Why analog is better than digital for your Dungeons & Dragons game, according to Portland shop 1985 Games

Published 1:27 pm Friday, May 5, 2023

Passion for board games and tabletop games surged during the pandemic, as many new people experimented with being shut-ins. One sector that was already on a roll, however, is the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons. There are basic versions, played with a book, pen and paper, and more elaborate versions with plastic dragons and castles. Somewhere in between are the people who draw out maps for every scenario, which can be time consuming at the start of a four-hour game session.

One Portland company has been trying to solve that problem. 1985 Games, which has its office at 1319 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Portland’s inner east side, publishes ready-made maps and terrains which can be placed and replaced as the game rolls on. They also sell Dungeon Notes journals for recording character and story notes, the Deck of Stories adventure system and Counterspell Miniatures.

Hobby game sales surpassed $2.69 billion in 2021 and tabletop role playing games (TTRPG) are a large part of that. Dungeons and Dragons (a TTRPG) got a shove towards the mainstream by appearing in sympathetic shows such as “Stranger Things” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and with players now in middle age, it has been swept into the lucrative nostalgia industry.

Lenny Gotter (CEO) and Jeremiah Crofton (Creative Director) are well aware of this. They cofounded 1985 Games in 2019. They see their niche as supplying tools to make playing the game easier, rather than selling storylines or collectibles and accessories.

“Jeremiah can actually draw fairly well. I however, cannot,” Gotter told Pamplin Media in their offices recently. “Instead of drawing trees, you can use our trees. You could just set down a forest right there. Not only does it save a lot of time, because you don’t have to draw everything, it also adds a lot more to the realism.”

Navigating the Dungeon

“This is where I play D&D every week,” said Crofton, indicating a perpendicular piece of cardboard at the end of the table. “I sit right here behind my screen. I have all of my tools and rule books and cards and some of the pieces that I use back here. D&D can be played in a ton of different ways, which is why the game has grown so large.”

Crofton said with five players and one running the game (the dungeon master) they build and create the world themselves. “The DM runs the adventure, the story and all the people in it, while all the other players play a singular character in that world. So, when I run a game, I’m playing all of the villagers, the King, the Queen, the wizard, I play all of those characters. And I put my players through encounters and role-playing situations.”

Sometimes a Dungeon Master doesn’t have time to dig through the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the large books that they work from, and which are often updated. “You can sit down and draw a map that takes 15 minutes. And when you’re playing a game, sometimes that’s too long.”

Crofton adds, “So, if my players all of a sudden take me to a village or a bar that I wasn’t expecting, because they choose the direction they go, and I have no control of that, instead of making up a character on the fly, I’m able to pull out a character that’s already pre-made. And I just put them in the world.”

For example, he has a bartender, with artwork and a backstory.

“The goal is making a fun experience even better with accessories that really enhance the game.”

“We sell printed products. Paper is what mostly what we sell,” Gotter said, simplifying the business. In an increasingly digital world, finding things that are better off analog is a skill. They believe they have found their niche.

Crofton says there are totally digital, app versions of D&D, but they are connected by a paid monthly subscription of about $15 to the company that makes the game. He prefers analog anyway.

A $40 book contains flat, pop-out terrains and characters. Some players prefer this cheap option to buying complex plastic miniature figures. Some prefer to spend their money on dice sets. But Crofton points out the Dungeon Master has to spend more money on upkeep.

“There’s a lot of people who are all digital, they play fully on their phones, or their tablets and laptops. Sitting around the room, sometimes from all around the world. It’s a style of play,” said Crofton. He prefers the miniatures and paper-and-pen versions.

“The thing I dislike about digital is that it leads to distraction. As someone who’s prepping a game, who spends a lot of time thinking about the story, I don’t want my player to be looking on Instagram,” said Crofton. He has tried being with players using apps. “I find when we all switched back to paper, the game was more exciting. Everyone was involved, everyone was keeping track. And even if you weren’t necessarily involved in what was happening, you were hanging out with your friends, you’re talking to them. I like to keep the phones off the table.”

Gotter adds, “There’s also lots of families play D&D now, and using this visual stuff just makes it a lot easier for a 12-year-old to understand what’s going on.”Lore of the Land1985 Games sends demo books to some schools in Beaverton and South Salem, because teachers request them. They use it to teach kids social skills.

“The reason it’s taught in schools, and they use it in elderly homes, is because one, it’s an amazing problem-solving game that helps collaboration. You’re all in a group moving toward a singular goal. So, you need to figure out how to do that together, or else your characters could die. It’s great storytelling, it’s great collaboration, it’s great improv learning. It helps build teams, it helps build a sense of community,” said Gotter.

Gotter said he met a teacher from Iowa who is teaching the game to middle schoolers who were shut off from their peers during COVID. The teacher said a kid would meet the bartender in a story, and reflexively punch the bartender, instead of getting valuable information out of him. Gotter suspects they get that from video games, where there are few consequences for punching strangers.

“A lot of these kids spent two or three years indoors, they missed out on formative social interactions. So, he’s using D&D to get kids to interact with each other and learn social skills.”

Crofton has been in his current game for six years. His group plays from to 9 p.m. every Tuesday. A game often maxes out after several years. Players level up, starting at level one, moving through four tiers and topping out at level 20.

“The story gets more exciting or more intense. My characters, when we first started playing this game, were fighting goblins, because that’s low-level characters and bandits. And now that they’re at level 11, they’re in the middle of a war,” Crofton explained. “The two kingdoms that they’ve fought for now, colliding with each other in a big war. They have characters that have died that are incredibly important that they met six years ago, and it was like losing a friend, it was like losing a loved one. They were all incredibly upset.”

Gotter says the attraction for kids is they get to be someone else.

“When everyone starts playing the game, they want to be big and strong and powerful. They want to destroy things. But once you learn the game a little bit more, you get to be somebody else, be someone that can cast spells — kids think that’s really cool,” Gotter said.

Crofton says two types of kids get into D&D.

“Either they’re already analog, they love reading, they’re into fantasy books or Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Percy Jackson, and those young adult novels.”

That or parents were the gateway.

“Parents love it, and the dad or the mom who’s obsessed with D&D, been playing D&D for the past 15 years, is just waiting for their moment for their kid to turn 11 or 12. And they go, ‘Hey, put the (video) game down, try this instead.’ And they will run a game for them and their friends,” Crofton said.

He adds that “Stranger Things,” where many of the characters are named after D&D characters and the kids play D&D in the show, has been influential. As for influential video games, Crofton thinks only Skyrim and Minecraft (fantasy and world building) have been gateway products. “And the movie, ‘Dungeons & Dragons, Honor Among Thieves,’ the official Wizards of the Coast title, you can go and see that now. Anyone who has played D&D will recognize the tropes. And it’s just an adventure movie, it’s more akin to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ a group of misfits taking on the world.” A bit like Crofton and Grotter.Leveling up the business

1985 Games has relied upon crowdfunding to launch six products, raising over $1.3 million on Kickstarter. In 2021 the company grew 142% and reached $1.54 million in revenue. Now it is trying out a different business model, selling shares in 1985 Games on Start Engine. It is not a Kickstarter-type fundraiser that promises a product. It promises equity.

“You’ll get rewards, like merch, and sometimes discounts, all the way up to making custom characters and miniatures that we will sell for you,” Gotter said. “But yes, you get shares of the company. “

“We need capital to grow,” explained Gotter. “We have about five full-time people and a number of part time or contractors. We started the business in 2019 and didn’t really get product until early 2020, and we all know what happened in 2020. It wasn’t until Q3 of last year that the retail side of this of our whole industry started to recover, the game stores and stuff like that.”

Gotter cites Guardian Games next door on MLK Boulevard, which relied upon offering dozens of tables where people could try out games. “People would go in, play a $60 game, while they’re at it they’ll spend $60 on beverages and snacks and pick it up as they walk out the door. In an hour of playing, they’ve made $120.”

He estimates they need five more people to work on sales and design. It has over 5,000 digital assets (images that can be printed) that could be licensed.

“There’s probably at least 100 Kickstarters that are using fantasy-related stuff. And I would love to be able to license art to those, but we’ll have to build a platform” to sell and track them all.

Stocks and shares1985 Games used to sell to 20 stores total. Since June of 2022 that is up to more than 100 stores. “The issue for us is all of these stores, almost all of them are independently owned, and there’s no easy way to sell to all these stores,” said Gotter.

Even though there are no competing products, it takes a lot of shoe leather marketing — sales calls, convention booths, high school visits — to make sales outside of the mega chains. Attending the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in Germany is not cheap, but it’s the place to be seen.

“None of the distributors are taking anything new until this year.” They had a contract from a distributor, and then COVID hit. “So, I have a contract right over there on my desk. And it’s taken that long for someone to care.”

If that sounds like a craft brewer with a great product struggling to find a distributor, Gotter understands. He used to be in the distillery business. He took Eastside Distilling public in 2014.

“It’s the same model. Every time I try to open up a new business avenue, that’s more energy, and more inventory and more tracking of inventory. And so, we need capital, because we need people.”

They want to design and produce miniatures for others — outsourcing the manufacturing of plastic figures — but don’t have the time. 1985 Games has made a dice set, inside a vintage VHS box, for Penny Arcade Comics, but the founders fear their creative power is going untapped.

They advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Google and Microsoft Bing. “All those platforms, we have to constantly make new ads, which requires new graphic design work.” The ad landscape is shifting.

“It’s easier to find people (in ad agencies) that understand those platforms. We tried a few times on TikTok, with marginal results. To be successful on a lot of these platforms requires a full-time job.” However, the ad poeple might understand TikTok, but they don’t understand D&D or the 1985 Games product.

Booze biz warningWhy don’t they just go to the bank?

“Well, I mean, banks don’t loan money to small businesses. So let me rephrase that. If I was making a million dollars a year in profit, the bank would loan me a million dollars. But if I was making a million dollars in profit, I wouldn’t need to borrow a million dollars,” said Gotter.

He added, “I’ve been interested in crowdfunding for a long time, I helped a distillery in 2020 raise a million dollars. Not only do you get the capital for the business, but you also get people that are champions of your business, and they help grow your business, too. Because all these people are now shareholders. And they’re excited about your company.”

“It’s really hard to ever make any profit-making spirits, ever, from anyone. Because it costs $14 to make a bottle of booze that you sell for 20 bucks. In the amount of time we’ve been talking, a distillery has gone out of business.”

“And two more have opened!” chimed in Crofton.

Not a board gameExplaining what they do is hard work. It’s like explaining “Settlers of Catan,” except it isn’t.

Gotter added, “If we go to an agency and they’re like, ‘This is a cool board game, we’re going to sell a ton of them. And we’re like, ‘This isn’t a board game.’ Then we’ll spend months trying to explain we are a kind of a niche in a niche. We have to train our own people to do to it for us.”

Crofton has backed around 60 Kickstarters, usually some fantasy product. He sweeps his hand across the bookshelf. “Pretty much all of this from here to here is on Kickstarter. Third party D&D books.”

They say they own their assets — the art — and the market, D&D, is big.

“We’re not board games and we’re also way more scalable. We can order larger quantities, we own all of our art. So, the company is easily scalable. And that’s a lot easier for people to understand.”

Being the elder partner, Lenny Gotter has experience investing in other fields. Specifically, craft distilleries. He has learned a few lessons about American capitalism.

“It’s really hard to get small investment in this country. Once we hit $5 million in sales, I’ll have no problem getting investment money. (Sales now are $1.1 million and were $1.5 million in 2021.) I have distilleries I’ve been trying to raise capital for, for years. I have people call me out of the blue and they’re like, ‘I’m interested in investing or buying a distillery,’ and they don’t know anything about the spirits industry at all. Five million. They all say the same thing, five million. They’re not interested in a $1 million (in sales) company that they can buy for $3 million. They want a $5 million company that they can buy for $30 million.”

“No one in this country cares about a business until it does $5 million in sales. I don’t know if you learn that when you get your MBA? But everyone says the same exact thing. I’ve even been like, ‘Look, we can take that $30 million and spend 25 of it growing this company…’ Not interested, not at all.”

“I usually get calls from investment groups, they’re mostly rich white guys. But where’s all the money anyway? I’ve been trying to seek either acquisitions or investment for smaller companies, and no one is interested. And when I had my public company, so much capital in this country is tied up in hedge funds. Well, if you manage a $5 billion dollar hedge fund, you don’t invest a million dollars, you don’t invest less than $20 million. And it takes just as much work to invest $20 million, as it does to invest $1 million. It is so difficult to find investment capital as a smaller business. And I know that from tons of experience.”