The soft reboot of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons looks like a critical hit.
Back in September, publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) decided that instead of releasing a whole new version of the game, as is habit, it would update the now 10-year-old fifth edition of the game by releasing a new set of core rulebooks full of fixes and features, but which is still compatible with the previous ruleset.
Immediate response to the new products indicated the strategy was off to a strong start. A week after the updated 2024 Player’s Handbook hit stores in September, WotC said it was the fastest-selling Dungeons & Dragons product in the game’s fifty-year history, and sold three times as many copies as the previous version did in the same period back in 2014. Of course, fastest-selling isn’t a very useful superlative, since it was possible all the most devoted fans upgraded right away, and the vast remainder of the customer base never would.
Now we’ve got more information, and it’s more positive news for WotC. In a recent call with press to discuss the upcoming third update of the “core rulebooks,” VP of franchise and product for D&D Jess Lanzillo said that the English language version of the 2024 Players Handbook “reached more players hands in four months” than the 2014 edition did, across all languages, in three years.
That’s a very good sign, though it’s worth parsing out a bit more, since “reached more players” isn’t the same as raw sales. Lanzillo also revealed that there are now over 19 million registered users on D&D Beyond, the game’s online toolset, where you can buy and share digital versions of rulebooks. “Master Tier” users of the site, who pay $54.99 a year, gain the ability to share their unlocked rulebooks with friends in their active game campaigns… so that means one player who bought the new book and shared with five other players could count as “reaching” six players. And for all we know WotC is also using some internal estimate to count people who buy a physical book and share it with players across a game table.
There’s also the fact that in 2014, D&D was at something of a nadir, coming off a controversial and unpopular fourth edition ruleset. So just reaching “more” players isn’t hard, since hardly anyone was playing in 2014, and a comparatively huge number of people are playing now.
But still, couched marketing language aside, reaching more players in four months than the 2014 books did in 36 months is a good indicator that many home campaigns are actually shifting their campaigns over to the 2024 rules. Anecdotally, I’m seeing significant sales among players not so much because they care about the 2024 rules changes, but because the new books have lots of other content they want, like new spells and magic items.
And that’s where the third and final update to the core rulebooks comes in. The upcoming (and increasingly anachronistically-named) 2024 Monster Manual will be the biggest in D&D history, with over 500 monsters including 85 entirely new entries and variants.
“One of the biggest goals for this new Monster Manual is just more,” Jeremy Crawford, game director for D&D and co-lead of the book, said on the press call. “There are going to be new critters, there are going to be things you’ve never seen before, but there are also going to be incredible takes on some of your favorite monsters, giving you more versatility, more gameplay, and more opportunities to use them.”
An emphasis on adding new content, and not just changing the rules, says to me that WotC knows it is enjoying an unprecedented era of D&D popularity that is not really under its control. The 2014 5th edition was a brilliantly-designed, highly accessible version of the game that made the modern boom possible, but outside elements including the rise of live play games and the pandemic really made the game take off. Now that so many new players have discovered D&D, they could easily jump ship to other tabletop roleplaying games —like Daggerheart, which is designed by Critical Role’s Matthew Mercer, and sure to get tons of press and attention when it debuts this spring.
And so WotC wants to keep feeding players what they like, instead of making a classic mistake of D&D publishing past: Trying to get people to buy a new edition because it’s different from what they already own. WotC is making the smart move, and it looks like it’s working.
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We will probably get some actual D&D sales numbers when WotC owner Hasbro announces its fourth quarter and full-year 2024 earnings sometime in February. That should correspond nicely with the actual release of the new Monster Manual, which like all D&D books these days, will see a rolling release over the course of several weeks. First availability will be on February 4th at select Wizards Play Network local game stores, and as a digital rulebook for D&D Beyond Master Tier subscribers. D&D Beyond Hero Tier subscribers get access on February 11, and finally the rest of the world gets the book on February 18, 2025.
The book does look like it has exciting new stuff for players, including the addition of what Crawford calls “apex foes,” designed to be epic-level threats for high-level characters. I’m particularly fond of the new Elemental Cataclysm, a kind of all-elements elemental that causes environmental disasters as players fight it. The Blob of Annihilation, a massive ooze with the skull of a dead god inside it, is also pretty damn cool.
WotC released a handful of new images from the new Monster Manual today, and you can get a look at them below.
Colophon
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