Whoops...

Well it was night two of running the adventure with my home DnD group and I had one fantastic encounter and one that TPKed the party. This was through a design flaw but, if I may say, it was not entirely my fault. Part of the blame belongs to WotC. Let me explain. I have a creature that had an at will stunning power. I took this only because there was a monster (or possibly monsters, I didn't search thoroughly) which has a power like this in the Monster Manual So I assumed it must be okay.

No. The monster is broken.

So if you ever run a creature that has an at will stunning attack you may use it IF there are only one or maybe two of them. Any more than that and you are going to kill the party, most likely. Naturally, one of the recommended encounter builds in the monster manual for this monster has three of these creatures. So next weekend we are running it again but this time with the power changed to dazing rather than stunning. Hopefully it will be a little more balanced and fun, though still difficult.

Happy Independence Day all! ^_^

Brainstorm!

If there's one thing I love about the human brain it is its ability to have a problem it stews over for a period of time only to suddenly pop up with the perfect answer out of nowhere. This happened with a portion of the second adventure last night.

I am much more pleased about the second adventure because of this idea. It solves a couple of problems I had in one simple solution that makes things more interesting and weaves together a few disparate story elements into one cohesive thread.

Now if only my brain would do the same for how to publish this I'd be doing better.

I need your advice...

I need your feedback as I have a small dilemma.

I'm not sure if I should publish this adventure... or just distribute it for free.

Here's how I arrived at this point. I finally caved and got a D&D Insider subscription since the price is being jacked up tomorrow and I've been meaning to subscribe since last fall. So I download my first Dungeon Magazine and open it up only to find that there is tons of awesome adventure material within. And adventure after adventure each, easily, as long as my own but with better maps and better artwork and all that. And I stop and think "This is 100 pages of content every month for about $5 a month. And if you count Dragon Magazine in with that the page count gets even higher. So then I think "One fifth of that content (20 pages) comes to about $1. Which means my module, by comparison, would be worth $2... tops."

I begin to see why there are so few independent 4e modules being produced out there. WotC just cannot be competed with. The sheer amount of quality content that they are putting out far exceeds what an independent can afford to produce. You cannot make a living off of $2 modules. Or hope to run a business. I see that Goodman Games, who is one of the only big 4e module producers I can think of, sells their content for maybe 2 times that amount or so. And I don't know how well they are doing at it.

I can already tell trying to produce this on my own will take a lot of time. If someone in this town ever hires me for a job I will have considerably less free time, making this even harder to complete. Top that with the fact that 80%+ of the monsters I had planned to use in the next module are unusable by the GSL SRD and you add even more time. And, being a perfectionist on these things, I already see things that could be fixed in the original. Add this all up and it looks to be a hell of a lot of effort without much of a payoff (dollar-wise) at all.

So I am wondering if I should just say screw it and not publish. I'm not really sure what content I can put out for free and whether or not I have to abide by the GSL to put out free content. If I'm just sharing my stuff with friends, though, I would imagine I could do what I wanted. Which would save a crapload of time.

I mean I didn't start this project because I thought I could make money off of it, I started it because I thought it would be a good adventure for me to run my group through. And then, when I had cranked through so much of it so quickly I thought, you know, that I might light to share it. And then I wanted to lay it out properly because, well, I'm an anal graphic designer and all. THEN when I looked into the particulars of publishing I came across all sorts of hurdles that had to be cleared in order to do it by the books. And that created TONS more work for me. I mean, yes, it does make a better product, if you will... but at what cost?

I had dreamed of publishing but I can see now that to do it on par with other big businesses I have to sacrifice a lot... and not get much return. I know the adventure would get a wider audience if I just gave it away. So I am torn. It might be easier to just accept reality and give it away and not have to jump through all the hoops.

I think that this was part of WotC's business plan all along. They were losing their lunch to all the independent 3.x publishers out there and wanted to shore that up so that that wouldn't happen to them in the new version. They even wanted publishers to not publish both 3.x and 4e stuff, originally, though that got left by the wayside. But they have secured that when they go to 5e that 4e will die. It's in the agreement for 4e. By tweaking the SRD to have so many limitations and setting the standard so high for adventure quality at a low price they are driving other publishers of things for their game out of business. Which, from a business standpoint, makes a lot of sense and is, frankly, smart.

Aside:
Hell, if you think about it, their idea to not have a fixed map of the world even helps them as taking a world-neutral view for their products means you can put their published stuff in any other published world that you want. And again this makes sense. I don't think I have yet to see a Forgotten Realms- specific adventure. And I am likely to never see it again. It makes more sense to have adventures fit to a world neutral view and have settings that conform to many world neutral standards (the plane structure and whatnot) so they can be mixed and matched or not matched up at all. So gone is the 2.x TSR structure of making money by building more worlds and perhaps gone is the 3.x WotC structure of putting out world supplements. They might just be distilling it down to:
-Game Basics (expanded upon by more PHB and DMG versions)
-World Basics (Players and DM books detailing the setting)
-Adventures (Both published, printed ones and D&DI ones)
-Those plastic minis (mixed success here as quality is steadily dipping and the structure of how they are distributed is changing. Personally, I think they would be better off selling these in an online store individually and making fewer of them, but what do I know?)

Aaaaaaanyway... should I just say screw it and give it away? Or hope that people will be willing to buy and unknown's content for 3x the price of WotC content? Please sound off in the comments!