3 Reception
Fortunately, the game proved resilient enough to weather the societal backlash. And since that backlash came from a vocal minority anyways, the game’s playerbase was largely unaffected.
The first professional review of Dungeons and Dragons came from Ares Magazine in 1980, six years after its release, giving it a 6 out of 9 and attributing that score to its concept of merging fantasy and tabletop gaming – something that had never been done before. By 1981, the game had hosted some three million players in America, and by 1992 it had been localized into 14 different languages. It set the standard for tabletop RPGs – the use of dice and numerical stats for characters became the backbone of every RPG that came after it.
Just past the turn of the century in 2004, the game had made an estimated 1 billion dollars in revenue from a playerbase now 20 million strong globally. Dungeons and Dragons had firmly entrenched itself as possibly the greatest TTRPG of all time.
However, the game underwent some growing pains. The third and fourth editions were wildly mechanically different from the first two, driving some players away. I myself have experienced the bad rep of Fourth Edition, with everyone that had played it ragging on it just so I, the “new guy,” wouldn’t get into it. The primary gripe was the rules – they were too complicated, apparently, and the game put more focus on number crunching and hard mechanics than playing it fast and loose like real people would. This debate of “fluff vs. crunch” defines the struggle of TTRPGs to this day.
The controversial Third and Fourth Editions, respectively.
As the years went by though, competitors arose. Pathfinder, a game founded on the mechanics of older editions that were now public domain, was gaining a foothold as the “equal” to Dungeons and Dragons. And of course, there were myriad other, smaller games that attracted cult followings of their own. Then, in 2014, Wizards of the Coast released the edition that would make Dungeons and Dragons into an easy to play, hard to master, good old time of a game – Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition.