It’s a Tuesday night. The Steve Jackson Games forums have over 220 active users right now, and Mongoose Publishing’s forums have nearly 600. While sandwiched between a few anime-styled games, DriveThruRPG’s top sellers are heavily represented by vintage properties. Their top 10 is split between four anime games (Fabula Ultima, two Twilight Sword books, and ‘The Legend of Heroes’) and six systems with original publication dates between 1977 and 1987 (Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Traveller, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay). While the anime part may be a bit new, the overall trend is not: Legacy properties being shepherded by Mongoose, Cubicle 7, and Arc Dream consistently jump to the top of sales charts, essentially every time a new supplement is released. Even if these companies aren’t doing WotC numbers, they’re consistently Tier 3 or maybe even better in the RPG world, on the success of old games. Calling these nostalgia plays may be technically true, but it misses the point; we’re in a world where fandom-creating Mothership is able to generate a little less than $1.5 million once in a Kickstarter, but Mongoose Publishing, mostly on the weight of a space game ten years older than I am, generates enough revenue year after year to securely buy the building their office is located in. Old games are built differently, and it begs the question: Is there something older games are actually doing better for their audiences, or are newer games simply being starved of new blood?

Is refinement better than innovation?

Looking at top sellers a little more closely, you see another trend that comes up over and over. While Chaosium specifically is having consistent success with their old brands, there are multiple companies all selling their own d100 titles, notably Cubicle 7 and Arc Dream in addition to Chaosium. This family of games and systems, arguably the second oldest mechanical family in roleplaying other than d20 and D&D itself, has also been heavily iterated since 1978 or thereabouts. In addition to Pendragon, Runequest, and Call of Cthulhu in the Chaosium wheelhouse, both BRP derivatives like Delta Green and the Laundry Files as well as other d100 games not so technically licensed like WFRP, Dark Heresy, and Eclipse Phase expanded the breadth and depth of design talent working on these games. Not until PbtA exploded in 2012 would there be as large a cohesive ‘design school’ (for lack of a better term) in tabletop.

It’s important to note that TSR tried and failed to make d20 expansive in the same way back in the 70s and 80s. Both Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World were derivatives of D&D mechanics, but never had the same impact as the original game. Notably, a number of other TSR titles from the time, like Boot Hill and Top Secret, used completely different mechanics from D&D. In an ironic twist to this particular story, Boot Hill is considered one of the first d100 games ever published. While TSR’s decision not to consolidate their design work under a single house system umbrella may have hurt them, what likely makes more of a difference in terms of how much design evolution occurred in the d20 space was TSR’s unfortunate habit of threatening lawsuits. Chaosium likely couldn’t have stopped other companies from developing percentile games even if they tried, and as it was RuneQuest and BRP were already iterated from D&D. Given that, we got a strong independent d100 offshoot in 1986 with WFRP, while the best, strongest d20 offshoots didn’t really have a chance to grow until after 2000 (and would in my opinion include games like Spycraft and Mutants and Masterminds, bright spots in the d20 glut).

All this is to say that the d100 design space has been revising and iterating, across multiple design houses and game ideas, for the last 40 years. In the D&D/d20 space, we’ve got a little more than half that amount of time, with the OGL d20 boom followed by an OSR boom and then followed by a ‘D&D alternative’ boom in the last three or four years. The important thing here is that innovation will be led by companies which aren’t Wizards of the Coast, just like how d100 innovation wasn’t led by Chaosium. If we were just looking at Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and RuneQuest, I don’t think it would be as relevant a point of discussion (or mechanical pillar in the hobby).

There is one thing that RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Pendragon all do almost as well as D&D, and that is simply exist for quite a long time. While the newest editions may only be a few years old, the foundations set by forty or fifty years of development have provided significant refinement and allow for each edition to more rapidly and comprehensively release supplements than the one that came before. These supplements, be they completely new or reimaginings of something older, form the basis for why these games can attract so many more players (and so much more money) than something newer.

Are big supplement libraries the key?

On the Chaosium website, Call of Cthulhu has 13 rules supplements and 30 setting/scenarios supplements listed for sale. Cubicle 7 lists 30 products for WFRP, including five books of the massive ‘Enemy Within’ campaign, and Steve Jackson Games’ Warehouse 23 lists a staggering 250 supplement PDFs for GURPS Fourth Edition. Supplements have significant benefits for a game line: While they may not sell as well as core rulebooks, they tend to be cheaper and faster to produce. At the same time, even a modestly successful supplement has a multiplicative effect on those core rules sales, to say nothing of a supplement that gets on that top seller list and has a whole swathe of people thinking about the old game again. The more supplements you produce, the more chances you have to sell your game, and the more you can sell to fans who have already signaled financial interest.

It is harder to prove that supplement libraries are why these old game lines continue to stay top of mind. Supplements would certainly continue to be profitable; that these companies have the resources to support their game lines over time is one reason they continue to have the revenues to, well, have the resources to support their game lines. For one thing, it’s not like nobody else in the industry has realized the value of supplements. It is hard to draw out newer games specifically (Dragonbane crossed my inbox as an example, but it’s both quite old and has its roots in d100 design to boot), but those who have the resources are making supplements. Up in DrivethruRPG rankings now is Fabula Ultima’s ‘Bestiary Volume 1’, a supplement borne out of a very successful Kickstarter as well as one following the game’s three genre books which have also performed very well.

The issue here is more about how few peers Fabula Ultima has in this respect. Clearly if a game is successful enough to support supplements, those supplements will extend the game’s relevance, profitability, and lifetime. We do see supplements for newer games like Blades in the Dark and Orbital Blues, and the fact that we only see one or two is more tied to the resources necessary to continue publishing supplements at a consistent rate, a requirement that is moderated by drawing on existing editions and supplements. Still, though, as much as Blades in the Dark is possibly the hallmark of the 2010s indie movement, it does not have the visibility or sales volume of something like Call of Cthulhu. Refinement and existing audience is part of it, but shouldn’t drive the trend; the TTRPG audience has always skewed younger, and the growth in the hobby is coming from players who are equally as likely to have heard of Call of Cthulhu as Blades in the Dark. So what’s going on here? Is there something hoovering away new players and giving existing, more well-heeled, supplement-buying gamers outsize influence in the market?

Is this actually all D&D’s fault?

There are some trends in the recent TTRPG market that broadly explain what’s going on. These do not point to everything here being D&D’s ‘fault’, but the monopoly and immense money possessed by Hasbro in the space have created a different outcome than we would have expected to see otherwise. The good news here is that there are opportunities for the future that will present themselves.

The TTRPG market has been a niche of a niche for a long time, growing slowly and mostly ignored outside its key boosters. This began to change in the late 2010s, bolstered first by the ascent of Actual Play as part of the broader media revolution around streaming, and then secondarily by the COVID-19 pandemic. After the pandemic ended, the TTRPG market, like many hobby markets temporarily boosted by extraordinary circumstances, contracted.

While these demand-side effects were creating a roller coaster for the market, the supply side was getting weirder. One of the reasons that was cited by the creators of the indie RPG forum The Forge for its closure was, simply, that the forum had accomplished its mission, it had helped spread information and create a new generation of self-publishing RPG designers. Indeed, around the time of the forum’s closure it had become incredibly easy to design, package, and sell your own game, easier than it had been at any previous time in the hobby’s history. At roughly the same time, Numenera became one of the first huge Kickstarter success stories, and it was off to the races.

Between 2012 and 2020, the ‘supply’ of RPGs available on the market exploded, and as I noted above this started before demand really accelerated. This massive uptick in available titles hadn’t been seen since the d20 boom/bust of the early 2000s, and consumers still remembered that time as a flood of, frankly, bad games. Wizards of the Coast doubled down on their marketing of ‘The World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game’ and, when combined with major Actual Play shows generally playing it safe and sticking with the brand, consolidated the market. That consolidation was what put pressure on the entire RPG design industry (so to speak), and it was the incumbent firms who had generally existed long enough to build up a back catalog and pay off their debts who were best positioned to survive. In this way, it is somewhat the ‘fault’ of D&D and Wizards of the Coast that most of the major players outside D&D are 30+ years old.

At the same time, we have not reached the typical point in the TTRPG business cycle where game diversity truly thrives. Generally speaking, D&D waxes and wanes on its own fortunes, and those changes in fortunes provide opportunities for others to be recognized. This was clearest in the 90s, when TSR had begun to collapse and White Wolf was able to reign ascendant. The next time it happened was in the period between 2008 and 2012, when 4e sold below expectations and invited its own rival, Pathfinder, to take a part of its market share. What also happened from 2008 to 2012, though, was the fallout of the global financial crisis. We did see a ton of new games get attention in that time; 2012 kicked off both Numenera on the trad side and Dungeon World on the indie side. However, to avoid getting too deep into finance speak, no one had any money. This both meant weaker uptake on the buy side and more conservatism, indie efforts, and smaller print runs on the sell side. It also primed customers to feel more comfortable with the biggest brand, especially when 5e came out in 2014 and had completely returned to the trajectory that 3e started.

In short, it’s not D&D’s ‘fault’ that it and other legacy brands were riding a wave of retrenchment in the mid-2010s. On the other hand, it was arguably the ‘fault’ of Wizards of the Coast that they used their position and wealth to corner the market as comprehensively as possible. Here now, though, in the wake of 5.5e and the recovery from the post-pandemic slump, we’re in a very interesting part of the business cycle.

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While I stand by the title of this post, there’s an important caveat: It’s still all old games ‘now’. I mentioned one example, Fabula Ultima, which has done very well building its own brand and supplement tail, and there are others. The next couple of years, though, could be very exciting.

First, Wizards has released D&D 5.5e, and it’s clear that it doesn’t have the same momentum that 5e gained. That’s unsurprising; no “revised edition” has the same sales trajectory as its predecessor unless it’s cleaning up serious errors or otherwise making the game notably more playable (which 5.5e is not). It’s also not necessarily a bad thing for Wizards or Hasbro from a strategy perspective, as they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to be investing in new editions of the game on a regular basis (it’s expensive, but it also hurts their marketing). In order to let 5.5e linger, though, they do need to let other games to the table. They haven’t really had a choice in this matter, and newer fantasy RPGs like Draw Steel and Daggerheart have shouldered their way in. But that leads us to the second major change. Actual Play is no longer new. While this does mean it’s going to be harder to get a seat at that table unless you’re an incumbent in the space in some way, it also means established shows can take more risks without losing their shirts. Critical Role is playing more Daggerheart at their table, as they should be considering they published the damn thing. While an Age of Umbra miniseries is more than the system has gotten in the past, airtime-wise, it’s still not a full season; the question simply remains if Critical Role is actually going to support Darrington Press or if they’re going to let Daggerheart crumple into an irrelevant side project. I do think we will see more Daggerheart in the future, though, and once Critical Role is no longer a Hasbro tie-in brand, it’ll make it easier for other APs to follow.

Now is the time for the hobby to expand and diversify again, though, and in some ways, the stark increase in sales successes for old games is a part of that. These are expansive, refined, and well-loved properties, and the fact that they’re getting more attention is the first sign of more gamers siphoning away from D&D. It’s going to accelerate, too, especially in light of Hasbro using the Wizards of the Coast properties to make more money, more margin, and (frankly) less content with a shift to digital. The switching costs for an RPG are relatively low, but they are lowest when looking at a game that has been around for a while, capturing hearts and winning awards for multiple decades. The question, really, is not why we’re buying so many old games, it’s how long will it take to see that combination of ambition, good design, and luck bring more totally new games to their rightful seats at the table.

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