Idea for product line... Free setting, pay for adventures?

[Dykstrav]

I've been discussing an idea with some of my gamer friends about how to sell and distribute setting content. Here's the gist.

The idea is to post a website with the setting material on it, free of charge. You can view and download the setting material, and perhaps even go so far as to have a collaborative wiki sort of thing where people can post things from their own home campaigns. If certain events reach a "critical mass," the setting would be updated to reflect that.

For example... If the group captures a certain bandit lord, they could note it in the description of the NPC on the site and describe their group's experiences with it. Once there were a bunch of groups that had defeated that bandit and noted it, the setting's designers could use those anecdotes to guide the setting's canon--the bandit is "officially" captured, killed, whatever. Conversely... If too few groups participate (or too many groups fail) in an adventure to thwart a demonic cult's plot, the cult's plot comes to fruition--that also becomes canon, based on feedback and input from various groups playing that adventure.

The revenue would come from selling adventures through the site. Say, $5.00-10.00 for a decent-sized adventure covering a level or two of play, or perhaps $5.00 for a shorter adventure covering about half a level (this is approximately the pricing structure for Pathfinder Society scenarios, I'm just using it as a ballpark figure). In various entries throughout the site, you'd find references to what element appears in what adventure... "The Red Bandit appears in module B5, Bandits of the Granite Mountains." This would give you the benefit of finding adventures related to elements of the setting that you enjoy, or simply distinguishing them by geography. Of course, you could also search adventures by level, monster types, and general adventure types (dungeon crawl, city intrigue, wilderness exploration, et cetera).

Does this sound like a product that anyone would be interested in? Thoughts?

 

[Croesus]

I can see a couple issues off the bat:

1) Many GM's still like to homebrew, so they would simply pick over your site for ideas to steal for their own games. Nothing wrong with that, but not sure that many of those GM's would buy anything. Adventures tied closely to a campaign setting are by their nature more difficult to convert to fit into someone else's campaign world. This will automatically limit your potential customer base.

2) The whole idea of updating the setting canon based on sales will just create problems for your customers. Any group that runs one of your adventures and has a different result than what you update the canon with won't match your material from that point on.

Point two raises another issue for me - I don't want to run someone else's campaign, I want to run mine. If you're going to be updating the campaign world based on sales (or lack thereof) of adventures, I would simply ignore any changes you make after I started playing in the campaign - otherwise, I'm playing your world, not mine. Once I start ignoring your material, where's your hook to get me to buy adventures?

It's one thing to offer a campaign setting, then periodically offer updates that flesh out areas not yet addressed in detail. It's quite another to offer a campaign setting, then tell those using it, "Hey, we decided such and such events occurred in the world and going forward all our material will assume those things happened."

 

[Stormonu]

Actually, Legend of the 5 Rings uses the update model, based on the results of their CCG events; the campaign world moves forward based on the results of the season's CCG events. This has created several "ages" of play in the campaign world, from the rise of the Shadowlands, the Scorpion Coup, the Time of the Hidden Emperor, the War Against the Shadow and the Race for the Throne eras. It would be worth investigating to observe how a successful campaign world has handled such changes and survived to sell.

Although you do run into the problems that have occurred with published settings that have done advancements; both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have had world-shaking events that have greatly influenced the campaign world, for good and for ill. Mostly, I believe the changes are more likely to push people away than attract them, though. Gamers generally play in a campaign world to make it their own and respond poorly to having their story outcomes dictated to them.

 

[Jhaelen]

Does this sound like a product that anyone would be interested in? Thoughts?

In a way, yes. If the setting was attractive, I might be tempted to use it, but to be honest I'd rarely if ever invest money to get one of those 'official' adventure modules. I'd just write my own.

Also, if the setting has a meta-plot that is advanced in official adventures, I'd lose interest in no time. Meta-plots are the death of settings. I want to use an official setting as a starting point and develop my own meta-plot as we play!

 

[Wednesday Boy]

My group typically gets the campaign book for a setting and writes our own adventures for it. So we'd be terrible customers for you. We'd get what we need for free and more than likely not actually buy any of the products you're selling.

 

[Gilladian]

If I liked your setting, I'd pillage bits of it for my home campaign (filing off the serial numbers and rewriting as needed).

If I read enough about an adventure in the setting to believe that I could translate it to my campaign, I'd buy one or two and give them a try. Problem is, I'm fairly hard to please with adventures, and usually end up writing my own or adding a lot of my own flavor to them. Or stripping out flavor that I don't like.

I think you might almost be better off creating a base campaign setting, then selling updates to IT. Ie sell a detailed writeup of "the bandit mountains" or "the western seas" where in the original campaign there were only two paragraphs. Then throw in an adventure or two; people who purchased the expansion are likely to buy the adventure, as well. Those who don't buy the expansions but like buying adventures will buy them no matter what.

Whatever you do, skip the campaign advancement stuff. Just present a campaign world and let the DMs who run adventures advance their own timelines...Anything else is too metagamey and interfering.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Possible number of sales aside, I see some practical problems.

Is you "critical mass" being reached by play of your adventures? If so, do you invalidate the respective adventures when the setting is updated?

How would you handle different speeds of progression by different groups? Say a group which plays monthly has just started one of the world progressing adventures when you update the setting. If the poor sod of a GM hasn't actually downloaded the setting material he has lost his background material. If he has downloaded it, though, he can play at his group's leisurely pace - but may discover after the adventure that the world has progressed too much for him to sync with it again without a lot of work.

You'd have to publish the adventures at pace suitable for fast playing groups.

With an ever-changing background, continuity will be hell to achieve.

You might think about clocking the progress. A couple of adventures is published at day 1. The groups can submit their results up do day 150. The effects are applied to the setting on day 180. So each group can decide whether to sync their game with your clock or go their own way. If further adventures openly announce the assumed WCE's resulting from former adventures, an out-of-sync group may later on use more of your adventures, even if they haven't reached the progress the official world assumes.

 

[Agamon]

PDF-wise, this is similar to what Paizo does actually. The main rule and campaign pdfs are 1/5 the cost of the print books, and then the adventures and accessories are where they make the margin. Seems to be working well for them. Of course, they have writers with a pedigree, too....