‘We’re all nerds now’

Will Champion was 24 and working at a board game café on New York’s Upper West Side in 2021 when he and his friends decided to turn their Dungeons & Dragons hobby into something bigger.

Champion was making a meager $15 an hour at the game café as a dungeon master, the storyteller who often leads the games, and felt like he could do better. “Why don’t we just do it ourselves?” his friend, Woody Minshew, then 25, suggested.

The group of four 20-somethings, most of whom had performing backgrounds, began streaming a D&D campaign on YouTube and Twitch under the moniker “The Bards of New York.” They found they enjoyed playing together for an audience, and people were eager to join their community. So they started a Discord, began to build relationships with their listeners, and scrapped the idea of working as dungeon masters. “We still had to have muggle jobs,” says Kyle Knight, one of the group members, referring to non-D&D jobs, “and DMing, when done well, is very time-consuming.” They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.

Things took off in 2023 after a clip of their stream went viral. The video, which got 3.5 million views, captured two characters who’d shared a slow-burn romance finally confessing their feelings. Comments flooded in from people who shared their favorite D&D moments or wanted to experience a similarly heartwarming game. The Bards gained a new audience and are now the 19th-most-popular D&D streaming channel on Twitch, based on TwitchMetrics. They had tapped into the growing market of tabletop role-players.

Once considered a niche game for fantasy nerds to play in someone’s basement, tabletop role-playing games have entered the mainstream. In 1968, Gary Gygax, a game designer and the cocreator of D&D, organized the first-ever tabletop convention, known as “Gen Con,” in his basement with a dozen or so people. Last year’s Gen Con conference in Indiana set new attendance records, with over 71,000 attendees and 540 exhibiting companies. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast, the owner of D&D, touted a seven-year growth streak, saying that online play grew by 86% that year.

As its popularity has grown, D&D has inspired a film and a hit TV show and attracted over 50 million players worldwide, Wizards of the Coast says. Other tabletop games such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and RuneQuest have seen a similar surge in popularity. Meanwhile, board game cafés owners have seen demand explode over the past few years, with more cafés popping up across the US. For a select few streamers, the boom has been incredibly lucrative. Leaked data from Twitch showed that Critical Role, one of the most popular D&D streaming channels, earned over $9.6 million between 2019 and 2021 from a combination of subscribers, tips, and ad revenue.

The nerds are taking over — and they may have the solution to America’s loneliness crisis.

Cherie Wright, a 36-year-old from Virginia, was one of the people who saw the Bards of New York’s viral TikTok. She’d never played D&D before but found herself captivated by the storytelling. As she watched the group’s streams, she familiarized herself with the game’s lingo. “ I learned what ‘rolling the dice’ meant, and what a ‘perception check’ is, and why everyone gets so excited about a ‘natural 20,'” she says.

Wright became an active participant in the group’s Discord and Twitch chats, which now have several thousand members. “There’s really a love for connecting with other people,” she says, describing the community as “enchantingly warm” and “wildly creative.”

The community has been a critical support for her, especially when her job as a museum director was busy and she had a hard time getting out of the house. “I didn’t realize how close to burnout I actually was,” she says.

We’re all nerds now. It’s all one big group. It’s like, ‘I don’t care if you don’t have social skills. Come play with us.’

Since the pandemic lockdowns, lots of people are in a similar boat, with many of us spending more time alone than ever before. In the group chats, fans would talk about the stream, share pet photos, or ask for help if they were having a bad day. “ People became regulars and we all learned each other’s names,” Wright says.

A little over a year after she joined the community, Wright decided to learn more about D&D. In the tabletop role-playing game, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, players design their own characters and set out on a quest. They roll dice to battle enemies, find treasure, and complete challenges in order to reach the end of a campaign that can span anywhere from a single afternoon to a couple of years.

“ I walked into my local game store just with the intention of asking about it,” she says. There was a one-shot session — a short adventure that can be finished in a single sitting — in progress and she decided to join. She was immediately hooked. “I met some of my now best friends that day,” she says.

Playing consistently can be tricky because people’s schedules are always changing, but she still manages to make it work.  ”At one point, I was playing two or three times a week with different groups and different nights, but right now it’s about once a week.”

In the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have taken on a new life. The hit TV show “Stranger Things,” which first aired in 2016, brought D&D back into the spotlight. “It was such a phenomenon,” Knight says. “It broke a lot of stigmas by just placing it into the zeitgeist and making it seem fun and acceptable.”

The show’s success made Hannah Minshew, one of the Bards, suddenly feel cool. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know what a Mind Flayer is. I have this exotic information that you all don’t. Let me teach you. I’m the cool guy,'” she laughs.

People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D. That’s not the case anymore.

D&D is far from the only tabletop game that’s popular today. Warhammer 40,000, also known as Warhammer 40K, is a turn-based tactical wargame in which players collect, assemble, and battle detailed miniature armies against each other. Based on traffic to its website, the gaming site Goonhammer estimates the game has 2.4 million players each month. In December, Games Workshop, the publisher of Warhammer, announced that it had sold Amazon the film and television rights to the game universe. That same month, Games Workshop made it onto the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index, a list of the largest UK companies.

Marcus Pascall, a 53-year-old in San Diego, had largely given up role-playing games when “Stranger Things” came out. Pascall’s son Ian was 10 years old at the time. “Everyone in school was talking about it, so I dusted off my old books and ran a D&D game for him,” he recalls. “It was nice to see role-playing games through the eyes of someone who hadn’t played before.”

Now in college, Ian continues to play tabletop games with his friends, and Pascall himself has returned to D&D. For the past three years, he’s been running a monthly game with his 29-year-old daughter and some of his friends. His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives two hours to make the sessions.

Pascall has noticed a big shift in the culture from when he was playing. “In the ’80s, being called a nerd was a massive insult. And you avoided it at all costs, and you felt insulted, you felt almost ashamed,” he says. “ We’re all nerds now. It’s all one big group. It’s like, ‘I don’t care if you don’t have social skills. Come play with us.'”

For John Edwards, 60, who was active in the role-playing game world for decades, the social experience was always the main draw. “ You’ve got a topic that you can talk about, even if you don’t have a lot of other things in common,” he says. A large part of the audience is made up of adult men, many of whom, he says, “don’t have any good excuses to all sit down together and do something.”

Although Edwards has shifted to more traditional board games over the years because of how time-consuming it was to run D&D campaigns, he still values how the games opened up his social circles. “ Particularly in a country that is very polarized politically right now, it means you can sit across the table from people that you otherwise maybe wouldn’t be comfortable sitting with,” he says.

Anna Prosser, a 40-year-old Oregonian who is a streamer on the weekly D&D show “StonesThrow,” has found that committing to regular play has had other positive impacts on her mental health.

It’s really important to have the flexibility of looking at the world and looking at problems through a different perspective.

“ A lot of times we grow out of play and out of imagination,” she tells me. “ It’s considered something that’s for children.” She says that “committing to times of play every week” has helped her to retrain her imagination and improve her creativity, problem-solving skills, and mental health.

Plenty of research backs up the benefits of play for adults, finding that it improves creativity and can help people process stress. In a study published in July, researchers at University College Cork in Ireland found that D&D helped people’s mental health by providing escapism, self-exploration, and social support. “The most interesting finding for me and for a lot of people that I’ve talked to is this exploration of self,” Orla Walsh, the study’s lead, says. “I can’t think of many hobbies where you get to do this.”

She says one player who was struggling in a male-dominated work environment created a confident character that helped her practice being confident in real life. Another player, a comedian who lost his grandfather, felt pressure to be the comic relief for his family while struggling with his own grief. As the dungeon master, he created a monster representing his grief, which allowed him to privately process his emotions. “ No one else knew that it was happening but he gained so much from it,” Walsh says.

Prosser says that using her imagination more brought “a vibrant inner life back into focus” and has helped build her confidence in making decisions. “The stories I’ve helped write in D&D have helped reassure me that perfection isn’t possible and life is good without it,” she says.

By acting as different characters with different personality traits and talents, she’s also learned a lot about what kind of person she wants to be. “ It’s really important to have the flexibility of looking at the world and looking at problems through a different perspective in order to either affirm your own or enhance your own,” she says. “D&D gives you a really safe place to do that.”

Because it’s been accepted more broadly in mainstream culture, the game is welcoming to a wider range of people. Prosser says that the expectation of who a D&D player is has changed significantly over the years. While the game is still dominated by men — Wizards of the Coast said in 2023 that “60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% identify otherwise” — the demographics seem to be shifting. Prosser used to play in a group that was made up entirely of women players. “ People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D. That’s not the case anymore,” she says. “At least in most of the circles that I run in.”

As the internet fosters more avid fan communities, nothing feels as niche as it once did. Being a nerd once meant you were part of a specific subculture of people passionate about comic books or video games. Today, fandom is just the air we breathe. When everyone is a nerd, nothing is really nerdy — that’s made it easier to find really special communities in the tabletop game world.

Aimee Pearcy is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and digital culture.