10 Reasons Why Adventures Don't Sell "Well"

[jasper]

hardcovers generally have steak and potatoes content.
softcover please cardboard are popcorn. So of course the hardcover sell better.
Correct on the number of modules out there. It use to be you lurked you gaming shop for each new module that came out once a quarter if you lucky. Now with the mass of modules you all sorts of choices so you can pick and choose the the adventure. And still you may lose money. Also the old library is here also. Why should I buy Freeport when I do a fast and loose City of Invicible Overlord since I bought 15 years ago and still haven't use all of it. Or you have a module which you never played.
What needs to be checked if the new gamers to D&D are buying modules not us old farts who remember the blue scale (so you can copy them) modules.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

By the way, the cover image for my company's next release, an adventure setting called "World of Whitethorn 1B: The Village of Oester", was just announced last night. Check it out here:

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63464

It will be released in late November and have a limited print run.

Why are you doing a limited print run?

I mean, if it sells out and people are clamoring, nay, demanding copies, you would not do a second printing?

Where's the business logic there? Or is this just marketing hype?

 

[Pixie Barbarian]

Are we talking adventure or campaign setting? I'll buy a 300 page campaign setting in a heartbeat, but to buy a 300 page adventure is just a bit much. Heck, a campaign setting doesn't even have to be a sourcebook covering a full world; books like Ghostwalk or Freeport are excellent resources that stimulate many ideas without telling you how to run your adventure. IMHO they provide a lot more bang for your buck than any adventure I've ever seen.

Of course, that doesn't explain why I never buy the shorter advenures either. So, the reasons that I shy away from adventures in general are:

1) It is much more fun to create your own story.

2) It is much more fun to create your own story (I thought that bore repeating ).

3) For every good adventure, there are 10 really crappy ones (e.g., how many times will the entrance to the cave/dungeon/keep/sewers cave in/seal/move/get blocked by a monster on the other side or generally cause the GM to make "choo choo" noises while he railroads his players into the next dungeon crawl?).

4) Even if I'm too lazy to create my own adventures, there is a ton of free adventure stuff online.

5) My players may already be familiar with published adventures. They won't be familiar with something I made up.

6) I can usually think of better supplements to spend my money on.

7) I usually have to change a lot of the stuff in published adventures, because I don't usually find the NPCs interesting, the motivations compelling, and the events all that entertaining. In other words, I end up making my own adventure anyway.

 

[Benben]

What about PDF mdoules?

Off hand I can't seem to remember very many, and I hope somebody more versed in the pdf realm can correct me.

PDF seems like a great format for publishing modules:

1. Publishers don't need to worry about print runs.
2. DMs can reorganize the layout of the adventure as they see fit. I for one hate flipping around a module look for a room description or statblock.
3. DMs can play with the props more. A little photoshop or microsoft word action and all of the maps and signs can agree with their homebrew setting.
4. Those same props can then be printed out at a whim which is a major boon for my table. We have more than a couple spills and soy sauce accidents.

So what PDF adventures have been published?

 

[Darrin Drader]

Some thoughts...

1) I see adventures as "buy it once, use it once, and now it's no use to you anymore." So to me, depending on the price, there is a percieved lack of value in some sense. On the other hand, an adventure that is well-written and really "fits" into whatever plans I had already is "valuable" because it saves time.

Sorry to disagree with you Eric, but there are adventures that I've run 3 or 4 times for various groups. Horror on the Hill, The Lost City, are the notable ones. Of course to balance that out, there are the ones I have never run, or will never run again.

8. A lot of people say, “Well, I’ll just buy X magazine and get adventures from there.” Well, have you noticed that X magazine has fewer and fewer adventures? How many of these can you actually use or get ideas from? One, if you’re lucky, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I think magazines are great, but they shouldn’t be the only resource for adventures.

I find the adventures from the magazines to be great. Even if I don't use them right away, I do take ideas from them. Dungeon has been a regular resource for good adventures. Mongoose's Signs and Portents is also proving to be an excellent source of material. Issue 2 had exactly 1 adventure, which I thought was refreshningly reminiscent of more classic published adventures, and provided me with a number of great ideas. I may actually run this one at some point. I don't rely on them as my only source of adventures though. I will spend the money on a softbound adventure if it looks interesting to me.

9. Distributors and retailers will generally order a few copies of anything produced by one of the better known d20 companies. Then they stop. They simply don’t bother to re-stock. Even when a customer comes in to ask for a specific product or even place a pre-order, many just don’t buy any more copies after the initial order. They’ve made a profit, so why risk ordering more? That puts a glass ceiling for even some of the best d20 products out there. They just simply aren’t available to customers. If they’re not on the shelves, most people won’t even know about them.

This is huge and is a symptom of the glut of D20 products on the market right now. This isn't a problem unique to adventures, but is a problem across the board. It probably won't get any better until either less products start being released by fewer publishers, or there are a lot more players to buy them. Which do you think will happne first?

I remember when the D20 thing was new. I tried to buy everything that was released for quite a while. Then as the volume increased dramatically I had to pick and choose whose products I would buy. Unless a product really jumps out and grabs my attention, I generally tend to ignore it if I'm not familliar with the publisher or the author. Its unfortunate, because I know I'm passing on some good stuff, but there has to be a way to filter out stuff so that I can afford my RPG spending.

 

[Darrin Drader]

What about PDF mdoules?

Off hand I can't seem to remember very many, and I hope somebody more versed in the pdf realm can correct me.

PDF seems like a great format for publishing modules:

1. Publishers don't need to worry about print runs.
2. DMs can reorganize the layout of the adventure as they see fit. I for one hate flipping around a module look for a room description or statblock.
3. DMs can play with the props more. A little photoshop or microsoft word action and all of the maps and signs can agree with their homebrew setting.
4. Those same props can then be printed out at a whim which is a major boon for my table. We have more than a couple spills and soy sauce accidents.

So what PDF adventures have been published?

The PDF market is OK for exactly the reasons you mention. However, the number of sales you can expect from a PDF are so much smaller than the sales of a printed product that a company is lucky to break even on the art and freelance expenditure for this type of product. More often than not, they are released for free on various websites as loss leaders to promote interest in a publisher's main line of books. Trust me on this one, I've written three of them. I have personally written Dead Fire, which can be downloaded from www.darkportalgames.biz, The Waters of Akaya (Oathbound) www.bastionpress.com, and another that will make an appearance on the Wizards website in a couple months.

 

[smetzger]

I disagree with you guys about mega-adventures. I am running RttToEE right now and me and my players are having a blast.

Maybe adventures aren't selling because everyone is still DMing and playing RttToEE

RttToEE is the first time I have DMed a mega-adventure and after this experience I would rather buy a mega-adventure than a campaign setting.

I'll be picking up GRs new mega-adventure when it comes out and most likely the new WOTC mega-adventure that is in the works. I'll pick up Spider Queen only if someone posts a 3.5 conversion document of it.

 

[Pramas]

7. Writers working for TSR were often paid salaries. Writers today are mostly freelancers getting paid by the word. Is there a connection with adventures quickly being pushed out with lots of wordiness and poor writing today? I think so.

While some of your other points have merit, this one is utterly ridiculous. It's insulting to the many talented freelancers who work hard and take pride in their work to suggest that, as a rule, they produce needlessly verbose and poor prose. There are both great and terrible writers on salary and who work by the word. That's the nature of the business.

The reason that a lot of poor adventures were "pushed out" has nothing to do with this, and everything to do with the success of the first wave of d20 adventures. People smelled money and they thought they could slap the d20 logo on any old thing and make bank. You'll notice that the first wave of d20 adventures stand up rather well (Death in Freeport, Three Days to Kill, Ne'Moren's Vault, Crucible of Freya), but things quickly went south after the publication of the Horror Beneath.

 

[Darrin Drader]

While some of your other points have merit, this one is utterly ridiculous. It's insulting to the many talented freelancers who work hard and take pride in their work to suggest that, as a rule, they produce needlessly verbose and poor prose. There are both great and terrible writers on salary and who work by the word. That's the nature of the business.

Thank you for making that point, Chris. I wouldn't be able to say that without needlessly sounding indignant.

 

[Mordane76]

From a personal standpoint...

I don't buy pre-written adventures for several reasons. One, as Eric points out, I see them as sort of "Fire-and-Forget" fare; I buy it, run it once, and then it's used up. I see adventures as a paradox: they're sort of like a "crunchy fluff" as far as books go; they have a lot of information and setting material, present a plethora of pre-generated statistics, but normally present little in the way of new or innovative material.


As for the hardcover versus softcover point, I personally don't agree -- I buy books regardless of their cover stock, and pre-order books regardless of their cover stock. I buy them according to what I perceive they will add to my games, and I think a lot of gamers are like this. When push comes to shove, if an adventure had something that would continue to be useful beyond its one-shot nature, I would buy more adventures, but I just don't perceive a value in them beyond running once, and anything over $10 for one usage is more than I'm willing to pay.


Under the $10 threshold, however, there just doesn't seem to be much quality. I won't go into any details here (one, I'm at work, so I don't have my collection in front of me), but I just can't see schilling out cash for trash.


As for mega-adventures and interconnected adventure lines... I qualify. One, they're cool because they're designed to take characters from 1-20, and they take the burden of generation off the GM. On the other hand, it's someone else's work -- it makes me feel more like a narrator than a GM, because I'm not developing my own arcs and making my own NPCs. Still, even something like this still feels one-shot; I only GM for one group, and I could only run this once, and then it would be just so much paper in a shiny paperback cover.