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Why Adult D&D Novels Have Disappeared and Were They Any Good?

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What happened to D&D novels? Were they any good? As someone who read a lot of them as a kid, and with the game booming right now, I decided to re-visit and find out. Let's briefly go over the history to provide some perspective. For decades TSR (and then WotC) published novels as part of the D&D IP (producing 623  before licensing them out to HarperCollins in 2017). In the early days some of these became very successful, but Hasbro (who own WotC) has given up on it (assuredly because it had ceased being profitable). Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, who had taken Dragonlance  independent early on, also stopped publishing five years earlier (clearly for similar reasons). To touch on the article cited above, the author (Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone ) did not dive into the declining sales numbers like I did  researching my article last summer and so he doesn't draw the obvious conclusion that you don't slow down or stop publishing if it's making you money (the num...
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The Lessons of D&D 5e as the next Iteration Approaches

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Since I haven't written about D&D much, who am I? I've been playing the game since the early 80s (AD&D and Basic D&D), mostly as a DM, but sometimes as a player. I've played every edition and I've enjoyed 5e the most. I do play other TRPG's ( Call of Cthulhu  particularly), but D&D is my favourite. As I've discussed before ( cf ), it's not easy to figure out what exactly has made Dungeons & Dragons  so popular of late ( graph source ). We know it's not the edition (which came out in 2014), although its accessibility helps; it's not Critical Role  (2015), although its existence helps; it's not references in Stranger Things  (2016), although that helps; and it's not just D&D Beyond  (2017), although that platform is almost ubiquitously used now. The only conclusion I can reach is that it's an accumulation of many things, with its beginnings coming from things like Harry Potter  (1997), which introduced fantasy elemen...
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Critical Role Numbers and a look at the Bottle Rocket Pattern of D&D Advice Channels

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I had a lot of fun writing about D&D last time  and during that process I had thoughts that didn't fit into the scope of that article. Since posting it I wanted to update Critical Role 's relative and comparative popularity with itself  (as in, this campaign vs the others), so that and my original idea about DM advice channels are the focus of this article. Numbers reflect actual interest  (as opposed to opinion/hype), so here's how campaign three compares to prior CR iterations (using YT numbers as the largest and most accessible dataset--it does not include Twitch or podcast numbers). Before we jump into it, let's acknowledge that the older campaigns have had more time to accumulate views (although simply having time doesn't axiomatically mean significant views are gained). I've targeted episodes 15+ to avoid number bumps from casual interest (viewers at this point would, presumably, be fairly committed). The numbers are in millions, with the highest in g...
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The Secret Behind Critical Role's Success and the Failure to Imitate It

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I've been investing more time in TRPGs (I currently run two D&D campaigns), and that's brought to mind a question: why does  Critical Role  utterly dominate the D&D streaming scene? It absorbs so much of the space that you can find multiple videos discussing 'the Matt Mercer effect' on the game ( cf ), which is really more of a 'Critical Role' effect. It's extremely rare for one show to cast its shadow over an entire community, particularly over such a sustained period of time. Critical Role debuted back in March, 2015, and the group not only earns the largest payouts from Twitch ( cf ), but no other streamed D&D campaign comes anywhere near its viewership--why is that? It's a question no one that I can find has seriously explored. Let me add: my exploration isn't about value judgements --whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to Critical Role (or any of the other streamer referenced here), it's not about what is good or bad, bu...
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