RPG A Day 2020--Day 9--Light

RPG A Day 2020: Day 9—Light

I’ll do the easy thing today and make this the sister to yesterday’s entry.

After the Satanic Panic of the 80’s—which surprisingly still maintains a small residual effect here and there even today or at least as late as 2016 in my case—the hobby slowly came into the main stream.

As I mentioned yesterday, the D&D cartoon had already made it to Saturday mornings right in the thick of 80’s panic, but more and more benchmarks appeared to normalize the hobby here are a few that I remember in the 90’s to the 00’s not necessarily in order:

1. Mass Produced Boardgames—these included: Heroquest, Dragonstrike, Battlemaster, Nightmare—complete with a video “Gate keeper” who acted a lot like a Dungeon Master, and any number of those I’m forgetting.

2. Video Game RPGs—Far too many series to list and still extremely popular. MMORPGs based off of the table-top RPGs helped to refuel interest in the table top and vice versa. D&D licensed products, Final Fantasy and other single-player RPG series were heavily influenced by the table top as well.

3. Card Games—Particularly, but not exclusively, Magic: The Gathering, became extremely popular for a time, and although I won’t take the time to research and confirm, I’m fairly sure that Magic remains WOTC’s top product.

4. Open License—In the late 90’s early 00’s when the open license came out, it seemed every company or IP was coming out with a D20 based RPG. I remember anime games, wrestling games, revivals of games like Deadlands getting the D20 make over. It kind of flooded the market, but it was a definite precursor to what happens today.

5. Movies—Those D&D movies—such as they were—and the much better Lord of   the Rings trilogy—brought an interest in fantasy back to the mainstream. If there’s one thing D&D the table top game does well, it’s fantasy.

All of those things and more laid the foundation of what we have today. We’re all living today, so I’ll be brief, but I’ll still recount what we have: the advent of virtual table tops, the prolific rise of self-publishing and project funding projects like Kickstarter, the so-called ‘let’s play’ videos that eventually led to streaming RPGs like Critical Role and quite possibly the most important, a well-received 5th edition of D&D being released in 2014. These are the things that brought RPGs into the light of the mainstream. We went from devil worshiping allegations to having a My Little Pony version of the game. I sometimes wish the hobby had it’s teeth—check out Mork Borg if you haven’t—but the trade off of having more players in the pool is one I’m glad to make.