Oh, it absolutely is. If you stick strictly to the core rulebooks. Pretty much as soon as you move beyond those you're accumulating material that you'll never use, and the value proposition drops sharply.
Regarding the quality of the adventures: I think what hurts me the most is not that they're bad - almost none of the ones I've seen have been. In most cases they're actually pretty solid but seriously flawed in one way or another. So you can see that they could be great, and it's really frustrating that they're not.
Part of the challenge with for-sale adventures is that it's a lot of design work for a relatively small pay-off. I'd say that any adventure is going to limit your audience more so than other material because it may just not be to someone's tastes or outside their level range. That's just part of the medium.
Edit: There are lots and lots of industry insider anecdotes about adventure writing being largely done on a donation basis / one-off passion projects by freelancers.
Another iterative pass and playtesting for another month might make for great improvements, but then your time invested can easily exceed profits.
The answer from WotC has been to go bigger with adventures, but that leads to increased work of a different type from shorter adventures (i.e. organizational, layout, weaving together story beats, working across a multi-author team).
And then when you add on upper management / brand mandates, it seems like an extraordinarily difficult process to hit a homerun with.
Speaking for myself – with my very limited small adventure-writing experience – when I wrote the 80-page Beast of Graenseskov mystery adventure it was a 2-month long process, probably 150 hours altogether writing & layout & cartography & editing, plus one playtest and incorporating that feedback, minimal stock art costs. I priced it at $5 which was low, probably should have been double that, but very few people knew me or my work & it seemed like back in 2016 around the $5 price range was a sweet spot for DMs Guild sales. If I valued my time at very modest $18/hour that's about $2,700 of effort. I released it in 2016 and it's a Platinum seller on DMs Guild, so it's one of the better selling products. In the last 8 years it made $5,474, and then OneBookShelf + WotC received 50% royalties... So I didn't make any money on it, rather it was barely a break even for me... after 8 years. BUT that wasn't why I wrote it – effectively tackling how to write a mystery in D&D was what mattered to me, as I wanted to leave a good example for future writers. It was a passion project.
Here is a snapshot from 2016 to date, with projects that I don't fully "own" greying out the portions which should be kept private.
I am happy I wrote it and I'm proud of it. But I couldn't afford to invest that kind of demanding creative energy consistently into passion projects without getting compensated fairly.
Even though I'm just one little person, I think many publishers recognize that making good adventures that are also profit-making/sustainably-selling adventures is extremely difficult to do. I think it's a mistake to assume that a larger scale operation suddenly makes adventures a winning prospect because they're moving vastly more product... there are real difficulties with creating a good for-sale adventure, period, and then a whole other set of difficulties for doing that at a 256-page multi-person team scale for a big brand.
I didn't say it didn't count. I said not everyone uses Beyond and you said they don't count. Which is probably true from WotC's perspective, but it doesn't refute the idea that there is a market for shorter adventures from WotC in less predatory formats.
I didn't say it didn't count. I said not everyone uses Beyond and you said they don't count. Which is probably true from WotC's perspective, but it doesn't refute the idea that there is a market for shorter adventures from WotC in less predatory formats.
I didn't say it didn't count. I said not everyone uses Beyond and you said they don't count. Which is probably true from WotC's perspective, but it doesn't refute the idea that there is a market for shorter adventures from WotC in less predatory formats.
I'm just praying that Quests From The Infinite Staircase is better. Anyone else hoping you can have a Bastion in the Infinite Staircase given Nafas has a Palace there?
