D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

[Staffan]

in yon olden days if you got published in Dungeon or Dragon magazine was the understanding that you owned the content you produced or WotC did? Not talking reality here, I think that turned out complicated for WotC.

Also you could use WotC IP.

The standard contract almost certainly signed over all rights to TSR. There may have been some folks who got better deals, particularly regarding fiction/comics.
The thing that bit Wizards regarding the Dragon Magazine archive was, I believe, two-fold:

• The oldest contracts had been scanned for archival purpose. And were stored on an 8-inch disc. Which they no longer had the ability to read. This is why the Dragon Magazine is basically a photocopy of the actual magazines instead of turning them into more useful formats – they figured that making the archive a facsimile of the originals would be safe.
• Apparently David Kenzer and/or Jolly Blackburn of Kenzer & Co/Knights of the Dinner Table did have some special deal in their contract, and threatened to sue. They negotiated a deal that let them call Kingdoms of Kalamar an official D&D world, as well as publish Hackmaster as a parody version of AD&D.

 

[Reynard]

The standard contract almost certainly signed over all rights to TSR. There may have been some folks who got better deals, particularly regarding fiction/comics.

They bought articles outright, and fiction and comics they bought single issue rights to. This was fairly common in publishing at the time.

 

[SlyFlourish]

in yon olden days if you got published in Dungeon or Dragon magazine was the understanding that you owned the content you produced or WotC did? Not talking reality here, I think that turned out complicated for WotC.

Also you could use WotC IP.

I don't know about TSR but you certainly signed over rights to WOTC, as you do with almost every other freelance assignment for an RPG publisher.

You also get paid for the work directly. You aren't given a percentage of an unknown number of sales with no marketing support.

The DMs Guild is fantastic for WOTC. They get 20% of every product without doing any work at all. They don't have to vet anything. They don't have to do any of the work for editing, layout, art, design, or whatever. Those are all of the things you used to get when you wrote for Dungeon or Dragon magazine like I did back in the 4e days and when Dragon+ was a thing for 5e (the articles of which have now totally disappeared forever...).

I think its really important that new creators realize they're essentially handing the rights to their product over to WOTC forever in exchange for use of the Guild and WOTC's IP.

I know others disagree. I just don't think it's ever worth writing your own work and publishing to the Guild. Write your own IP instead of using theirs. Post it to a blog. Make it a free product for a newsletter signup. Use it as a patreon reward. Try to crowdfund it. Sell it on your own store. Sell it on DTRPG. Make an ebook or print-on-demand version out of it and sell it on Amazon. You don't have to do all those things, but you can do any of them if you haven't signed away your rights – the rights you have to sign over when you write for the DMs Guild.

For every fantastic product you've found on the Guild, you're likely looking at a publisher who barely made enough to pay for the work.

 

[TiQuinn]

For every fantastic product you've found on the Guild, you're likely looking at a publisher who barely made enough to pay for the work.

With that in mind, what kind of profit are writers/designers making the way you outline, forgoing the connection to WotC IP?

 

[Mistwell]

Most? Citation needed =)

You don't need a citation for people shopping at Amazon

 

[Chaltab]

I wish I could go shopping on Themyscira instead, but alas I'm not a lady.

 

[mamba]

With that in mind, what kind of profit are writers/designers making the way you outline, forgoing the connection to WotC IP?

I don’t think we have data on this, but for starters they make 20% more from every sale. Being on DMsG therefore needs to result in higher sales compared to DTRPG to be worth it.

Whether it is probably depends largely on whether you can do a similar product without their IP, as I doubt the DMsG gives you that extra visibility to get you those additional sales.

So if you want to make a D&D adventure, make it generic instead of setting it in Phandalin or wherever. If you make supplements specifically for a WotC adventure or setting, then you have no other option than DMsG however.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don’t think we have data on this, but for starters they make 20% more from every sale. Being on DMsG therefore needs to result in higher sales compared to DTRPG to be worth it.

Whether it is probably depends largely on whether you can do a similar product without their IP, as I doubt the DMsG gives you that extra visibility to get you those additional sales.

So if you want to make a D&D adventure, make it generic instead of setting it in Phandalin or wherever. If you make supplements specifically for a WotC adventure or setting, then you have no other option than DMsG however.

As someone who shops on DMs Guild and posts products on DTRPG, the pile of slush in DMs Guild is almost overwhelming, including for apparently generic adventures and supplements.

I have a hard time imagining that a $1 PDF with no art and a generic cover is getting so much more attention at DMs Guild that it's worth having there.

In contrast, as someone who does have $1 products at DTRPG, including a generic adventure (with cover art I purchased one-time publication rights to), people definitely do find adventures by relative unknowns and buy them there. My adventure is only a copper best seller, but that still puts it in the top 35%, I believe, of all OBS titles, which suggests that most of the slush pile gets purchased by essentially no one.

Also, some unsolicited advice: Stop doing Pay What You Want. After your mom buys your PDF for $10, you're not going to get any kind of even irregular passive income that way. Just make it $1, which is low enough for an impulse buy for a small product. I get a steady clip of purchasers on both itch.io and DTRPG and my RPG pdf purchases are now covered by my customers. (I'm going to probably need to have a few more products available before I can get a big hardback of Monster Manual Expanded, though.)

I believe it was @M.T. Black who had a blog post suggesting that $1/8 pages of content was the then-standard price tag for OBS content and that seems like a pretty reasonable amount to me, both as an occasional producer and regular consumer of gaming PDFs. (The exception, of course, is for highly produced professional work like a PDF from Free League, etc., which obviously has much higher costs on their end.)

 

[Chaltab]

I know others disagree. I just don't think it's ever worth writing your own work and publishing to the Guild. Write your own IP instead of using theirs. Post it to a blog. Make it a free product for a newsletter signup. Use it as a patreon reward. Try to crowdfund it. Sell it on your own store. Sell it on DTRPG. Make an ebook or print-on-demand version out of it and sell it on Amazon. You don't have to do all those things, but you can do any of them if you haven't signed away your rights – the rights you have to sign over when you write for the DMs Guild.

I feel like you're kind of leaning hard on a false dichotomy. It's not like you publish one thing to DM's Guild and are subsequently forever bound to only using it; you can publish stuff on DMs Guild if it requires WOTC ip like my Spelljammer books or the Doomed Forgotten Realms series and publish stuff that doesn't to any of those other suggestions.

 

[Reynard]

I feel like you're kind of leaning hard on a false dichotomy. It's not like you publish one thing to DM's Guild and are subsequently forever bound to only using it; you can publish stuff on DMs Guild if it requires WOTC ip like my Spelljammer books or the Doomed Forgotten Realms series and publish stuff that doesn't to any of those other suggestions.

Serious question: couldn't you have done your spelljammer book just by "filing the serial number off"? Then you would own it.