the PDF on Paizo’s website. I kinda feel stupid buying four new books at basically $60.00 each already. The changes in the Remaster were motivated by a desire for Pathfinder to divorce itself from all of the possibly trademarked D&D terms. Otherwise, it’s still the same as PF2E. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m so tired of game companies playing this “It’s different, but the same game,” crapola.

Yes, I’m looking at you, Jeremy Crawford.

I’m so tired of this new-not-new game that is being played with D&D 5E. For crying out loud, stop lying about the compatibility and put a new name on the damned thing. It’s “One D&D” and then someone said, “5.5” but that wasn’t right according to WotC. We all want to say, “6E” but then Jeremy Crawford comes out with his infinite wisdom and tells us “It’s all compatible with 5E, but…” It’s not.

The same guy told us there was no canon before 2014, yet they made Dragonlance, Spelljammer, and Planescape which were are all originally 2E AD&D boxed sets. The Deck of Many things is originally from the white box Greyhawk set in 1975. But there’s no canon going back that far. Oh, except for Vecna, Bigby, Mordenkainen, Tasha, Strahd, and a whole host of others. When are they going to keep Crawford away from the microphone?

Perhaps the saddest part of the 2023 D&D drama, Open Game License fiasco notwithstanding, has got to be all of the petty drama focused on WotC’s little disasters that seem to accompany every release. There’s a rumor that they’re already back to AI art. No surprise there, really. Their crack editing staff works very hard for a lot of money and lets one error after another go sailing right on by. Brilliant.

The capstone of the rhetoric about 2024 version of 5E is when Crawford and company told us that all rules conflicts will default to the new ruleset. If there are any differences between editions, 2024 is now the default. So, everything’s compatible as long as you look through the rosy 2024 lenses when it comes to rules, classes, magic items, monsters, etc. Just brilliant, guys. (*groan*)

Remember, all of the D&D community drama is tantamount to a big nothing.

I find it incredibly discouraging that for all of the bluster and 2000 word discussions we have Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast/D&D Studios still doesn’t listen, doesn’t show any more respect for the fans, or even care that we people that are very passionate about their product. Hasbro just wants more of that sweet ching-ching to be wrung out of the D&D IP. WotC seems pretty oblivious to everything D&D or Magic: the Gathering fans have to say and spend more time listening to the shills it seems.

D&D Studios has been sending people to conventions. I guess that’s sort of a thing now. My requests for an open Town Hall style meeting about the future of D&D with Crawford and Perkins fell on deaf ears. Somehow I still don’t think they want to hear from the community all that badly. They just keep shipping free product off to the shills every month and then listen to the glowing praise about what a great job they’re doing. I think they’re high of the smell of their own propaganda at this point.

2024 will be a huge year for D&D, undoubtedly. We know there’s an anniversary movie in the works. The new core books are going to drop (online.) No promises of physical products yet. To make the release dates of the core books more mysterious, D&D Studios has mentioned we will be getting more (filler) products leading up to the new-not-new D&D core rulebooks. The VTT might be ready by the end of the year as well, but don’t count on it just yet.

This is already running very long. Thank you for staying with me. More to come on this subject. I appreciate all of you. Have a good week.