The 2024 edition of the Player’s Handbook “has become the fastest-selling Dungeons and Dragons product in the game’s 50-year history”, according to publisher Wizards of the Coast. The massive sales success comes after two years which, as a commentator who spends a lot of time scrutinising the firm, seem to have been characterised by corporate missteps and an increasingly sour fan community.
Everyone in the Wargamer office plays DnD, and we think the new edition is a great evolution of a game that we love – see our DnD 2024 Player’s Handbook review for an in-depth analysis. But as professional muckrakers, since the start of 2023 we’ve spent almost as much time reporting on Wizards’ controversial and unpopular decisions as we have writing about new DnD classes or reviewing books when they arrive on the DnD release schedule.
I expect a certain degree of online outcry about everything that happens in the tabletop space – we gamers are opinionated folks. But, as someone who watches online discussions around DnD closely, it has seemed to me that DnD’s reputation has soured substantially since 2022, and there have been more detractors declaiming the game and the company behind it.
The trouble began at the very start of 2023, when proposed revisions to the DnD Open Gaming License were leaked. This licensing document was something of a sacred text, with historical significance as a driving force in the early ‘00s RPG boom, and setting a standard for the industry that encouraged collaboration and free idea sharing.
The changes would have made it far harder for fans, other companies, and content creators to create third-party content connected to DnD, with licensing fees headed to Hasbro. It was universally reviled.
Other companies scrabbled to launch their own games with open licenses, fans questioned the morality and legality of revising the license, and Wizards of the Coast made a series of humiliating walk backs, ending with it placing the DnD 5th edition system reference document into the Creative Commons.
My colleague Matt Bassil observed at the time that “DnD has turned fans into cynics”. The whole OGL fiasco seemed like a truly pointless bonfire of community goodwill for a game that was widely beloved. While nothing has matched that nadir, it has seemed to me that Wizards of the Coast cannot stop making unforced errors that irritate fans.
In August 2023, fans identified AI-generated artwork in the supplement “Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants”, at a time when discourse about the ethics of the technology was particularly active. Wizards promised new guidelines that would explicitly prohibit artists from submitting work with AI contents.
In November 2023, a marketing campaign for Magic the Gathering was also spotted using AI art, again apparently the result of an oversight.
In December 2023, Hasbro laid off around 1,100 staff, just in time for Christmas, including many members of the DnD design team at Wizards of the Coast. According to Swen Vincke, CEO at Larian Studios, this included almost every staff member inside WotC who helped to make smash-hit CRPG Baldur’s Gate 3 a reality.
In an interview in March 2024, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks was enthusiastic about the potential for AI technology in DnD, and in September speaking to investors he speculated on its uses in DnD other than generating art or text for DnD books. The technology remains controversial.
There’s been a double-whammy of snafus around the launch of the new DnD 2024 Player’s Handbook. Wizards’ initial plans for DnD Beyond would have seen the 2024 versions of spells and magic items removed from the interactive character builder. It was an unpopular decision, given players had paid money to get access to those items and weren’t all done playing DnD 5e, and one that Wizards reversed.
Then, a mysterious administrative error saw multiple customers’ pre-orders for the new Player’s Handbook cancelled without explanation.
I’ve also seen complaints about the substance of the new edition, some of it rooted in a smallness of imagination, such as complaints about sushi and tacos appearing in artwork for a fantasy game in a made up world, or the visual representation of the DnD races.
Perhaps there really is no such thing as no bad press – the launch of the new Player’s Handbook must be considered a massive success. It’s possible that it may have sold better if Wizards of the Coast’s reputation had been nothing but roses, but there’s no way to know,
I’m taking several lessons from this, which reinforce opinions I’ve held for some time. First, that the most visible comments online aren’t necessarily the most representative of what the fandom is actually thinking. Second, that the people who are online enough to take part in ‘the discourse’ – the hardcore fans, the journalists, the commentariat – are not the main part of the audience for DnD. We’re not even a representative sample.
If you are one of those who still doesn’t fancy DnD 2024, make sure you check out Mollie Russell’s thoughts on Tales of the Valiant. It’s a 5e-adjacent RPG that Kobold Press committed to making at the height of the OGL debacle, and followed through on after Wizards’ walked back all its unpopular announcements.
Source: Wargamer
