September 22, 2024
In its 50th year, Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than ever. Here’s why
As Dropout’s ‘Dimension 20’ sells out Madison Square Garden, D&D has begun expanding beyond the realm of nerddom and into the mainstream.
When a promoter from Live Nation told Brennan Lee Mulligan that his Dungeons & Dragons series, Dimension 20, could play a show at Madison Square Garden, he couldn’t believe it. Literally.
“There was a feeling of, You must be joking,” the creator recalls. “Like, that can’t be true.”
Madison Square Garden is, after all, one of the world’s most iconic performance venues, with a seating capacity of around 20,000, while Dimension 20 is a cult hit show on the comedic streaming service, Dropout, in which a handful of improv players shamble through Dungeons & Dragons games, speaking in goofily heightened vernacular, for two-and-a-half hours at a time. For the stars of the show, the math was not mathing.
“We were like, hey, let’s do it, and if we get a couple thousand people to come, what a cool, funky thing to pull off,” says Aabria Iyengar, a frequent player on the show, who will serve as Game Master on the upcoming season, which kicks off September 25. “And then it sold out in negative-10 minutes.”
While the team behind “Gauntlet at the Garden,” as the January 2025 show has been dubbed, were gobsmacked that it sold out in a matter of hours—as were many observers—perhaps they shouldn’t have been. Thanks to a pop culture vibe shift, looser game rules, and a crop of peripheral content like Dimension 20, the imagination-fueled tabletop game has become, in its 50th year, more popular than ever.
Just how popular? Last year’s film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, made more than $200 million worldwide, a vast improvement over the $34 million total of its franchise predecessor back in 2000. One of the biggest video games of 2023, Baldur’s Gate III, takes its setting, mechanics, and lore directly from D&D. D&D nights at bars and D&D-themed pubs are popping up far and wide; and a fan-made D&D play, Here There Be Dragons—A New Musical Quest, even opened Off-Broadway in 2022, followed by the first official D&D live theatrical experience, this year’s Twenty-Sided Tavern. Not to mention the ever-growing market for boutique 20-sided dice. And then there’s the tabletop game itself.
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro vertical that produces D&D, generated more than $1.3 billion in revenue in 2021—the first time it ever passed the billion-dollar mark. Even when Hasbro reported a major loss in 2023, WoTC’s revenue remained over $1 billion. And while the figures from 2024 won’t be available until next year, the game’s 50th anniversary—a milestone the USPS commemorated with D&D stamps—has brought in new editions, products, and licensed materials that have sparked further interest.
The tabletop game, which involves collective storytelling among a group of people each assuming different fantasy roles, was much less of a draw 26 years ago, when Mulligan started playing at age 10. In fact, the broader culture that the game is very much a part of carried a shameful stigma at the time: a scarlet letter D for Dork.
“When I was a kid, it was bad to be a nerd,” Mulligan says. “And then in the early 2000s, Lord of the Rings was winning Oscars and superhero movies were beginning to pop. Nerdy culture just started coming out of the shadows.”
By the time Netflix’s signature hit Stranger Things made the game central to its first season in 2016, it had gotten much easier for the D&D-curious to don their inaugural imaginary armor. The watershed Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, released in 2014, was created with an eye toward accessibility. It streamlined the game’s byzantine ruleset, emphasizing intuitive play over complicated combat. Wizards of the Coast even put the core rules online for free for the first time, lowering the barrier to entry.
Around the same time, in the early 2010’s, a flood of D&D-related content—what’s become known as Actual Play shows—began to trickle out online. Critical Role emerged in 2012, when a group of professional voice actors including TMNT’s Sam Riegel started playing Dungeons & Dragons together on Twitch. The appeal of D&D, at its core, is simply telling a farfetched story with one’s friends. What such shows as Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and HarmonQuest soon revealed, however, is that when those friends are funny, articulate, and have big personalities, the game is just as fun to watch as it is to play. Critical Role became so popular, it spawned an animated series on Amazon Prime, now in its third season; while The Adventure Zone has spun off a series of New York Times-best-selling graphic novels, starting with 2018’s Here There Be Gerblins.
Although Dimension 20 arrived in 2018, after the early wave of Actual Play shows hit, it quickly distinguished itself with an emphasis on genre-blending. The first campaign from Mulligan and co. established the tone with Fantasy High, which moves the setting of a typical sword-and-board romp into high school. It would later be followed by epic mashups like A Crown of Candy, which plumbs the connective tissue between the board game Candy Land and Game of Thrones, exploring the King of Candy Land’s bloody path to power.
“Dimension 20 has built an oeuvre of stories that really shook up the way people understand what you can do in D&D,” says Iyengar, who was a fan of the show before coming on board in 2020. “It is a storytelling mechanic system, but Brennan’s genius is in showing you again and again how many different kinds of stories you can tell. It doesn’t just have to be your standard high fantasy faded hero adventure.”
Another reason people gravitate to Dimension 20 and its peers is that populating these shows with seasoned performers brings out the potential for humor in the game. While D&D has always had a reputation among critics as taking all too seriously something inherently kind of silly, the rise of Actual Play shows has helped change this perception. It’s a shift that found its reflection in the 2023 D&D film, starring Chris Pine, which was a full-fledged comedy.
“I think what they nailed in [Honor Among Thieves],” Mulligan says, “is that while the game in the official material has to present itself as the height of epic fantasy, the game that most people are playing at their table has some epic fantasy and a lot of, ‘Oh no, we got this goblin drunk at a tavern and now we’ve dressed him up like a clown and we’re sneaking him out of the city in a wheelbarrow because there’s a bounty on his head.’”
As a show that takes the scenic route through the zaniest cul-de-sacs of the Dungeons & Dragons universe, Dimension 20 was probably destined from the beginning to connect with Dropout’s audience. (It helps that the show has had a slew of high-profile guest players like author Hank Green, Bob the Drag Queen, and Monét X Change, the latter two appearing, naturally, in 2023’s Dungeons and Drag Queens campaign, alongside Jujubee, Alaska, and a dragged-up Mulligan.) Nobody involved with the show, however, could’ve predicted just how much it would connect.
The moment its wild popularity first truly dawned on Mulligan was when he walked into the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo in the show’s second year and found an enormous banner with his face on it. (He describes the experience as “a dissociative episode.”) As the team embarked upon its “Time Quangle” tour through the U.K. and Ireland this past spring, the idea of playing Madison Square Garden still seemed like, well, a fantasy. Sure, there was some precedent, with Critical Role selling out London’s Wembley Arena, which seats 12,000 people, in 2023. The fact that their show had reached such rarified heights, though, is something they are still grappling with, even as Mulligan is waist-deep in planning Gauntlet at The Garden.
What’s equally galling is the idea that D&D, and Dimension 20 by extension, might have even further to grow in the zeitgeist, says Iyengar.
“My incredibly silly dream is to see that moment where pop culture has its reckoning with D&D, and the agents of mega A-list celebrities are like, ‘You have to be seen playing D&D. I want it to be so ubiquitous that everyone you know and everyone you’ve heard of has tried it at some point,’” she says. “That’s the dream, and I kinda feel like it’s not that far off.”
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