Interestingly enough, Royal Mail has done the same (I saw this earlier):

www.linns.com/news/world-stamps-postal-history/britain-s-royal-mail-celebrates-50-years-of-dungeons-dragons

I'm not a stamp collector, but I'd be tempted if they had art by the likes of Erol Otus and Jeff Dee.  This stuff...it's fine, but not my D&D.  

Sweet!! Even as someone who is kind of stuck in 1e for life with my old handbooks, seeing this newer stuff still excites me. And that is a particularly gorgeous cover, it has a "timeless" classic look to me, nice score!

Sharing the beginnings of my ambitious environmental encounter tables. I haven't seen environments broken down like this anywhere before. There's three grasslands, three wetlands, three mountain elevation levels. Freshwater and seas are further broken down by four climates and three levels of light penetration. Plus everything else, it adds up to 76 different environments. The tables are sparsely populated though. Only 5% of the creatures in my creature collection have been assigned to environments so far. Still, you might find it to be a novel table breakdown and presentation to check out.

Here it is It's going to look like crap on anything less than a widescreen resolution.

Daggerheart is a fantasy ttrpg developed by the people behind Critical Role and featured in some of their other streams than the main Critical Role stream. Some speculate that when their current campaign ends, Matt Mercer and crew will switch from D&D to Daggerheat as their primary game and that will cause a seismic shift in the ttrpg landscape. Daggerheart provides a very different play experience than D&D. It does some thing well, maybe better than D&D, but it doesn't do at all, and does many staples of D&D as well as D&D does.

All that said, I an skeptical Crit Role will abandon D&D. A large chuck of their audience base tune in to watch them play D&D, and their viewership on streams/youtube vids where they play other games is still good, but much less than their main D&D vids. Switching from D&D will lead to a reduction in their core audience.

There is also an undercurrent in the ttrpg sphere currently, especially from the "influencers" who farm outrage clicks and views that leans heavily on anti-WoTC sentiment (due to some questionable/bad decisions and PR looks they've had in the past couple of years-many of which stem form Magic" The Gathering decisions as much as D&D-related stuff) to get those kind of clicks and views, stirring the pot with stuff like Daggerheart will replace D&D without understanding the mentality of the vast majority of the customer base who only play D&D and have zero interest in any other ttrpg no matter who is promoting it or the strength of the D&D brand which gets retailers like Target and Walmart to carry it when the won't touch any other ttrp, whether its established games like Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, ettc. with a built in customer base or sop called up and comers like Daggerheart (which is one of about a dozen new ttrpg that are going to "replace D&D" over the next few years because that's the marketing pitch of those "influencers" who are butt-hurt over some of WoTC's decisions over the years, and what they don't realize is that D&D is the center that holds the entire ttrpg industry together.

Many will switch to Daggerheart, but many will also switch to Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, Draw Steel, or any of the other alts out there. These will be people who like to try other ttrpgs or make decisions based on outrage bait. But none of those alternatives will emerge as "the game" or be popular enough to create a brand identity that people outside the hardcore ttrp community will see as a synonym for ttrpg (D&D is to ttrpg what Kleenex is to facial tissue, Band-Aid is bandages, and Xeorox is to photocopiers). Other alternatives can do well, none of them are going to replace the central identity of the band, and the biggest obstacle to any of them even becoming significant players in market share as that there are too many alternatives and it will divide up the dissatisfied customers so none of them will have a large enough customer base.

And here's the secret none of these alt D&D folks want out of the bag. Lots of gamers buy lots of different games, but the vast majority of them that aren't D&D never get taken off the shelf and played, and many more get played a handful of times and put back on the shelf to gather dust there. So those great initial sales numbers and impressive kickstarter campaigns raising impressive amounts of money rarely translate into lots of people actually playing the game long term.

If I had to point to any of the new wave of alt D&D games gaining enough traction to put a dent in D&D's market share, it would be Shadowdark, not Daggerheart. Daggerheart will have some advantages with the strength of the Critical Role brand behind it, but 10 minutes looking over CR social media will reveal that their fanbase is divided over the game with some being D&D fans who watch CR because it's D&D and some being CR fans who like D&D because it's what CR plays. And even if CR switches, only a portion of their fanbase will follow. And the challenge in the real world will be finding enough players who want to play an alt to D&D longterm to make the game sustainable longterm, let alone popular enough to replace D&D.

-M

Thanks for the information and the analogy. It’s not something I know much about.

Incidentally, this is the page of that recent issue of Starburst, which got me intrigued (they do a two-page article on TTRPGs in each issue):






The writer, Ed Fortune, didn’t go into further details about Daggerheart, but that sentence got me intrigued.