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

[M.T. Black]

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.)

I can't recall saying that specifically, but it's not a bad rule of thumb. I do notice that some folks are reluctant to pay above $20 for a PDF. They really want a lot of value.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If people really wanted generic material, we wouldn't see so many complaints by people on the boards here that settings like Greyhawk, Dark Sun, and Mystera are not yet opened on it.

Except the generic material sells. So people are buying it.

I gave a specific example -- me, selling a generic (rather, a non-setting-specific) adventure on DriveThruRPG, with no name, selling more than 65% of all OBS products.

Most of the "DMs Guild is good, actually" arguments seem to come from people not selling there.

 

[M.T. Black]

I don't know of anyone who's tried it, but I eventually intend to do something like that, probably something simple but useful for Heroes of the Borderlands.

Kelsey Dionne is the best example of this strategy. She gave away the excellent "Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse" on the DMs Guild and used it to build a mailing list via in-document advertisements (something I desperately wish I'd done back in the day). It is hard to build an audience on the Guild because you can't get access to their email addresses.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Kelsey Dionne is the best example of this strategy. She gave away the excellent "Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse" on the DMs Guild and used it to build a mailing list via in-document advertisements (something I desperately wish I'd done back in the day). It is hard to build an audience on the Guild because you can't get access to their email addresses.

I forgot about that. Yeah, she's a great example. Before she shifted over to her own e-commerce site (as @bedir than suggested earlier on this thread), I was picking up her stuff on DTRPG based on knowing her name from DMs Guild.

So yes, it definitely can work. Although it probably helps to be an excellent designer like she is.

 

[Azzy]

Dennis Moore got to them.

I'm sorry, I don't get this reference. The bane of humor everywhere.

 

[Chaltab]

Kelsey Dionne is the best example of this strategy. She gave away the excellent "Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse" on the DMs Guild and used it to build a mailing list via in-document advertisements (something I desperately wish I'd done back in the day). It is hard to build an audience on the Guild because you can't get access to their email addresses.

Dragonix too. Got all his Monster Manual Expanded books and now his non-DMS Guild stuff is on my wishlist.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Just as an idle thought, is there any point in doing "loss leader" products on DMsG and use those as advertisements for your main body of work over at DTRPG? As in, "Here's my Caves of Chaos tie-in adventure. If you like that, go that-a-way for more."

Personally, I think its too hard to move them over to something else. You have no access to your customers on the DMs Guild. At least on DTRPG, you can email previous customers to let them know about newer products as long as they're also on DTRPG or will be posted there as part of a Kickstarter.

You can't build a transportable audience on the DMs Guild.

 

[Velderan]

I forgot about that. Yeah, she's a great example. Before she shifted over to her own e-commerce site (as @bedir than suggested earlier on this thread), I was picking up her stuff on DTRPG based on knowing her name from DMs Guild.

So yes, it definitely can work. Although it probably helps to be an excellent designer like she is.

Yep, she talked about that in this interview and as @bedir than said being able to handle her own sales once she's driven traffic to her own site was a game changer for her. The example she gave is she typically has a profit margin of about 95% from a sale on her site so on a $50 sale she keeps around $48 while on DTRPG she was only keeping around $30. She does point out it's a constant effort to keep eyeballs coming to her site so a percent of them can buy something.

 

[SlyFlourish]

What an excellent discussion, and I look forward to listening to the interview when I have a few moments.

There has been a lot of discussion about the DMs Guild. Given my history with the platform, I have thoughts. Mike Shea and I have discussed this endlessly in other forums.

For an aspiring game designer, I think the DMs Guild makes for a good breakfast, an indifferent lunch, and a miserable dinner. That is, it's a good place to make a start, but you need to move on pretty soon. Quite a few people now working fulltime in the industry honed their craft on the DMs Guild in the early days: Justice Arman, James Introcaso, Hannah Rose, Emmet Byrne, Celeste Conowitch, Joe Rasso, Lysa Penrose, come to mind. Countless others have picked up freelance writing gigs with first tier RPG companies.

Mike highlighted two big complaints with the Guild, and I agree they are problems.

The first is the 50% cut, which is very rough. I think it's wrong to compare this to a bricks and mortar store taking 60%, since they are providing things like physical shelf-space. The better comparison is other digital marketplaces (like the Apple app store), which typically take about 30% of the sale. The real reason the cut on the DMs Guild is 50% is because the hosting company (Roll20) takes 30% and WOTC takes 20%. If WOTC open their own marketplace in the future, such as on D&D Beyond or on their long-awaited VTT, I hope and suspect they will take 30%.

The other issue is that your IP is locked onto the DMs Guild perpetually. This became a real problem once the industry shifted to crowdfunding as the main source of income. Everyone understands that you can't take something about Drizzt and publish that elsewhere - obviously! It would be good if there were more flexibility to use non-WOTC IP that you may have published there. For example, in a hypothetical book "Drizzt's Guide to the Underdark", you might have created a dozen new spells which have no relation to WOTC exclusive IP. But I understand the tightrope this would require from a legal perspective.

One last thing we haven't discussed is that the DMs Guild could disappear along with everyone's products and you could never publish your DMs Guild product anywhere else ever again.

It sounds impossible but WOTC kills off old stuff all the time. Their whole previous D&D website is gone. Dragon+ is completely gone along with every article ever published there (including a couple of mine).

It would be a huge outcry if they got rid of the Guild but I wouldn't say its impossible.

If, somehow, DTRPG disappeared, you'd still be able to continue to sell your product (or give it away, or offer it as a patreon reward, or a Kickstarter back-catalog purchase or whatever).

 

[SlyFlourish]

there are a lot of people out there, I would not read too much into it


if you just put stuff out there, not a lot of people will generally come, having some channel to get the word out is always better

Just look at what some YTer KS brings in vs an established game designer without a YT channel

Honestly, these days, it's hard to get any "top of the funnel" attention to anyone's work outside of YouTube or paid marketing. Social media is terrible at bringing organic attention. Blogs can work if you can get people to find them in Google.

Roughly 40% of new patrons who find me find me through YouTube. The next highest is about 23% and it's by people who bought my book (what we'd often consider the bottom of the funnel).