Genericization is the term for when a specific named brand becomes so successful and dominant in its field that it becomes the label for a whole category of products; think Q-Tip, Band-Aid, or (of course) Kleenex. And as Kleenex is to soft, paper moisture eaters, so Dungeons and Dragons is to tabletop RPGs.
We don't just put the phrase 'DnD rival' into our news headlines to appease the cackling, bloodthirsty gods of SEO. We also do it because, whether they like it or not, every pen and paper roleplaying game has to compete with Dungeons and Dragons for players' attention, time, and limited resources. Every new game has to decide whether to define itself against the D&D yardstick, or let the audience do it for them - it's going to happen either way.
Partly because of that, it's both fashionable and legitimate for gamers to dunk on DnD. It's only one of the best tabletop RPGs, and it's far from perfect. It's mechanistic and overly weighted toward combat gameplay, yet its tactics and builds are far less deep and flexible than Pathfinder's. It's drowning in supplements, settings, and narrative content to play with, but it's still way worse at engendering original storytelling than the likes of Blades in the Dark.
But D&D's jack of all trades offering, combined with half a century of momentum and (ew) 'market penetration', keeps it firmly on top, even as genre aficionados beg folks to try this or that alternative instead. Gamers and publishers have grudgingly accepted that DnD is most new players' first game, and many experienced players' second or third choice.
And on balance, we all agreed, that's OK, because for every new player coming to DnD, another is already getting bored of it and trying something new. Love it or hate it, DnD was the immovable adamantine tower at the center of RPG culture, and everyone else settled for building around it.
Like Amazon or LeBron, you can knock it all you want, but it just keeps winning - even more so since the 2023 release of Baldur's Gate 3, the most powerful recruiting tool for Dungeons and Dragons since the Satanic Panic. Which begs the question: can anything ever bring it low?
The lightning struck tower
Even as sales remained strong, the D&D tower has been hit by a string of PR storms since the DnD OGL crisis of 2023 and now, at long last, we're seeing it wobble just a little. Critical Role, which became one of the world's most successful internet entertainment businesses by playing D&D on camera, has now not only released its own competing TTRPG, Daggerheart - it's poached D&D's two highest profile game designers.
After a combined 46 years working for Wizards of the Coast, D&D's game design director Jeremy Crawford and creative director Chris Perkins both left the company in late April and early May - only to reveal in late June that they were both joining Critical Role's publishing house Darrington Press to work on Daggerheart instead.
It's difficult to overstate the scale of this win for the Critters. The last few years of Wizards' strategy for Dungeons and Dragons has leant hard on producing more customer-facing marketing videos, and the most recognizable 'human faces' D&D chose to wear were those of Crawford and Perkins.
Throughout the rather haphazard launch of its new 2024 ruleset, it was J-Craw and Perky we saw on our screens, explaining the design updates in the books, and the changes to the ancient, familiar DnD classes.
Wizards put significant effort into making sure that, unlike most tabletop game designers, these two individuals became well known figureheads, understood to be the masterminds behind all the exciting new stuff coming to the world's biggest roleplaying game.
Now they're not just gone - they've very publicly joined a competitor. And all just a few months after Wizards' last cacophonous balls-up: launching its 3D virtual tabletop Project Sigil early, getting unfavorable reviews, then promptly axing it and laying off most of its developers.
In the media world, the technical term for this is 'clusterfuck'.
Damage control
That's not all, either. In the same week its two biggest luminaries joined a rival game, Wizards laid off its video editor Todd Kenreck (another friendly human face frequently seen in DnD reveal videos), and Jess Lanzillo, DnD's VP for Franchise and Product and prominent game ambassador, quit her job. Kenreck has since announced he's going it alone with his own YouTube channel strategy, and will be creating third party content for both D&D and Daggerheart.
@toddkenreck I was laid off from Wizards of the Coast, but I'm not going to stop making content. In fact I've just begun. You can support my content on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/c/toddkenreck#dnd #dungeonsanddragons #baldursgate3 ♬ original sound - Todd Kenreck
When Crawford and Perkins first announced they were leaving Wizards, Jess Lanzillo reportedly told ScreenRant the pair's exit had been foreseen and talked about within the team for a long time, and the company was prepared. But that interview gave no hint of them joining Darrington.
It's fair to say that, assuming these tumultuous transitions were indeed long in the planning, it would have been prudent for the D&D publisher - one of the most famous, consumer facing, PR exposed parts of Hasbro's $10 billion empire - to try and arrange some impressive good news to counteract the bad. None has been forthcoming.
We're in a lull in the DnD release schedule, and the biggest 'new hotnesses' Wizards can point to are a batch of fairly divisive playtest class rules, and Dragon Delves - an interesting but ultimately low profile adventure anthology coming out on July 8, featuring, er, dragons again. Neither has created a spontaneous upswell in fan enthusiasm. Several big new DnD videogames are in development, but they're apparently a long ways off.
As a result, there's nothing to divert fans' eyes from the big news: a novel, exciting D&D-like game has entered the arena, created by the biggest D&D celebrities of all time, and the two most famous people on team D&D have jumped ship to help it grow.
In the media world, we call this 'dropping the ball so hard it falls through the very surface of the earth'. So: what's the damage? Is Daggerheart the fabled DnD killer?
Dragon slayer
In a word, no. Daggerheart isn't going to replace Dungeons and Dragons - at least, not in the quick, confrontational, dramatic fashion that it's exciting for fans to imagine, in the wake of J-Craw and Perky's thrilling defection. Darrington Press is careful not to frame its mission in those terms, either - our own Mollie Russell interviewed two of the design team about Daggerheart's biggest features, dreams, and desires, and the words dungeon and dragon cropped up not once. The core book lovingly praises DnD as a huge inspiration, not an adversary.
For now, at least, Critical Role and friends are running their own race, and making excellent time. Daggerheart's a deeply cool, innovative, and promising game; it seems to be selling extremely well; and it's having a predictable moment of glory. Our whole team is decidedly jazzed about everything it has to offer and I, for one, am genuinely excited to see how the game lands, grows, and evolves in the next year or two.
But even if this were the David and Goliath story many D&D influencers want it to be, there would be bad news for team Daggerheart: under capitalism, Goliath wins every time. Also, the Philistines make him redundant six weeks later, hire someone else for a superficially different job description, and pay them 25% less.
Wizards of the Coast turns over more than a billion dollars a year on a very healthy profit margin. Even accounting for Critical Role's fame and money, WotC can likely outspend it several times over to reassert D&D's pre-eminence. You can't solve a problem just by throwing money at it, but it certainly helps.
And there's a long line of failed dragon slaying candidates to testify that having a game 'better' than D&D doesn't magically help you climb the enormous mountain of dollars between Wizards' game and every other tabletop RPG on earth.
A new home
But that's not the end of the story. Daggerheart absolutely will have an effect on Dungeons and Dragons, and it could be quite dramatic. Original 5e designer and outspoken Daggerheart stan Mike Mearls was right to flag the importance of this game breaking into Amazon's global top 100 for book sales, and he may yet prove right in saying that "the TTRPG landscape has fundamentally transformed".
It's perhaps telling that, in Darrington Press' announcement of its surprising new hires, Chris Perkins says "[s]torytelling has always been at the heart of everything I do, and joining Darrington Press feels a bit like coming home".
Daggerheart, a game that counts Forged in the Dark, Powered By The Apocalypse, and other narrative heavy systems among its primary influences, may well allow its designers opportunities for storytelling gameplay that Dungeons and Dragons couldn't offer without fundamental changes. And in large, publicly traded companies, fundamental changes that risk the golden goose simply don't get made.
As we learn more about the scale of Daggerheart's successful launch, its future plans, and exactly how Crawford and Perkins factor into them, it's perfectly possible that it'll become as big a competitor to D&D as Paizo's Pathfinder is. With the mega popular Critical Role as its dedicated entertainment arm, I can even see it going much bigger.
But if D&D is one day finally unseated as the world's default method of pretending to be fantasy heroes with dice, it won't be Daggerheart that did it. It'll be Wizards' failure to act. It's completely baffling to me that the D&D publisher's chosen response to the last two months has seemingly been limited to quietly putting up job listings to replace its lost design bosses.
Radio silence
The Wargamer team play, and love, a huge variety of TTRPGs - I've just finished a gloriously silly run of Eat the Reich, and am about to dive into Pirate Borg - but it's not at the expense of Dungeons and Dragons. We absolutely love DnD, play it weekly, and take great joy in writing about it every day. We're not interested in slamming it as a game, just because it's a 300 foot whale in a relatively small pond.
But even we're surprised at just how uninspiringly thin its 2025 slate is. We're coming off the game's 50th anniversary year, with a brand new set of core books that are genuinely good. Our glowing 2024 Player's Handbook review awarded it 9/10, saying the game's future was bright - and we meant it.
This is the year we'd expect D&D to be pressing its home field advantage, firing off shiny new books, games, and features in all directions. Right now, with Daggerheart making waves and poaching its staff, is the time we'd expect them to whip out a secret weapon or two. As yet, there's no sign of that at all.
Watching all this happen and doing nothing of note smells to me like the rigid risk aversion of a megacorp that thinks itself untouchable. Huge companies with multiple extremely popular products can soak up a lot of flak without needing to worry, and for now, Wizards of the Coast has the luxury of complacency.
The OGL scandal, successive bouts of brutal layoffs, and the miserable fate of Sigil all raised justified outrage from emotionally invested Wizards-watchers - and yet none seem to have dealt the monolith any meaningful damage. Daggerheart won't kill D&D either. Wizards knows that, and so it keeps its silence.
But whatever Crawford and Perkins' move to Daggerheart means to them, Wizards should take it as a wake up call: if you never try anything new, your top talent will eventually abandon you for more interesting challenges elsewhere. Given time, the same could become true of players.
Sic semper Tyrannis?
There's a tendency among tabletop gamers to disproportionately criticize market leaders and lionize quirky upstarts. Maybe it's an anti-authoritarian streak, born of a community that started life being ostracized in basements and persecuted as devil worshippers. Maybe it's just creative people's instinctive dislike of popular things with generic, mass appeal, in favor of niche creations that do fewer things, better.
I think it's a good instinct, in general. We should instinctively distrust and scrutinize those in power, whether it's political power, economic, creative, social, or a mixture of those. The alternative is stagnation and tyranny. Dungeons and Dragons is not a tyrant, though. It's a superb, wildly playable, uniquely influential game that's done wonderful things and added more to the sum total of good in the world than many others.
The modern, algorithm driven web overvalues controversial hot takes and wild predictions - and so I suspect the apparent hunger to see D&D humbled is far less widespread than the online hullabaloo suggests. But even so, it's worth Wargamer stating our position clearly: Dungeons and Dragons doesn't need killing. It's brilliant, its potential is unlimited, and its value to tabletop gaming as a whole is vast.
What it needs is to come out of its corporate comfort zone, try new things for a change, follow through on them, and stop instinctively laying people off when something doesn't work out. Damage control works in the short term, but in the long run it's the road to obscurity, obsolescence, and failure. Open up the hatches, acknowledge your weaknesses and competitors' strengths, and get back in the fight, DnD - or else someone will end up taking your throne one day.
In the meantime, of course, we'll still be dungeoning, dragoning, and daggering hearts in abundance - and I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts about the current state of D&D, the arrival and future of Daggerheart, and how the two relate to one another.
If you have Opinions, come share them by joining the Wargamer Discord community - we're chatting about all things tabletop constantly, alongside live designer AMAs, giveaways, painting competitions, and more. See you there, adventurinos!