I could swear there’s more talk about role-play­ing games than ever. My gut tells me that pop­u­lar­i­ty is rapid­ly increas­ing. A few facets of thought:

• Crit­i­cal Role — a show chron­i­cling the dra­mat­ic adven­tures of voice actors lead by the amaz­ing Matthew Mer­cer as Dun­geon Mas­ter — has been explod­ing on YouTube and Twitch.
• Peo­ple are start­ing to 3D print their own game minia­tures and have built strong com­mu­ni­ties on Red­dit and YouTube.
• There’s a brand new Dun­geons & Drag­ons starter set com­ing out, and it’s exclu­sive to Tar­get (yeah, where you buy your hand soap and tow­els).
• LitRPG is a new fic­tion genre that’s only a few years old, but is grow­ing and has become quite pop­u­lar in audio­book for­mat. The genre fea­tures sto­ries about the char­ac­ters play­ers become inside a game, whether they know so or not.

It’s all cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence and intu­ition on my end. What do you think?