Tabletop and other Youtube channels, plus various podcasts, have been around a lot longer and spread the idea to a lot of people who are caught up in the current zeitgeist of nerd culture but hadn't grown up in it (and so largely had missed out on the RPG games the rest of us played as teens).

There was also a strong movement away from heavy mechanics to narrative heavy games with lighter mechanics over the past decade which offered a lot more ways to introduce people to tabletop RPGs. Video games also helped. A ton of jocks and frat guys, folks who never would've played a tabletop RPG in the 80s or 90s (or not in large numbers) were won over with 4th edition last decade because it was like the video games they were playing (for better or worse, I never really took to the system).

Kickstarter catching the public's attention has also helped, with lots of indie or otherwise smaller presses being able to publish their systems.

Lots of factors involved. Stranger Things may be helping this year, but the trend in increasing popularity has been happening for several years.

I'd give Critical Role a lot of the credit for the jump start a couple years back. Seeing how much fun a game can be had to inspire a lot of people, or remind the old timers. It's the reason I started looking for a pickup game on Meetup, and now play weekly.

Critical Role, 5e, Stranger Things, and the desire for “poker night” without the poker.

Source- The lions share of my earnings come from running a company that sells accessories for D&D.

Some shameless self-promotion, please. Link?

This can't possibly be the case.

Nerd culture has spread and with it all things nerdy.

Look at the growth of GenCon for one example of how explosive this has been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Con#Timeline

Board games sales are up 28% in the US http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/from-monopoly-to-explo...

If anything, I'd say that Stranger things is a symptom of nerd culture. I mean, look at things like Big Bang Theory. There is no way that show would have hit mainstream without nerd culture being even remotely popular.

BBT is an attack on, not a celebration of, nerd culture.

And the reasoning behind this sentiment usually is that the jokes in the show are made at the characters' expense - people watching the show laugh at them, not with them.

Here's an example of a post that explores that topic: http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-p...

Agreed. Tabletop rpgs endured in the convention scene, and video games and cosplay revitalized fannish cons, a ton of people were introduced to or reminded that the hobby was something that "people like them" did.

Something as mass-market as Big Bang Theory did a D&D episode years before Stranger Things existed. It's been a much longer process than that.

Something more niche but still network TV (Community) did one a few years before that, even. That's around the same time I started noticing it popping up in more stores in suburban TX.

Also, Freaks and Geeks did it too, in 2000.

Not just stranger things, but Adventure Zome, The Gamers/Journeyquest, Harmonquest, Nerd Dice there's a lot of D&D in the Zeitgeist.

And its just the best known path in. Someone mentioned Java, but maybe PHP is a better example, something everyone has heard of with pop culture paths in and you can spend all your time there or dig deeper into esoteric paths.

For myself and a number of friends, Community's D&D episodes were the cause. But the episodes, like Stranger Things, were probably a symptom of larger trends.