Tabletop Roleplaying Game Expectations in 2022

January 3, 2022

Editorial/ Nerd Culture/ Roleplaying Games

It’s the first day of a new year and reflection on the previous year naturally comes to mind. Recently we shared a collection of Nerdarchy’s Top 10 of 2021 and for a companion piece I’m looking forward to 2022 like I did 12 months ago for the year that’s just ended. I’m a lifelong nerd and now partner in our company so I spend considerable time thinking about the hobby personally and professionally. From this perspective here’s my thoughts about the future of the tabletop RPG industry including what I hope emerges. Let’s get into it.

Box up my RPGs!

Last year my No. 1 hope for the year was more digital first products. We experimented with this idea through some of our own products but based on observations of fellow hobbyists and some analysis I’m concluding this hope is held by a very small segment of RPG players. Most people really love physical products.

This year I’d love to see a trend I noticed continue to grow and that’s boxed sets. I love these things! Partly due to a childhood where these were much more prevalent in the RPG space whenever I see a complete game or a starter kit version in a box I’m all in. To me these sorts of products do a wonderful job straddling the line between standard RPG fare and a board game in the sense of accessibility. What seems more likely to you?

People unfamiliar with RPGs getting their hands on a rulebook, spending many hours absorbing the information within and realizing they’ll need dice, character sheets, maybe additional book(s) and more then playing at some point in the future.
People opening a box with everything they need to play including slimmed down rules, dice, an adventure and perhaps even pregenerated characters and then playing the very same day.

As it stands in the RPG industry today I can point to Modiphius Entertainment as a leader in this regard. Or is it Free League? If I’m honest the relationship between these two publishers confuses me. At any rate the wide array of RPGs under their umbrella includes quite a few boxed sets. Alien RPG, Star Trek Adventures, Tales from the Loop, Symbaroum and others all offer boxed set or starter set options. Good ol’ 5E D&D offers two such items — the classic Lost Mine of Phandelver along with Dragon of Icespire Peak (the Essentials Kit).

And I want more!

Even for an RPG nerd wholly immersed in the hobby there’s something liberating about discovering a new game through a boxed set. I get more of a sense I could play one of these games one time, stick it back on the shelf and feel satisfied. There’s certainly plenty of bonafide board games on my shelf I’ve only played once too. Looking down the road at our own production schedule — as tentative as this may be — I’m already laying the groundwork for our own ventures when it comes to this kind of presentation.

Broad strokes RPG desires

My relationship with the RPG that brought me to the dance has changed a lot over the decades and especially since making the segue to a career in this industry so when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons my feelings are quite complicated. A really terrific blog post from Teos Abadia from his Alphastream Game Design Blog addresses The Real Competition for D&D and Wizards of the Coast. Teos does a great job articulating the big dog’s unique position in the RPG industry and went a long way towards helping me reconcile how I look at D&D these days.

One of my takeaways from what Teos illustrates is how D&D’s pivot to a lifestyle brand over the last few years means it truly has become more than a game. A great example of this is How to Be More D&D: Face Your Dragons, Be More Adventurous, and Live Your Best Geeky Life, which is an officially licensed guide to life inspired by the world of Dungeons & Dragons. The enormous swell in cultural penetration resulting in projects like Champions Of The Realm, the planned 2023 Dungeons & Dragons film and even the tone shift in game products like Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos and the evolution of D&D itself reflect this.

I do not envy Wizards of the Coast’s stewardship of the D&D game at this point in time. Elevating something to a such a degree is certainly healthy and robust for any business but it also creates a ton of new issues and problems to deal with along the same lines seen with Marvel as the MCU emerged from the incredibly more niche comic book biz. Appealing to a group of people orders of magnitude beyond the existing base demands change, often quite averse to the desires of the earlier adopters. Steering D&D towards a scenario where the rules, traditions and engagement with the game don’t seem to be the No. 1 priority is a tricky proposition.

On the flip side of this perspective I’ve grown even more open to the RPG hobby than ever before. As a kid my friends and I played different games all the time but since making this stuff my career the differences in perspective are dizzying. But I digress.

Basically what I want — and expect to develop in the RPG industry — I’m already seeing more of and this makes me very happy. As a driver of the industry I’ve learned to be comfortable with whatever direction D&D moves because at the end of the day it raises awareness for the hobby as a whole and this is a good thing. The concept of an RPG isn’t nearly as enigmatic as it once was in broad terms. Casual players including folks like our friends who aren’t interested in the hobby much at all seem much more open to gaming than ever before and in my experience doesn’t carry the same reliance on D&D as in the past. For example my girlfriend and I use Quest RPG for our seasonal game and the campaign getting underway with some friends uses Cypher System. In both cases the games were chosen because the system is a better fit for the kinds of experiences those players seek.

All things considered I’ve learned to feel happy about the growth and changes to D&D both as a hobby enthusiast and industry professional. It creates more opportunities to explore all sorts of games. A big factor in this as I see it comes from publishers offering open licenses for their game systems. Overwhelmingly we see this through third party Fifth Edition productions but it’s not the only one out there!

Cypher System Creator Program. This particular license limits creations to DriveThruRPG only as far as I can tell. I’m not 100% sure but this would explain why I never see crowdfunding projects for third party Cypher System material.
Quest Community Creators License. I absolutely love Quest and it’s so cool they provide this opportunity for creators. I believe Salvage Union was the first and currently only crowdfunding project using this license. It topped to $100K mark, which I am incredibly excited about because it means this amazing game has some real legs beyond the official content.
Free League Open Gaming License. Offered with the Year Zero Rules Engine for people to create their own games.
Powered by the Apocalypse. More of a policy than a license it’s explained by the original creators D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker in that link.

There’s probably more like these out there but along with the 5E OGL they’re the ones with which I’m most familiar. If you know about other open licenses please share in the comments below! I’ve got to believe Wizards of the Coast’s creation of the OGL from the 3.5 D&D era forged the path forward for the hobby to grow. If the players who love these games had never been able to legitimately create and market their own contributions I highly doubt we’d be enjoying the popularity of tabletop RPGs like we are now. The cultural penetration spearheaded by 5E D&D making participation in the hobby more widely acceptable and intriguing was a huge step forward. Now I’m excited for the possibility for so many creative folks in the world to share their ideas outside the 5E system and attract both experienced RPG players and new people into these games we love so much.

What sorts of developments to you expect to see for the RPG industry in 2022? Did I win you over with my passionate desire for more boxed sets? Do you know of any other open licenses? Share your thoughts and expectations in the comments below and of course as always stay nerdy!