The Many Deaths of Dungeons & Dragons | Game On | 3

0:07I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

0:30It's been 50 years since Dungeons & Dragons was first published, but this cult favorite is experiencing a resurgence. What used to be a niche game for fantasy nerds has become a global phenomenon. YouTube channels like Critical Role generate millions of views on their livestream D &D campaigns. And Thursday nights, all eight founders will be returning for Campaign 4, which will still be nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons & Dragons. And we can't forget about the Netflix series Stranger Things, right? Final season just dropped not too long ago, in fact. In season one, the D &D Demon Prince gets a pretty big cameo.

1:06A shadow grows on the wall behind you, swallowing you in darkness. It is almost here. What is it? What if it's the Demogorgon? Oh, Jesus, we're so screwed if it's the Demogorgon. It's not the Demogorgon. This newfound popularity has launched Dungeons & Dragons into what some are calling a Golden Age. Yet despite the buzz, D &D only generates a small slice of the profits for Wizards of the Coast, the studio that manages the game for its parent company, Hasbro. So how can they build on D &D's popularity and continue to expand beyond the tabletop? Guiding us through this quest is Ryan Dancy. He's the chief operating officer for Alderac Entertainment Group, a company specializing in tabletop games.

1:49Before that, he was a VP at Wizards of the Coast, where he helped restructure D &D's rules for the third edition in 2000. Today, Ryan is walking us through how the game became mainstream and what Wizards of the Coast is doing to bring D &D into the digital world. And Ryan's going to provide a quick overview of how this complicated game is actually played, just in case you'd like to stir up a campaign of your own. Sharpen your quill, steady your dice, and get ready to embark on the quest of a lifetime. All that's coming up.

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4:05Ryan Dancy, welcome to Business Wars. Oh, I'm really glad to be here. Very excited. Hey, what was your earliest experience playing Dungeons and Dragons. Do you remember? Yes, I found Dungeons and Dragons when I was in the sixth grade, which would have been around 1980. I learned from a thing that we call the Blue Book, which is one of the early editions of Dungeons and Dragons. I played with a group of kids in my neighborhood. I played regularly until I was in high school. And then in 1991, after my daughter was born, my family, my wife and I, we decided to reboot our old D &D campaign and start playing again as a way to have a chief hobby.

4:40That's great. Were your parents cool with that? I know there was a lot of stuff going around about Dungeons and Dragons back in the day. Yeah, I lived through what the industry calls a satanic panic, but it didn't really affect my household at all. I don't think my parents even knew. They didn't even know. What was it about the game that drew you in in the first place? That is a great question. I think it was partly the feel of the ability to be a creative person, to create interesting things that other people could interact with. And it's really complicated, and I've always been drawn to very complicated things.

5:16Let's talk a little bit about how this game is played, because some of us have had a little experience, others not so much. They sort of hear second and third hand. How do you play it? Can you set the scene for us? Sure. traditionally one person assumes the role of the referee, which is colloquially known as the dungeon master or the DM. And that person's job is running the game. They enforce the rules. They play the parts of non-player characters. They decide what the monsters will do in combat. They narrate using imagination. They create the world for the players. The rest of the players assume the role of one or more characters.

5:57The characters are enumerated on a character sheet that quantifies their skills and abilities and their wealth, their inventory, aspects of their morality, their ethics. There's a bunch of dice and charts and tables, little miniature figures, but it's mostly a game you play in your mind. It's a game about imagination. Is it hard to keep up with all the rules? Because it seems like to me, I would have trouble remembering, okay, this person has this much power and these sorts of vulnerabilities and all that. And then you've got to sort of keep up with that in real time, too, because you're playing against other people.

6:32Yeah, for sure. There is a very high cognitive load, especially on the Dungeon Master. In the beginning, when you're learning how to play, you try to keep things very simple and you'll be reusing the same kinds of monsters and the characters will be doing the same kinds of actions pretty repetitively. And so the complexity of the game kind of grows over time, the more you play it and the more comfortable you become with it, the more you're able to access more and more complex parts of the game. But it is insanely complicated. And of course, in most games, you're using dice. Here you're talking about, I guess, what, a 20-sided die?

7:10Is it very much sort of driven by people taking turns with the die? Yes, there are a lot of dice in Dungeons & Dragons. Not just the 20-sided dice, but dice of all different sizes. The reason the 20-sided dice gets so much attention is that it is the dice that you are typically rolling when the most important things happen in the game. A roll of that die could decide whether your character lives or dies. Literally. Yeah. Okay. All right. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it strikes me that there's a kind of person who's drawn to Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't for everybody. You know, when I started playing, it was definitely not for everybody.

7:49But today, there is a much broader interest in this hobby and many, many, many more people play it. It has become a lot more mainstream. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that life has become more complicated and people are, their entertainment choices now involve a wide variety of really complicated things. People who play Pokemon or video games, they're playing fairly complicated games. And so a role-playing game isn't that weird anymore in terms of its level of complexity. We joke in the industry that Dungeons & Dragons is 20 minutes of fun packed into four hours. And that is both true and a little bit of a joke.

8:32Like you are usually having fun for the whole four hours, but a lot of that fun is just interacting with your friends, not necessarily engaging directly with the rules of the game. When you're looking at tabletop role play, what's D &D's biggest competition? What would you say? You know, on some level, I would say that Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have any competition. Really? There are lots of other tabletop role playing games, but in terms of their number of players and the revenue they generate annually, they are nothing compared to Dungeons & Dragons. The entire rest of the industry combined might be 10 % the size of D &D.

9:06But there are a lot of other games and there is a big enough audience that even a small percentage of D &D's audience is still enough people to allow hundreds of people to have a full-time job making a role play. Interesting. That's really fascinating to me. I want to go back to something that you said, because I think there's something important and maybe revealing in this idea that a lot of people who haven't played D &D, I think that there's this idea that, you know, at least once upon a time, it was considered to be a kind of nerdy game. And I'm curious about the culture of Dungeons & Dragons players.

9:46Does it tend to be more insular or does it tend to be open? For instance, I've gone into like a comic book store and seen people playing in the back and kind of wanted to learn more about it, but I didn't know whether or not I'm kind of an invader or whether someone would be open to sort of teach me how to play in the course of a game. What's the culture like? I think you would find it very receptive. My experience is that most people would be more than happy to tell you at length about their role-playing game experiences. They're hobbyists, and like any hobbyist, they're enthusiasts, and they love to share that enthusiasm.

10:23And now, you know, here in 2025, it isn't kind of a strange thing that no one's ever heard of before. It's got a lot more mainstream accessibility to it. So it isn't, it has never been and isn't now the kind of thing where people are interested in hiding it or hiding away. It's mostly a question of where are you going to find them? And are they going to have an opportunity to teach you something or talk to you about that game? And my experience is that most people would love to. My sense of it, too, is that there are a lot of people who'd love to break that barrier and sort of get in, especially since, you know, we've seen the game sort of amplified in, you know, in other media as part of the Big Bang Theory.

11:07It was featured in the sitcom community, you know. We've seen it come up in Stranger Things, right? I mean, it seems like there's a lot of buzz that's sort of getting built up around this. Is it still drawing in new players or not so much? What's your sense of it? It's definitely drawing in new players. This is a golden age for Dungeons and Dragons. It is bigger today than it has ever been. Really? By maybe a whole order of magnitude. And I think that is attributable in large measure to the fact that it's getting so much mainstream exposure. Who's playing it these days? I mean, it's certainly more than just the people I was talking about in the comic book store, right?

11:43Yeah. I think the biggest change over the lifetime of Dungeons and Dragons is the gender ratio. It used to be that there were very few women playing these games, but today I would say that number is probably close to 50-50. And in some places, there's probably more women playing it than men. That's a relatively new development, and it's something that our industry is still kind of grappling to understand. But anecdotally, that definitely seems to be the trajectory that at least achieving gender parity has probably already happened. I remember, you know, we were talking a little bit about, you know, how its popularity has been picking up online.

12:23And there was this web series called Critical Role, which was launched in 2015 on Twitch with live streams of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and that sort of thing. And a couple of years later, there was a podcast called Not Another D &D Podcast and several others after that. Do you think that that's had or how much do you think that these sorts of shows have helped boost the game's profile? Or is this mostly for people who are already playing, do you think? My intuition is that those programs have done more to grow Dungeons and Dragons than anything else that has happened in the last 20 years.

12:59Yes. And the reason is that they provide a model for people to understand what it is that you do when you play the game. So a lot of people have heard about Dungeons and Dragons, but they've no idea how to play it. And if you sit down and you watch the critical role people play for an hour, you'll get a pretty good sense of what this thing is and how it works. and that just demystifies it and makes it so much more accessible. And they are professionals. They are great at what they do. So when you watch those people play Dungeons & Dragons, you are watching like the best version of Dungeons & Dragons.

13:34It's like watching Tiger Woods play golf. I'm not going to go to the Lynx and play like Tiger, but I have seen what it looks like when golf is played at the highest level. So when I watch a group like Critical Roleplay, I am aspirationally seeing what I could get to maybe someday if I applied myself and practiced and really got into the hobby. Now, in the real world, though, how does that translate when it comes to sales? Does that line up linearly with an increase in sales for D &D? All of the data that we have, and none of that data is very public, is that sales of Dungeons & Dragons are bigger today than they have ever been, by a lot.

14:18And that is kind of not surprising when you consider how much more exposure the game has than it has ever had. Those two things should correlate, and I think that they do. Hey, let's take a short break. Our guest is Ryan Dancy. He's a gaming executive who oversaw Dungeons & Dragons while at the game studio Wizards of the Coast. When we come back, we're going to be hearing more about the Hasbro acquisition and D &D's struggle to make a profit. Stay with us.

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16:45Welcome back to Business Wars. Our guest is Ryan Dancy. He was a VP at Wizards of the Coast back in the 1990s when Hasbro acquired the brand and oversaw Dungeons & Dragons at the time. Ryan, I'm curious, how did you get involved with Dungeons & Dragons in a professional capacity? Did you imagine that you'd be doing this when you grew up? I did. You did? That's great. I did. I am unbelievably fortunate that something that I told people I wanted to do when I was a little kid is something I actually grew up to do. Wow. And that is to publish Dungeons & Dragons. And that story is a story of strange plot twists and lucky occurrences and kind of being in the right place at the right time.

17:32But in the late 1990s, I found myself being asked to take over and run the Dungeons & Dragons business at Wizards of the Coast. That's crazy. They just happened, they knew that you were an ace at it or what? I was a part of a company that brokered the transaction for Wizards of the Coast to buy TSR. TSR is the company that published Dungeons & Dragons before Wizards of the Coast. And I had known the senior leadership at Wizards of the Coast for a long time. Peter Atkinson, who was the CEO at that time, and I were friends. And he knew that I had a significant interest in Dungeons & Dragons. And I think that he thought that he could trust me to execute his vision for what he wanted Dungeons & Dragons to be after Wizards bought it.

18:18And I hope that I delivered on that vision for him. Something that struck me in the course of putting together our story around the rise of Dungeons & Dragons is how important it was to almost all of the central players in the trajectory of the game. How important it was that it be in the right hands, that it be nurtured. You know what I mean? And it's clear that that's part of the story of your rise. I know that your team at Wizards of the Coast famously restructured the rules for the game's third edition to make it more accessible. Could you say something about those changes? It must have been tough, I guess, in some respects, knowing how much the longtime players revered the game.

19:04And now you're going to institute changes that some might have felt like, well, this is really upsetting our universe in a sense. No? Yes, absolutely. Everybody who becomes involved with the business of publishing Dungeons & Dragons accepts a very high degree of responsibility towards the community to do their best to make the game as good as it can be. I think everybody who has ever sat in that chair or had those jobs has felt that sense of responsibility. And I certainly definitely felt that. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and acquired Dungeons & Dragons, there had already been a plan to make a new version of the game that TSR had been planning.

19:44And Peter Atkinson, who is the CEO of Wizards, definitely wanted to make a new version of the game. The game at that time, this is the late 1990s, was in its second edition. And the second edition of Dungeons & Dragons was kind of a sprawling mess. There were hundreds of source books and adventures and rule books that had been published, novels, video games. It was all over the place. And game design had evolved quite a bit since the last time the rules had been refreshed. And Wizards of the Coast was a very important part of the evolution of the art and science of game design. The people who worked at Wizards were very interested in trying to make the best version of D &D they could make.

20:30My team was the brand and business management team. And our job was to guide the brand and set the strategy and help develop the community. And I partnered with a guy named Bill Slavisek, who was the head of the tabletop RPG R &D division at Wizards. And his team was responsible for actually writing those rules and creating those products. And Bill and I had a very collegial and very good relationship. We were on the same page about what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. And Peter was there every step of the way to make sure that his vision for what the game should be was coming to fruition.

21:06And he had a very strong vision and he's a very good leader. So there was a lot of people who were involved in making the third edition. And I think the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons succeeded. Like, it's a great version of the game. So I'm very, very happy to have my name in those books. Now, you famously advocated for D &D to pivot toward the OGL, the Open Gaming License, which I know was originally met with some pushback within the company. Could you say more about that time period there and why you were so certain that was the best way forward? Yes, I can. The Open Gaming License is a solution to a business problem.

21:44And the business problem is how do you upgrade the core rules of the game when you have a giant population of players who have added to those core rules all sorts of material that has been published in the past 30 years? There is no way that Wizards of the Coast could possibly have written new versions of all that content. So by creating a mechanism by which the community could create their own versions and their own content for Dungeons and Dragons, we basically unleashed thousands of people's creativity and allowed them to contribute directly back to the community itself via the mechanism of the license.

22:28The open gaming license is based on the idea of free software and open source software. I was born and raised in Seattle and Wizards of the Coast is based in Seattle. And we are surrounded by people who are in the tech industry. And so the idea about open source software was very well understood, I think, by everybody. It was in the air. Yeah, for sure. It was in the air. Absolutely. And yeah, it was a little bit of a conceptual leap to say, can we apply this idea to a game? But Dungeons and Dragons as a game is a lot like a piece of computer software. So it wasn't really that weird when we kind of got into it and started to work on how to make it happen.

23:10I was very privileged to work with a guy named Brian Lewis, who was the general counsel at Wizards of the Coast. And Brian structured the license in a way that achieved our objectives and basically made that license the de facto system for people who wanted to work in this part of tabletop gaming for 25 years. I know that there was a point where a decision was made because there was a need to increase revenue. Wizards of the Coast was considering revoking the open gaming license or if not revoking, monetizing it in a way that outraged a lot of fans. What was your take as the guy who implemented that policy in the first place?

23:51Yeah, I was pretty unhappy. That's saying it pretty lightly. Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like understatement there. Yeah. First of all, let me say that the license is constructed in such a way that it cannot be deauthorized or revoked. No matter what Hasbro wants to say about it, it cannot be. It's permanent. It's forever. They have their reasons for what they tried to do. And I don't think they were very honest with the community about what those reasons were. And they certainly didn't go about trying to make changes to the license in a way that had community support. And the end of all of that was they sacrificed a billion dollars of future value.

24:31They alienated core members of their community. And in the end, they ended up with no change. And you could argue there's, you know, even less legal protections around Dungeons & Dragons today than there was before they started with that attempt. But do you think that the brand has earned back players' trust? I mean, that's sort of core to what this is going at. There are people now who will never trust Wizards of the Coast because of this. It's unfixable. Really? Is that a huge percentage of the community? Probably not a huge percentage. But when you damage a relationship like that, for some people, it is just unfixable.

25:09And that's unfortunate. Wizards had earned a lot of really strong community engagement over the years that they've owned Dungeons & Dragons, and they squandered a fair bit of it. We've sort of skipped over a part of the history of Dungeons & Dragons that I think we need to dig into a little bit more. What do you remember from the Hasbro acquisition of Wizards of the Coast? What was the team sentiment at the time? Yeah, it was fascinating. So Hasbro is a Fortune 500 company. They have been in the toy and game business for decades. They're based in Rhode Island. They have a very East Coast mentality about things.