The Council of Waterdeep – Art from Tyranny of Dragons On April 3rd, 2023, about 30 community members visited the Wizards of the Coast offices for a Creator Summit. Another 100 joined virtually. The event was prompted by the OGL debacle and was promised to be the first of many, with tangible results to come. A year later, what has changed? What remains to be done? The Briefest of Summaries I should perhaps state that I am a fan of Wizards and D&D. I am not writing this article to weaken D&D, but rather to strengthen it. Okay, here we go. In late 2022 and early 2023 it leaked that Wizar ..read more

Art by James Ryman What kind of campaign do we want to run? We may have many ideas for campaigns in our heads, making choosing the right one, and the RPG with which to run it, hard. Let’s create a process by which we can compare options and pare down to one great campaign. Reviewing Our To-Do List Last time we discussed how, as a campaign ends, we can keep a to-do list for our next campaign. These can be approaches we want to use again, concepts we want to improve upon, or ideas we never got to use and wish we had. Reviewing this list is often telling. The ideas may align along an obvious conc ..read more

Art from the Scoundrels of Skullport game The end of a campaign is the perfect time to reflect on what we enjoyed, wish we had done, and hope to do in the future. This way, the campaign’s end can become the first important step in our next campaign. New Series! A while back, M.T. Black said he would like to see my complete “to-do” list for a home campaign. I’ve kept notes as I completed a few campaigns to share my thoughts in a series of blog articles. And on the Mastering Dungeons podcast, we started a series of episodes exploring worldbuilding and campaign design! Links to the episodes at th ..read more

Come in and play! Recently I had the fortune to co-lead the D&D events at Emerald City Comic Con! How appealing is D&D to this casual geeky crowd? And what lessons can we learn from this experience? Read on. Full tables, some in cosplay! D&D’s Potential Growth is Staggering At Emerald City Comic Con we offered some traditional 4-hour adventures, some 2-hour adventures, and we also offered Learn to Play demos. We sat hundreds and hundreds of players, and more than half were brand new to D&D. I would never expected as many folks as came in. It helped that we were in the official ..read more

D&D’s logo for 2024, D&D’s golden anniversary We may at times feel that what we see and experience in the hobby as individuals is the truth for the larger player base and industry. This is, however, often not the case. Let’s take a look at the history of D&D’s brightest moments and discuss what it may look like if and when 5E’s golden age ends. The Golden ‘80s Here’s something I was sure of when I first started playing D&D. D&D was doing amazingly well. I rolled dice in my first game of D&D in 1983. This is the year the D&D cartoon was on TV, which I managed to see ..read more

Teos and Shawn, having too much fun 25 years since the end of the 2E Planescape line, the setting returns in a three-book 5E slipcase! It is a good, but not fantastic, product. Here is how to make it even better! If you enjoy this article, you can thank the Mastering Dungeons and Alphastream Patreons. After our review, patrons requested a summary guide. Here it is! The product is a slipcase containing three books, a DM screen, and a folded poster map of the Outlands on one side and Sigil on the other. Sigil and the Outlands Book one is the setting book, focusing on the major aspects of the ci ..read more

Art from the 2014 PHB The language of games evolves, just as our society evolves. Seeing the language improve over time is important to me. Our hobby has grown tremendously as RPG companies have done a better job of diversity and inclusivity, creating a game that better represents our society and is more welcoming to all kinds of gamers. Change isn’t easy. Any particular individual won’t necessarily agree with every change when they first see it. The point of this blog post isn’t to agree on every one of these changes right now. Rather, the point is to share these changes so we learn, grow, an ..read more

Enjoying Alex Kammer’s legendary RPG collection It only took one year for GameHole Con to become one of my favorite conventions. Three years later, I am an even bigger fan. You can read about GameHole’s history here. This year I had a fantastic time running games, attending and speaking on panels, and trying new RPGs. Here are the top lessons I learned from each event. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up World Design Seminar: One World, Many Games. One game, Many Worlds My convention began with this seminar run by Shawn Merwin and Joe Raso of Ghostfire Gaming. They discussed the challenges of running a worl ..read more

Art from the Scoundrels of Skullport board game D&D, WotC, and Hasbro typically don’t share revenue numbers. The BookScan data gives us a potential window into estimating D&D’s overall revenue, especially when combined with previous clues. If we can estimate the percentage BookScan might be of D&D’s overall revenue, we can get a rough estimate of individual revenue from different core books, adventures, sourcebooks, and even licensed products. Warning. This is only going to be a very rough estimate! And, this is the last blog article in this series examining the BookScan data. My t ..read more

In all other RPGs and D&D editions, we see diminishing returns. Each follow-up supplement, adventure, or other product will sell fewer copies and have a shorter tail than the first ones. Is 5E D&D seeing declining sales? We are again looking at the BookScan data, and it is worth repeating: BookScan data is normally available only to invited book publishers. BookScan tracks the sales of all books sold in the US to big box stores. It excludes direct sales, digital sales, gaming stores, and comic book stores. It includes Amazon, though Amazon in some years (especially during the pandemic ..read more