NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9372976" data-attributes="member: 20323">Part of the challenge with for-sale adventures is that it's a lot of design work for a relatively small pay-off. I'd say that any adventure is going to limit your audience more so than other material because it may just not be to someone's tastes or outside their level range. That's just part of the medium.Edit: There are lots and lots of industry insider anecdotes about adventure writing being largely done on a donation basis / one-off passion projects by freelancers.Another iterative pass and playtesting for another month might make for great improvements, but then your time invested can easily exceed profits.The answer from WotC has been to go bigger with adventures, but that leads to increased work of a different type from shorter adventures (i.e. organizational, layout, weaving together story beats, working across a multi-author team).And then when you add on upper management / brand mandates, it seems like an extraordinarily difficult process to hit a homerun with.Speaking for myself – with my very limited small adventure-writing experience – when I wrote the 80-page Beast of Graenseskov mystery adventure it was a 2-month long process, probably 150 hours altogether writing & layout & cartography & editing, plus one playtest and incorporating that feedback, minimal stock art costs. I priced it at $5 which was low, probably should have been double that, but very few people knew me or my work & it seemed like back in 2016 around the $5 price range was a sweet spot for DMs Guild sales. If I valued my time at very modest $18/hour that's about $2,700 of effort. I released it in 2016 and it's a Platinum seller on DMs Guild, so it's one of the better selling products. In the last 8 years it made $5,474, and then OneBookShelf + WotC received 50% royalties... So I didn't make any money on it, rather it was barely a break even for me... after 8 years. BUT that wasn't why I wrote it – effectively tackling how to write a mystery in D&D was what mattered to me, as I wanted to leave a good example for future writers. It was a passion project.[SPOILER=Transparency of royalties]Here is a snapshot from 2016 to date, with projects that I don't fully "own" greying out the portions which should be kept private.[ATTACH=full]367224[/ATTACH][/SPOILER]I am happy I wrote it and I'm proud of it. But I couldn't afford to invest that kind of demanding creative energy consistently into passion projects without getting compensated fairly.Even though I'm just one little person, I think many publishers recognize that making good adventures that are also profit-making/sustainably-selling adventures is extremely difficult to do. I think it's a mistake to assume that a larger scale operation suddenly makes adventures a winning prospect because they're moving vastly more product... there are real difficulties with creating a good for-sale adventure, period, and then a whole other set of difficulties for doing that at a 256-page multi-person team scale for a big brand.</blockquote>

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