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D&D is Evolving Because of Hollywood

The Real Money in Tabletop Games is in Movies and TV

When Wizards of the Coast announced their plans to “evolve” Dungeons & Dragons, fans speculated wildly about the changes in store for the game. But the game itself is quickly becoming irrelevant. WotC, like the rest of Hasbro, is now in the movie business.

Jeremy Crawford, D&D’s Lead Rules Designer, has said that D&D’s canon started anew with the 5th edition. That’s because there was no way they could make a decent movie or TV show based on what came before. D&D was still too generic-fantasy.

D&D has always had a reputation as “Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off”. The recent push to make D&D more fantastical is an attempt to fix that. Candlekeep, Witchlight, and Tasha’s Cauldron helped D&D look and feel very different from LotR, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher.

All this will even apply to the D&D movie currently in production. The ‘Forgotten Realms’ will include all the right people and places, but it will certainly look and feel less medieval than before.

WotC is also taking notes from Marvel. Now that the MCU is opening up a multiversal bag of crazy, WotC is using the word “multiverse” more than “planes”. “Planes” is a Magic: The Gathering thing.

Speaking of Magic, WotC is probably regretting ever publishing setting books based on MTG. D&D’s brand managers held out for years, trying to keep the two franchises separate. It looks like they were right to do so. The Magic setting books muddy D&D’s identity. Magic and D&D look strikingly similar to normies.

D&D will have some company. Projects based on World of Darkness and Blades in the Dark have been mentioned in the Hollywood trades. Blades in the Dark is a Victorian-esque gothic-fantasy crime procedural, and an indie darling to boot. There’s nothing like it on TV right now.

World of Darkness overshadowed D&D in the 90s. It’s also been through the Hollywood machine before, with Kindred: The Embraced. Kindred wasn’t great, but the original D&D movie was terrible and that hasn’t stopped them from trying again.

As the comic book industry learned in the aughts, the endgame for TTRPGs is getting a TV or movie deal. RPG movies are the next comic book movies. Even if D&D is the only franchise mentioned here that crosses the finish line, other games are waiting in the wings. Lancer, iHunt, Rifts and a hundred other RPGs would make great TV.

The final payout for the tabletop RPG industry is now getting the game made into a movie or TV show, just like with comic books. Comic books are like R&D for stories nowadays. Whatever works in the comic books gets to be adapted to the screen. The same will apply to TTRPGs.

I always figured Hasbro would eventually greenlight a 5e Transformers game, but I was wrong. Instead, Hasbro has handed their biggest brand to a third party. The mere existence of the Essence20 games is a slap in the face to Wizards of the Coast. It shows that Hasbro doesn’t think WotC can make games for anyone other than hardcore gamers.

But gameplay doesn’t really matter anymore, and growing D&D’s player base is no longer WotC’s priority. Making TV shows and movies is what drives them now. Fans of the D&D movie probably won’t feel the need to play D&D if they hadn’t already, and WotC won’t care much. MCU fans didn’t start reading comic books in droves and Marvel didn’t care either. There’s more money to be made at the box office. Once D&D hits screens, none of the discourse around gameplay will matter.

Dungeons & Dragons 6th Edition will be an adaptation of the movies and TV shows. Unless they flop, which is still very possible.