In its 50th year, Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than ever. Here is the reason
When Live Nation host Brennan Lee Mulligan told his Dungeons & Dragons series, Dimension 20he could play a game at Madison Square Garden, he couldn’t believe it. Literally.
“There was a feeling that, You must be kidding,” remembers the creator. “Like, that can’t be true.”
Madison Square Garden, after all, is one of the most prominent venues in the world, with a capacity of 20,000 people, while. Dimension 20 is a cult show on the comedy streaming service, Dropout, in which a handful of progressive gamers move between Dungeons & Dragons games, speaking in high-pitched vernacular, for two and a half hours at a time. For the celebrities of the show, statistics were not statistics.
“We were like, hey, let’s do it, and if we get a few thousand people, what a cool, fun thing to pull off,” said Aabria Iyengar, a regular on the show, who will serve as Game Master. next season, which starts on September 25. “It was sold out in negative-10 minutes.”
When the team behind the “Gauntlet at the Garden,” as the January 2025 show has been named, was accused of selling out in a few hours — as were many viewers — perhaps it wasn’t fair. Thanks to the changing pop culture vibe, loose game rules, and peripheral content like this Dimension 20an imaginatively inspired tabletop game has, in its 50sth year, more popular than ever.
How famous is it? Last year’s movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thievesgrossed over $200 million worldwide, a huge improvement over the $34 million gross of its franchise predecessor back in 2000. One of the biggest video games of 2023, Baldur’s Gate III, takes its setting, mechanics, and story directly from D&D. D&D nights at D&D-themed bars and pubs are popping up far and wide; and a fan-made D&D game, Here Are Dragons—A New Musicaluntil it opened Off-Broadway in 2022, followed by the first official D&D live theater experience, this year A bar of twenty. Not to mention the ever-growing boutique market for 20-sided dice. Then there is the tabletop game itself.
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro vertical that produces D&D, grossed more than $1.3 billion by 2021—the first time it has surpassed a billion dollars. Even when Hasbro reported a huge loss in 2023, WoTC’s revenue remained above $1 billion. And while the figures for 2024 won’t be available until next year, the game’s 50th year—a milestone the USPS commemorates with D&D stamps—has brought new programs, products, and licensed items that have sparked excitement.
The tabletop game, which involves interactive storytelling between a group of people each taking on different fictional roles, was less than equal 26 years ago, when Mulligan started playing at age 10. In fact, the wider culture of the game is very important. the part carried a shameful insult at the time: the red letter D for Dork.
“When I was a kid, it was bad to be a bully,” Mulligan said. “And then in the early 2000s, The Lord of the Rings he was winning Oscars and superhero movies were starting to appear. Nerdy culture is just starting to come out of the shadows. “
When the Netflix signature hits Stranger Things made the game midway through its first season in 2016, then it became very easy for D&D-curiosity to offer their first armor. The watershed Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, released in 2014, was created with accessibility in mind. It dictates a byzantine set of game rules, emphasizing logical play over complex combat. Witches of the Coast even set ground rules for the first time online, lowering the barrier to entry.
Around the same time, in early 2010, a flood of D&D-related content—what became known as Actual Play shows—began to appear online. Important Role appeared in 2012, when a group of trained voice actors gathered The TMNTSam Riegel started playing Dungeons & Dragons together on Twitch. The appeal of D&D, at its core, is simply telling a story away from one’s friends. That shows that Important Role, The Adventure Zoneagain HarmonQuest it is soon revealed, however, that when these friends are funny, talkative, and have great personalities, the game is as fun to watch as it is to play. Important Role became so popular, it spawned an animated series on Amazon Prime, now in its third season; while The Adventure Zone came up with a series of New York Times-best-selling graphic novels, starting in 2018 Here Are Gerblins.
Although Dimension 20 arrived in 2018, after the arrival of the first wave of Actual Play shows, it quickly distinguished itself by emphasizing genre fusion. The first campaign from Mulligan and co. build a tone with Fantasy High, which moves the setup of a typical high school sword-and-board romp. It would later be followed by epic mashups like Candy Crown, which includes connective tissue between the board game Candy Land and Game of Thronesexploring the bloody King of Candy Land’s path to power.
“Dimension 20 he created a bunch of stories that really shook up the way people understood what you could do in D&D,” said Iyengar, who was a fan of the game before entering 2020. “It’s a mechanical system for telling stories, but Brennan’s genius is in repeatedly showing how many different species of stories to tell. It doesn’t just have to be your run-of-the-mill superhero adventure.”
Another reason why people draw Dimension 20 and its peers that the abundance of seasoned musicians in these games creates opportunities for humor in this game. While D&D has always had a reputation among critics as taking something inherently silly too seriously, the rise of Actual Play games has helped change this perception. A change that found its expression in 2023 D&D movie, starring Chris Pine, which was a full-on comedy.
“I think what they put into it [Honor Among Thieves],” said Mulligan, “because although the game in official use should present itself as the height of epic fantasy, it is a game that many people play at their table others epic fantasy and more, ‘Oh no, we got this goblin drunk in a bar and now we’ve dressed him up like a clown and we’re sneaking him out of town in a wheelbarrow because there’s money on his head. .’”
As a show that takes an epic journey through the amazing places of the Dungeons & Dragons universe, Dimension 20 it was probably intended from the start to connect with Dropout’s audience. (It helps that the show has a slew of high-profile guest stars like writer Hank Green, Bob the Drag Queen, and Monét X Change, the latter two appearing, naturally, in the 2023 Dungeons and Drag Queens campaign, alongside from Jujubee, Alaska. , and Mulligan in drag.) No one involved in the show, however, could have predicted how much it would connect.
Mulligan’s first big moment was when he walked into the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo in the show’s second year and found a huge banner with his face on it. (He describes the experience as a “divisive episode.”) As the band embarked on its “Time Quangle” tour of the UK and Ireland this past spring, the idea of playing Madison Square Garden still seemed like a myth. Of course, there was a precedent, with Important Role to sell out London’s Wembley Arena, which seats 12,000, by 2023. The fact that their show had reached such heights, however, is something they are still grappling with, as Mulligan is waist deep in organizing the Gauntlet at The Garden.
Equally impressive is the idea that D&D, and Dimension 20 by extension, it is likely to grow more in the zeitgeist, says Iyengar.
“My incredibly silly dream is to see that moment when pop culture meets D&D, and agents of mega A-list celebrities are like, ‘You should be seen playing D&D. I want it to be so ubiquitous that everyone you know and everyone you’ve heard of has tried it at some point,’” he says. “That’s the dream, and I feel like it’s not that far off.”
