We Aren't the Target Audience

And That's Great

I have neighbors who play D&D

I have some wonderful ‘close by’ neighbors, the sort of neighbors everyone wants to have. Funny, friendly, kind, and just great people. You bump into them on a walk and everyone is happy to stand around and talk for 30 minutes. They’re late 30’s and very active with a wide circle of friends (who are also all nice). They’ve lived in the neighborhood a few years and we’re happy to know them.

Not too long after they moved in they asked a question - had I ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons? Because they play.

The discussion that followed is one I am fairly used to because my grown sons run various D&D games ‘In The Wild’ and often recruit from the ‘never-played’ or contemporary players.

Some of the highlights of the discussion are:
-They couldn’t tell me what edition they play because they didn’t know it had multiple editions.
-They host the game at their place about 3 times a year and play on average every other month ‘but wished they played more’.
-When they play everyone shows up in costume as their character and tries to stay in-character as much as possible
-They have a fair amount of merchandise ranging from custom dice to official figures to rather nice art. They often give & receive D&D stuff as gifts.
-Most of the other players in their group are like them as far as costumes, merch, and so on, but play 2-3 times a month, even more.
-Their DM and about 1/3rd of the other players are in Adventurer’s Guild and love going to conventions.
-They’d never heard of the OSR or really any other games, although they knew their DM played ‘some other game, too’.

And the marketing info WotC published a few years ago means their group looks like the average players - about 3/5th male, largely in their mid-30’s, and so on. My neighbors actually play less often than average, even a lot less.

Their party gets 10,000% more attention from Hasbro than I ever will.

This is because in most hobbies the regular guys are the core audience and the ‘filthy casuals’ like my neighbors are the primary growth target. Golfing, fishing, tennis, knitting, hiking, you name it, the core audience and the prime growth sector are the same.

In all of these hobbies, including TTRPGs, the hardcore, alternate rules & tools tinkerers are the outliers and the extreme theorists are the outer fringe. Look at comic books - the average consumer has a few titles they follow, buys related merchandise, might go to a convention from time to time. The publishers count on those customers and want to turn them into more frequent convention goers, higher-volume merch buyers, and maybe add 2-3 more titles. The fans that go to cons every year and but 8-9 titles a month? Core money-makers, they aim to keep them happy.

The people that can quote deep lore on obscure titles, know hundreds of characters by sight, but don’t buy more than 2-3 comics total a year, never go to cons, and don’t have mainstream merchandise?

“Meh” say the major publishers.

The super-into it guys that never, ever buy from the top 5 publishers (and even openly hate them) and spend a lot of time online talking about how comics ought to be as they write 9,000 word essays on comics from the ‘70’s and promote tiny two-man comics that are self-published?

Totally invisible to the big guys unless they are seen as a distraction marketing needs to downplay lest they discourage the prime growth audience from become core audience.

I bring up comics because I am one of the ‘deep lore, support micro-publishers’ etc. types. The last big-name comic I bought was a 1988 issue of JLI I got at the local shop to replace a damaged one. I talk a lot about classic comics and what I think is wrong about current publishing, but I have no illusions that DC and Marvel care. Nor do mainstream readers.

This is another key point. Not only are these fringe hobbyists obscure and largely irrelevant to the major manufacturers, the core audience might, might, have heard of them and primary growth sector usually has no idea they exist. My neighbors had heard of Critical Roll but never watched it. Do you think they have any idea who (randomly picked) Greyhawk Grognard might be?!

“But Rick,”
you say,
”You’re way outside of the core audience of TTRPG companies and you talk about TTRPGs all the time!”

Yes, I do. I said I am not the core or target for Hasbro, DC, or Marvel. I didn’t say I don’t matter.

The guy writing tens of thousands of words on the first decade of the Fantastic Four comic ends up with hundreds, maybe thousands, of readers and a lot of interesting dialog and commentary. Hardcore knitters can develop popular patterns that reach hundreds of fellow knitters and create a true online community of like-minded hobbyists. Independent comic book creators can produce some truly great work that is enjoyed by thousands of people. This is because virtually every hobby has subcultures and I am very well aware that I am in one. Subcultures exist and last to meet the interests of hobbyists, after all.

Look at the OSR. It started because around the turn of the Century it was expensive to impossible to get copies of B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1e, AD&D 2e, etc. Hackmaster 4e proved there was an interest and the OSR rose to the occasion, releasing various clones of the original rules so that people could play them, whether again or for the first time. Some great originality poured out, especially at first, and the subculture flourished. We see that in most of the niche subcultures in the TTRPG space (although not all!) and this is beneficial to the people in the subculture or interested in it.

I’d argue, though, that the OSR is shrinking because its main reason to exist, lack of access to the original rules, was solved when those rules because readily available again a bit over a decade ago. Don’t get me wrong, many OSR games have fans (you could even say they have core audiences and prime growth targets of their own) and a few evolved so much and provide so much ‘targeted value’ that they will continue a long time (ACKS comes to mind), but overall the OSR has, IMO, run its course and will evolve into something else.

In short, the OSR identified a niche hobby problem, flourished by solving it, the problem no longer exists, and the surviving elements of the subculture will be those elements that retain to love & nostalgia as well as the top 5% of innovation.

That still doesn’t matter to Hasbro

The OSR did some great work, has a lot of good writers, and generates a fair amount of online content.

Hasbro spent a few bucks leveraging a corner of that to convince people to buy 5e, once. When they realized there might be a few bucks in it they just put the older editions in online stores and, as I mentioned, removed the key element of the OSR origin story.

While I openly admit I don’t really watch much YouTube content on D&D (or anything else, really) my brief research indicates an OSR YT channel with 10k+ subscribers is doing well. Individual videos with name-recognition actors in them get 40k - 50k views. Meanwhile the official WotC D&D channel has well over 700k+ subscribers and more than a dozen videos with more than a million views.

Again, if WotC notices these subcultures at all they will take a little time using existing assets to try to flip some of the subculture members into their core or target demographics. Investing actual time and actual energy to add 0.2% more views and perhaps 0.1% more sales doesn’t make economic sense since they already have a fully-funded marketing machine doing its job.

We’re not ‘saving the community’ nor ‘the hobby’

What I’ve been saying is that hobby subcultures largely exist for their own sake. We are in a subculture because it is valuable to us for reasons personal to those of us in the subculture. If it was innately valuable to the larger audience it wouldn’t stay a subculture.

Consider tiki music (yes, tiki music). Tiki culture is still alive as a subculture, and a fun one, and live music is still a popular element of tiki. Thus, there are still tiki bands. I am a fan, I buy their music, I play their music, and I hope there are tiki bands for the next 100 years.

I don’t expect tiki music to be part of the Olympic opening ceremony or to top the charts of the Billboard Hot 100. I don’t expect to convince all of my friends and family to become fans of tiki music. I don’t argue that tiki music is the best music for relaxing after a tough day even if it is the best music for me to relax after a tough day. I play it, some people ask me what it is, and a few of them like it. I’ll send links so people that are really interested can listen to it on their own.

I don’t expect that if I lecture others long enough and hard enough I can “save” popular music via the Tikiyaki Orchestra. I don’t tell people that if they aren’t blasting tiki at the red light as a form of evangelization then they are failing to save music from the forces of entropy and decay.

Likewise, if the OSR was going to “save” (read: make other people play what you want them to play) D&D it would have done so years ago. There is not some titanic struggle between Good and Evil going on in golf or crochet or TTRPGs (although maybe in pop music), what you have is the main manufacturer(s), the core audience, the prime target, and the fringe elements.

This, by the way, is why subcultures can have such fierce little battles within themselves. Its the old joke about universities.

Q: “Why are university faculty politics so fierce and cutthroat?”
A: “Because the stakes are so small.”

If the OSR turned on each other and drove each other off the internet tomorrow WotC and the vast majority of regular gamers would learn about it well after the fact, if at all. I don’t expect that to happen - in general, the OSR (like most subcultures) is pretty friendly internally. But those few that want to be Important or that hope to monetize it can become very emotional, even aggressive, about their personal goals. The results of those people trying to turn a subculture into something about themselves is one of the few things that can really shrink a subculture quickly.

This is because of a key error made by some people in niche subcultures. They think they are in a little pond fighting for scraps. They aren’t. They are actually are just hanging out with pals in a corner of the vast ocean with tremendous resources available.

Enough rambling, what are you trying to say?

I’m trying to say that niche subcultures ultimately exist so people can share stuff they love. That means we should help, support, and encourage each other, not fight each other like those 3 extra video views means anything.

Of, more simply,

Relax, its just elf games.