Will Champion was 24 years old and worked at a board game cafe on New York’s Upper West Side in 2021.
The Champion was making $15 per hour as a dungeon master and often a game-leading storyteller at Game Cafe. “Why don’t we do it ourselves?” suggested his friend, Woody Minshew, 25, at the time.
A group of 4, 20, mostly running in the background, began streaming D&D campaigns on YouTube and starting Twitch under a moniker called “The Bards of New York.” They found themselves enjoying playing together for the audience, and people wanted to join their community. So they began to incongruence, began to develop relationships with listeners, and abolished the idea of working as a dungeon master. “We still had to work as a Muggle,” said Kyle Knight, one of the group members, referring to non-D&D jobs. They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.
Things started in 2023 after the stream’s clip went viral. The video, which received 3.5 million views, captured two characters who shared a slow burn romance and finally confessed their feelings. It’s flooded with comments from people who wanted to share their favorite D&D moments and experience the same heartwarming game. Bards has attracted new audiences and is Twitch’s 19th most popular D&D streaming channel based on TwitchMetrics. They were taking advantage of the growing market for tabletop role players.
Tabletop role-playing games became mainstream when fantasy nerds were considered a niche game in which they played in someone else’s basement. In 1968, game designer and D&D centre Gary Gygax held the first ever tabletop convention known as “Gen Con,” with around 12 people in the basement. Last year, the Gen Con Conference in Indiana featured over 71,000 participants and 540 exhibitors, setting new attendance records. In 2020, D&D owner Wizards of the Coast promoted a seven-year growth streak, saying online play had risen by 86% that year.
Due to its growing popularity, D&D has influenced movies and hit TV shows, attracting over 50 million players worldwide, says Wizards of the Coast. Other tabletop games such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and Runequest have seen similar surges in popularity. Meanwhile, demand for board game cafe owners has exploded over the past few years, with more cafes appearing across the US. For some streamers selected, the boom is a huge advantage. Leak data from Twitch showed that one of the most popular D&D streaming channels, a key role, won over $9.6 million between 2019 and 2021 from a combination of subscribers, tips and ad revenue.
Geeks are taking over – and they may have a solution to the crisis of America’s loneliness.
Shelly Wright, 36, from Virginia, was one of those who saw the Viral Tiktok bards in New York. She had never played D&D before, but she found herself fascinated by storytelling. As she watched the group’s stream, she got used to the garbled gaming jargon. “I learned what it means to “roll the dice,” and what “recognition check” is, and why everyone is so excited about “Natural 20,” she says.
Wright has become an active participant in group discrepancies and Twitch chats, and now has thousands of members. “I have a real love for connecting with others,” she says, describing the community as “enchantingly warm” and “very creative.”
The community was important support for her, especially when her job as a museum director was busy and she struggled to get out of the house. “I didn’t realize how burnt I was actually,” she says.
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We are nerds now. It’s all one big group. It says, “I don’t care if you have any social skills. Please play with us.”
Since the pandemic lockdown, many have been on similar boats, and many of us have spent more time alone than ever before. In group chats, fans will talk about the stream, share photos of their pets, and ask for help if they are having a bad day. “People became regulars and we all learned each other’s names,” Wright says.
Just over a year after she joined the community, Wright decided to learn more about D&D. In a tabletop role-playing game that celebrated last year’s 50th anniversary, players designed their own characters and embarked on a quest. They roll dice, fight enemies, find treasures, find complete challenges, and reach the end of a campaign that spans somewhere between an afternoon of the day and several years.
“I walked to my local game store, intending to ask about it,” she says. A one-shot session (a short adventure that can be completed in one sit-in) is underway, and she decides to join. She quickly became engrossed. “I met some of my best friends that day,” she says.
People’s schedules are constantly changing, so it can be difficult to play consistently, but she can still make it work. “At one point, I was playing two or three times a week on different groups and different nights, and now it’s once a week.”
Over the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have embraced a new life. The hit television show “Stranger Things,” which first aired in 2016, brought D&D back to the spotlight. “That was what it was,” says Knight. “It broke a lot of stigma by putting it into an era-list and making it seem enjoyable and acceptable.”
The success of the show made one of the bards, Hanna Minshu, suddenly feel cool. “I laugh, ‘Oh, I know what Mind Flayer is. I have this exotic info you guys don’t. Tell me. I’m a cool guy,” she laughs.
People will think it’s strange that a group of women playing the artist wanted to play D&D. That’s not the case anymore.
D&D is far from the only tabletop game popular today. Warhammer 40,000, also known as the Warhammer 40K, is a turn-based tactical Wargame where players gather, assemble and fight detailed miniature troops with each other. Based on traffic to the website, gaming site Goonhammer estimates that the game has 2.4 million players each month. In December, Warhammer’s publisher Games Workshop announced that it had sold Amazon to the gaming world with film and television rights. That same month, Games Workshop reached the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index, the UK’s largest list of companies.
San Diego’s 53-year-old Marcus Pascall had almost given up on role-playing games when “Stranger Things” came out. Pascoll’s son Ian was 10 years old at the time. “Everyone at school was talking about it, so I dumped my old book and ran a D&D game for him,” he recalls. “It was good to see the role-playing game through the eyes of someone who has never played it before.”
Currently in college, Ian continues to play tabletop games with friends, and Pascoal himself has returned to D&D. For the past three years he has been running monthly games with his 29-year-old daughter and his friends. His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives for two hours to do the session.
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Pascall has noticed a major change in culture since he was playing. “In the 80s, being called a nerd was a massive shaming. And you avoided it at all costs, you felt insulted, and you almost felt embarrassed,” he says. “We’re all nerds now. It’s all one big group. “I don’t care if there’s no social skills or not. Play with us.”
For John Edwards, 60, who has been active in the role-playing game world for decades, social experience has always been a major draw. “There are topics that we can talk about without many other things in common,” he says. The majority of the audience is made up of adult men, many of whom “don’t make good excuses to sit together and do something,” he says.
Edwards has moved to more traditional board games over the years, due to how long it took him to run his D&D campaign, but he still appreciates the way the games open social circles. “It means you can sit across the table from people who might not be comfortable sitting with you, especially in a country that is very politically biased right now,” he says.
Anna Prosser, a 40-year-old Oregonian, a streamer on the weekly D&D show “Stonesthrow,” discovered that committing to normal play has other positive effects on her mental health.
It’s really important to have the flexibility to look at the world and look at the issues from a different perspective.
“Most of the time, we grow from play and we get out of our imagination,” she tells me. “It’s considered to be for kids,” she says by “committing to the age of play every week,” she helped her regain her imagination and improve her creativity, problem-solving skills and mental health.
Many studies have found that it backs up the benefits of adult play, improves creativity and helps people handle stress. In a study published in July, researchers at University College Cork in Ireland found that D&D supports people’s mental health by providing escapism, self-exploration and social support. “The most interesting discovery for me and for many of the people I’ve spoken about is this self-exploration,” says Orla Walsh, the lead in the research. “I can’t imagine many hobbies you can do this.”
She says she created a confident character who helped one player, who struggled in a male-dominated work environment, practice confidently in real life. Another player who lost his grandfather, the comedian, felt the pressure to be a relief of his family’s cartoons while suffering from his own grief. As a dungeon master, he created a monster representing his sadness, which allowed him to personally process his emotions. “No one else knew that was going on, but he got a lot from it,” Walsh says.
Prosser says that using her imagination has helped her build confidence in decision making by “returning a vibrant inner life back to focus.” “The stories I helped write in D&D helped me to reassure you that perfection was impossible and life was good without it,” she says.
Acting as a variety of characters with different personality traits and talents, she also learned a lot about what kind of person she wants to be. “It’s really important to have the flexibility to see the world and look at the problem through different perspectives, either to affirm yourself or to strengthen yourself,” she says. “D&D gives you a really safe place to do that.”
The game welcomes a wider range of people as it is more widely accepted in mainstream culture. Prosser says expectations for who the D&D players are have changed significantly over the years. The game is still dominated by men, but in 2023, the Coast Wizard said, “60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% will identify otherwise,” but the demographic appears to be changing. Prosser played in a group consisting entirely of female players. “People would think it’s strange that a group of women playing artists wanted to play D&D. That’s not the case anymore,” she says. “At least in most circles I ran.”
As the internet promotes a more enthusiastic fan community, we don’t feel anything as niche as it once did. Being a nerd once meant you were part of a certain subculture of people who were passionate about comic books and video games. Today, fandom is the air we breathe. When everyone is a nerd, they are not really nerds. It made it easy to find a truly special community in the world of tabletop games.
Amy Piercy is a freelance journalist writing about technology and digital culture.
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