DM's Guild: One Week In - The Best & The Worst

The Dungeon Master's Guild has been around for about a week now, and in that time nearly 500 player-created products have been uploaded to the website. It can't be denied that the thing is spurring a blast of creativity. Anyhow, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the most popular items on offer, as well as the highest rated items, which include new archetypes, an Epic Level Handbook, some Forgotten Realms background material, and various monsters and feats.

UPDATE: Three of the items listed below have been removed from the store. I've noted them accordingly.

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[h=4]Most Popular Items[/h]
The ten most popular items are as follows. I've listed the price in the last column, and where an item is Pay What You Want (PWYW), I've noted the average contribution. I've no idea what the actual sales figures of these items are, but it's interesting that the first two by Matthew Mercer have 40+ ratings, while the third drops to 7 ratings. Of course, Mercer's work was on there from launch.

[TABLE="width: 80%, align: center"][TR][TD]1[/TD][TD]Gunslinger Martial Archetype for Fighters[/TD][TD]Matthew Mercer[/TD][TD]PWYW ($1.64)[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]2[/TD][TD]Blood Hunter Class[/TD][TD]Matthew Mercer[/TD][TD]PWYW ($1.57)[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]3[/TD][TD]Extra Feats (5E)[/TD][TD]Igor PhoenixRion[/TD][TD]$1[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]4[/TD][TD]DnD 5e Epic Level Handbook [since removed][/TD][TD]Gerard Shore, Mark Altfuldisch[/TD][TD]PWYW ($1.63)[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]5[/TD][TD]Blood Magic (5E)[/TD][TD]Joshua Raynack[/TD][TD]PWYW ($1.25)[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]6[/TD][TD]New Feats[/TD][TD]Andrew James Woodyard[/TD][TD]$1[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]7[/TD][TD]D&D Denizens: Drow & Driders[/TD][TD]Scott Holden[/TD][TD]$0.99[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]8[/TD][TD]Swordmage Class[/TD][TD]Juan Marcano[/TD][TD]$0.99[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]9[/TD][TD]D&D Citizens[/TD][TD]Scott Holden[/TD][TD]$2.95[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]10[/TD][TD]D&D 5th Edition Spell Cards [since removed][/TD][TD]Matthew Perkins[/TD][TD]PWYW ($2.30)[/TD][/TR][/TABLE][h=4]Highest Rated Items[/h]
For highest rated items, I have not included items with fewer than 5 ratings. Most items only have 1-2 ratings, so that took some pecking and hunting!

[TABLE="width: 80%, align: center"][TR][TD]1[/TD][TD]The Food Fight - An Acquisitions Incorporated Sidetrek [since removed][/TD][TD]Daniel Sweatman[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]2[/TD][TD]3 for 1$ DiBastests's Archetypes #04 - Druid[/TD][TD]Diego Bastet[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]3[/TD][TD]Troll Trouble[/TD][TD]Gary Whicker[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]4[/TD][TD]15 New Backgrounds - World Builder Blog Presents[/TD][TD]James Introcaso[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]5[/TD][TD]Adventure Template For OpenOffice/LibreOffice[/TD][TD]Dale Robbins[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]6[/TD][TD]Catastrophic Dragons - World Builder Blog Presents[/TD][TD]James Introcaso[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]7[/TD][TD]Gunslinger Martial Archetype for Fighters[/TD][TD]Matthew Mercer[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]8[/TD][TD]Kobold Triggerer - Fifth Edition Monsters #01[/TD][TD]Igor Moreno[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]9[/TD][TD]Races Revived: Slythe[/TD][TD]Dylan Serra[/TD][/TR][TR][TD]10[/TD][TD]The High History of Impiltur[/TD][TD]George Krashos[/TD][/TR][/TABLE][h=4]Lowest Rated Items[/h]
It'd be a bit mean to highlight the less well thought of items on the site (so I guess I lied a bit in the article title), but talking in general terms there are 10 1-star items there, and 33 2-star items. That's not too bad out of a selection of nearly 500 products, and implies that the quality on DM's Guild is reasonable. I count 171 items with more than 3-stars, which - when you consider that a lot have not been rated at all - puts the average item above average in quality.

One of WotC's stated aims for DMsG was to spot upcoming new writers. From the above lists, James Introcaso has two items in the top-10 rated list. I'm already aware of him from the excellent Round Table podcast, as well as some of the 5E articles he's written for EN5ider. Scott Holden has two of the most popular items on DMsG, and so could be worth following.

 

[Morrus]

Fair call. One of mine received a 3 star review for its first review that I don't think it deserved, so I do understand where you are coming from.
There is a simple solution though (although the solution is probably more of a significant issue than the problem it is solving), you can purchase your own material, so if you purchase your own book for $0.00 immediately after publishing it, then you can give it a 5 star rating and give it an initial fighting chance.

Reviewing or rating your own products is grounds for removal from OBS' sites. I do not recommend that at all. Trust me, they can tell.

 

[Giant2005]

I was referring to something which actually happened to me. My worst selling product PWYW in terms of overall average selling price was given a 2* review before it had even made a paid sale. No explanation and within an hour or so of it going up.

I'm not 100% certain that they didn't pay for it. But I'm reasonably certain that the review influenced things. Since then, it has averaged a 4, but there's an initial window where if a product is going to get popular compared to your average sales, it has to generally happen right near release when the maximum number of people can see it.

Fair call. One of mine received a 3 star review for its first review that I don't think it deserved, so I do understand where you are coming from.
There is a simple solution though (although the solution is probably more of a significant issue than the problem it is solving), you can purchase your own material, so if you purchase your own book for $0.00 immediately after publishing it, then you can give it a 5 star rating and give it an initial fighting chance.

 

[Morrus]

Here's a question for those worried that they're not getting many reviews. Before publishing yourself on DMsG, how often would you say you left reviews for things you bought?

 

[Giant2005]

Here's a question for those worried that they're not getting many reviews. Before publishing yourself on DMsG, how often would you say you left reviews for things you bought?

I'm not one to complain about a lack of reviews, but I am the worst kind of reviewer so I probably instinctively wrongly assume other people have those same tendencies and am actually a little grateful that they don't review.
I only really leave reviews for things that I think suck. If something is good, I have very little to say but if something is terrible I can explain what exactly I think is wrong with it.

 

[MwaO]

Fair call. One of mine received a 3 star review for its first review that I don't think it deserved, so I do understand where you are coming from.
There is a simple solution though (although the solution is probably more of a significant issue than the problem it is solving), you can purchase your own material, so if you purchase your own book for $0.00 immediately after publishing it, then you can give it a 5 star rating and give it an initial fighting chance.

As Morrus noted, that's not a good idea.

My best selling product has really enthusiastic talkative reviews and I've definitely appreciated them. I just think the issue with PWYW is that people have an option of leaving a negative review without commentary early on.

Btw, anyone know how to respond to a review? It doesn't seem to want to let me do it and I feel like I must be missing something obvious - I've seen other publishers do it, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong...

 

[Sacrosanct]

I was referring to something which actually happened to me. My worst selling product PWYW in terms of overall average selling price was given a 2* review before it had even made a paid sale. No explanation and within an hour or so of it going up.

I'm not 100% certain that they didn't pay for it. But I'm reasonably certain that the review influenced things. Since then, it has averaged a 4, but there's an initial window where if a product is going to get popular compared to your average sales, it has to generally happen right near release when the maximum number of people can see it.

That's the reality you have to accept when you put out a product for free. I think what you described has happened to us all, at some point. For example, one of my PWYW products got a bad review because the reviewer "didn't like the genre.". Nothing to do with the actual product itself, but because they didn't like the genre, they gave it a bad review, and they could because they didn't have to pay anything in order to leave such a review. And hope that you never pissed anyone off in online communities, because people have been known to give bad reviews to people the personally don't like.

I guess we just have to learn to live with such things as cost of doing business.

 

[bedir than]

[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION], I saw the update with the three removed items. Was there any statement as to why they were removed?

 

[dave2008]

One issue with ratings is that everyone has a different idea of what 3 or 5 stars means. Personally, 3 stars to me is good, 4 stars would be something exceptional, and 5 stars would be a "must have."

For example: The Epic Level Handbook was a good product so I gave it 3 stars and I wrote a review as well. However, it could never be 5 stars as epic level anything is just not a "must have" IMO, even though that is the area of the game that I focus on. So the best it could have gotten is 4 stars, which, IMO it didn't quite obtain. Now, I understand there have been some updates, that might have changed my rating, but I never got them and now it has been removed.

On hindsight I should have probably explained my rating in the review, that didn't occur to me at the time.

 

[dave2008]

Btw, anyone know how to respond to a review? It doesn't seem to want to let me do it and I feel like I must be missing something obvious - I've seen other publishers do it, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong...

I think you can only respond to a "discussion" and not a review.

 

[MwaO]

I think you can only respond to a "discussion" and not a review.

Yup, I was confused. You can't do it according to tech support.