Lago's Kickass D&D-Book Marketing Strategy!

[Blasted]

You think that you can have a decent release every two months? I think that you'd be lucky to do it in four, but that might have some advantages in marketing. I suspect two months might be too close together for what is really your primary product.

[Username17]

You think that you can have a decent release every two months? I think that you'd be lucky to do it in four, but that might have some advantages in marketing. I suspect two months might be too close together for what is really your primary product.

Absolutely you can, if you're WotC. Hell, for a while they were releasing 4 books a month. If you count novels and mirrorstone books, they are bringing out five books next month. And seven next month. And minis and dungeon tiles on top of that.

Say what you want about Mike Mearls - I certainly do - but he is a genuinely professional hack writer. And he produces over 20,000 words a week. I have never decided to try to write full time, and I don't think I could manage it. Certain not while balancing medical school at the same time. But even normal freelance writers produce abut 10,000 words a week minus a few weeks for holidays and personal tragedies and the like. Over the course of a year, you can squeeze about half a million words from each dedicated writer as long as you keep giving them writing projects.

With a writing staff of 5, your total writing output would be about 2,500,000 words. That's about 17 or 18 books the rough length of Frostburn or Runner's Companion. If you populated your writing brigade with high speed full-time hacks, you could get twice that or more.

Now, however long it takes for a book to be in development is however long it takes for the book to be in development. You'd like to get some playtesting done (and I don't mean the WotC "lunchbreak campaign"), you need solicited art, you need editing, you need typesetting, you need to print and ship and market it. But none of that shit needs to be done by the writing staff. Division of labor and all that. When the writing staff finishes primary writing on a project, you do specific art solicitations, you send it to the playtesting crew, you have editors poring over it, and so on. But the writers start writing on a new project. You don't leave any part of the factory idle longer than you have to.

And therein lies the genius of making a book like Might of Empires rather than a book like Arcane Power or Complete Champion. Only a quarter of the book or so is really character crunch, so the actual development can be fit into the 3 weeks prior to the book when Depths Unknown was being written. So the really time consuming character options (like the character classes of Warmage and Martial, as well as the flagship classes of Assassin and Knight) can be split up among different authors and the rest of the work can be left to quickly written material like essays about how empires sometimes hire Orcish barbarians to work for them and sometimes get attacked by Orcish barbarians. Getting the whole thing written in 3 weeks isn't even hard; at least, not once you've gotten yourself a group of authors that have all signed off on the design principles of your edition.

So really, the question isn't "Can we make one book every 2 months?" the question is "what are we going to do with all our excess capacity, if we are only producing 1 major book every 2 months?" And the answer to that is that you are actually also writing other things. Every month you have people writing on Stormwrack (or whatever), they are going to be done early. The rest of the month you have them submitting monsters towards the year's monster manual. And you do print a monster manual every year. Those things are just gold. The only books I bother to haul to games I am DMing. Also, you have your main writing team throw some work out making a few adventures.

And by a "few" I seriously mean getting those things out every month. You make Dungeon Magazine a core product, and bring it back as a real magazine. Like the old G, D, and B series adventures.

Remember, WotC has a staff in the several dozen range. If they wanted to make 72 books a year, they just could. In fact, they do. The question is really simply how to ration the releases out so that your flagship products don't get drowned out in a sea of mediocre stuff no one cares about. That and how to ration the workload out so that people aren't left phoning in actual character classes and major player options. You want to break it up with enough B and C material that the guy who writes up the Corsair is actually kind of excited and inspired to do so.

-Username17

[Blasted]

Absolutely you can, if you're WotC. Hell, for a while they were releasing 4 books a month. If you count novels and mirrorstone books, they are bringing out five books next month. And seven next month. And minis and dungeon tiles on top of that.

Say what you want about Mike Mearls - I certainly do - but he is a genuinely professional hack writer. And he produces over 20,000 words a week
....

Remember, WotC has a staff in the several dozen range. If they wanted to make 72 books a year, they just could. In fact, they do.

I'm obviously thinking too small scale. I wonder what their playtesting is like and whether it matters at all.

[RobbyPants]

I'm obviously thinking too small scale. I wonder what their playtesting is like and whether it matters at all.

Does matter or should matter? It should, but in practice it doesn't seem to matter that much.

A lot of people don't really understand balance, and more importantly, a lot of them don't understand the rules. So, as long as things aren't so ridiculous that people won't touch it, you're probably fine.

As Frank said, people want to play minotaurs and ninjas and pirates, regardless of what they look like on paper. Go to the WotC boards and look at people asking for advice on building a samurai or something. If your sample build doesn't have the word "samurai" in the class section, a lot of rubes will reject it, even if it's better mechanically and thematically. To many people, the word "samurai" is more important than balanced rules.

[Blasted]

Maybe I play with too many min/maxers

[Murtak]

I'm obviously thinking too small scale. I wonder what their playtesting is like and whether it matters at all.

Does matter or should matter? It should, but in practice it doesn't seem to matter that much.

Well, our sample size sucks but consider this: 3E had playtesting (only for the first ten levels, though). 4E had none. 3E lasted for years. 4E seems already on the brink of death.

[Crissa]

No, playtesting doesn't matter for your initial release, as most players have no idea what balance is, and besides, you can't put balance up on posters.

However, if you don't bake actual testing in at the beginning, you get no second chance to do so, because of that very same rule. Your game might be better, but it will never attract as many as it lost due to have the poor start.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, looking at the schedule of book releases, I am kind of actually having second thoughts about that model.

Frank blames one of the reasons why 4E is going under is because there weren't enough classes and class-based expansion material to satisfy everyone at the outset. And I agree. I'm not sure what I think about the conclusion.

For example, say you have a customer who is interesting in 5E but really wants to play a ninja and a corsair. You don't have these classes in your basic book, so they walk away all dejected or decide to hold off. 'But wait!' you tell your customer, 'In 2 months, we will have a samurai, a ninja, and a corsair class! You just need to buy Deadly Shadows and Stormwrack! Then you'll have both classes!'

The customer then looks at you all funny. Why would he want to purchase two books to get at two classes? You might have convinced said customer to pick up a book if both classes were in a book, but since you got greedy and split them up into two books the person decides that that amount of money is too much and doesn't buy the books. Or they pirate them.

I'm not sure if Frank's release schedule has enough Player crunch in it to convince people to pick up the books.

And I'm still totally not sold on the idea that there is even a demand for that many classes. People picked up 3.5E classes near the end of the lifecycle because they were better than the starting classes. Either they offered more raw filthy power (Book of Nine Swords) or that they were more convenient than the basic classes (TN, Beguiler). Unfortunately, the only reason why the new classes had an in-road was because the old classes were poorly designed.

Assuming that you did design your classes properly, though, and you did streamline the process then what's the temptation for people to pick up your new classes? If you strip away the mechanical incentive then all you have to sell people on is the theme. And as we've seen time and again, people use their coolest concepts first. Frank had to list popular new classes that were superior to the original ones, but I find it telling that no one picked up classes that were mechanically equivalent to old ones like Hexblade, Favored Soul, or Duelist.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, playtesting doesn't matter for your initial release, as most players have no idea what balance is, and besides, you can't put balance up on posters.

However, if you don't bake actual testing in at the beginning, you get no second chance to do so, because of that very same rule. Your game might be better, but it will never attract as many as it lost due to have the poor start.

-Crissa

Crissa speaks wisdom here.

People on these boards were coming up with 4E problems within a month that it was first released, but the problems didn't start to sink into the base until about a year and a half later.

Of course, once you release the initial book it's pretty much too late. 3E was modular enough that it was able to release some fixes that alleviated the worst of the problems, but 4E really can't without scrapping the entire system and rebuilding from the ground up.

Initial playtesting is really, really important in the long run. While when the book first gets out it'll coast on marketing and flash, the later years will depend heavily on word-of-mouth.

[Zinegata]

I'm not sure if Frank's release schedule has enough Player crunch in it to convince people to pick up the books.

And I'm still totally not sold on the idea that there is even a demand for that many classes. People picked up 3.5E classes near the end of the lifecycle because they were better than the starting classes. Either they offered more raw filthy power (Book of Nine Swords) or that they were more convenient than the basic classes (TN, Beguiler). Unfortunately, the only reason why the new classes had an in-road was because the old classes were poorly designed.

Assuming that you did design your classes properly, though, and you did streamline the process then what's the temptation for people to pick up your new classes? If you strip away the mechanical incentive then all you have to sell people on is the theme. And as we've seen time and again, people use their coolest concepts first. Frank had to list popular new classes that were superior to the original ones, but I find it telling that no one picked up classes that were mechanically equivalent to old ones like Hexblade, Favored Soul, or Duelist.

There are two to six players for every DM, so yes there should be lots of player material.

However, the reason why there should have been a gazillion classes in 4E is that each class in 4E has an extremely narrow schtick. You (almost) literally have to make a new class to make a sword-specialist even if you have an existing spear specialist because of the way they designed the classes.

3.X was massively more modular and didn't really need the new classes. But new classes are cool and tend to help players who don't want to sift through seven books and take three different classes just to make the sort of character they want to play. Duskblades for instance were created to let people be gishes without having to make Fighter/Mages. But you didn't really *need* to make all of those new classes.

So the amount of player material is really gonna depend on how you designed your core system. If it's 3.X like, you don't really need a huge number of classes. If it's gonna be like 4E, then a huge number of classes is simply gonna be mandatory.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

So.....4E is less class modular and requires more bookspace and is therefore inferior to 3E's system which is more class modular and requires less bookspace?

[Blasted]

I'm sure from WoTCs POV more bookspace is better.
I'm not sure that this would be a reason to call 4E inferior.
There are plenty of other reasons though.

[Orca]

Assuming that you did design your classes properly, though, and you did streamline the process then what's the temptation for people to pick up your new classes?

That's a hell of an assumption. There's always screwups.

As far as flavour goes, you should be able to use a rogue class (or whatever) in the core book for the ninja or corsair, but there's always going to be someone who wants the more specific flavour that you've attached to the name if you've made it cool enough.

The model the WoTC used to have was to use the later books to keep interest in buying the Players Handbook going. You don't expect to sell a lot of books about ninjas, they're there to keep up interest in D&D as a whole.

[Zinegata]

So.....4E is less class modular and requires more bookspace and is therefore inferior to 3E's system which is more class modular and requires less bookspace?

I didn't say it was inferior. But facts are facts. You can't really make a Gish in 4E by "multiclassing" a Fighter and a Mage. To have a proper Gish you literally have to make a new class, which means a fuckton of space for new powers, new advancements paths, etc.

[erik]

I find it telling that no one picked up classes that were mechanically equivalent to old ones like Hexblade, Favored Soul, or Duelist Swashbuckler.

(fixed)

I thought all 3 of those were inferior to their old competitors (Hexblade worse than anything, Favored Soul worse than Cleric, Swashbuckler worse than a Rogue or Fighter). I tried hard to work them into builds but there was always a better level to take no matter what I wanted to accomplish.

I think I had one character take a level of Swashbuckler for Weapon Finesse on a melee rogue who otherwise was going to need a fighter level for all the feats I wanted. That was it.

The more convenient classes (Beguiler, Dread Necromancer)... isn't that exactly what we want? A class that isn't better than the old guard, but fills a niche previously neglected or at least making the character design easier for that niche.

[Username17]

The Beguiler had legs, but no one bought the PHB2 because "It's going to have the beguiler in it!" That name doesn't mean anything to anyone, and people didn't pick up the PHB2 to get their hands on it until word of mouth told them that they should. On the flip side, while the Knight had bad word of mouth (for being a shittily designed class), people were psyched up to get access to the Knight class, because it's an evocative name that people wanted to play.

So while obviously you'd never try to make something like the Knight (a class that is deeply disappointing), but you're going to want to throw some stuff that, like the Knight, has a popular sounding name. And you're going to want to distribute your popular names through a large number of books. You'll be making other classes and throwing out alternate class builds, and new Feats and Attributes, and new equipment, and new mounts, and player accessible rules like Stronghold Building or Trade Subsystems all along. But you want to make sure that there is a "seed" class in every book. Some class that like the Knight will get people to buy the book on opening day and tell other people about the contents.

People bought the PHB2 for the Knight, and they kept it for the Beguiler. People will buy Bane Mires because "Death Knight" sounds awesome. Once they own it, they'll go ahead and read the Van Helsingish Hunter class, and if it is good that'll add to word of mouth. And they'll read the rules for skeleton armies, and the swamp adventure rules, and so on ad so on, and those sections that are good will add to word of mouth sales. But a number of people will buy it first day because it has the Death Knight in it, and probably playable Vampires.

You have to separate the fact that a book actually being good and generating positive word of mouth is entirely different from a book being enticing and generating buzz before it drops. You're trying to balance two things here that both drive sales in different ways.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm going to spin off my reply into another thread, because it has more to do with design philosophy than marketing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, what's the ideal ratio of fluff to crunch that your books should have?

If you put too much crunch in your books you turn off the Real Roleplayers and also risk missing out on a market segment of people who will read a book on pirates/undead/the underdark but won't on just Martial Classes. Also you'll run through your material faster.

On the other hand, it seems that the more popular books of 3E were crunch-heavy (i.e. 50% or more crunch); Oriental Adventures, Unearthed Arcana, Book of Nine Swords, Player's Handbook II, Book of Vile Darkness, most of the class books, etc.

Personally I think that 25% crunch for a book is just too low. Unless you have a really thick-ass book, the chance of having a hook for someone to look at/buy your book is too small. Going by the more successful books of 3E I think that the ratio of crunch to fluff should be anywhere from 2:5 to 3:5.


Also, what is your feelings on recycling? I think that the Spell Compendium was pretty successful for a latecomer 3E book. And the beauty of that is that the new content of the book is pretty low. I personally think that after the halfway point of your edition you should start printing books that have no other reason other than to cut down the number of books people have to sift through/bring to the take and also cut down the entry barrier for people interested in your edition but who are intimidated by all of the books.

In other words, when the edition is new you should expect fans to buy 6 to 8 sourcebooks for them to recreate the exact D&D experience that people want. But when the edition is older and new people are less willing to drop down 200 dollars all at once you can give them a very similar experience of content by making them just buy three books + core. Having too much continuity or content built-up is actually a huge turnoff for fans; it's precisely why I can't get into Lost and why I didn't start getting hook on Star Trek until the original series came out on YouTube and Chuck Sonnenberg started his own VOY episode guide.

[Username17]

Book of Vile Darkness is mostly fluff, Book of Nine Swords is mostly crunch, Frostburn is about half and half. All of those books were very successful.

I believe the ideal ratio is about 50% player material and about 50% DM material and about 50% Crunch and about 50% Fluff.

So you have new classes but you also have new hazards and monsters in every book. The Fluff actually appeals to everyone. Even though nominally a quarter of the book is player relevant fluff and a quarter of the book in DM relevant fluff, everyone is going to end up reading all of it as long as it doesn't stray into D material.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, character customization.

While it takes a really long time to do if you have a lot of it and sometimes irritates people, it doesn't mean that people won't go through with it. People like the idea of tweaking their character exactly the way that they want them to. Which means more marketing opportunities.

IOW, 5E characters should have these things that can be customized about them:

1) Classes: These have several customizing opportunity subcategories.

1a) Open multiclassing: This is extremely hard to balance but reaps rich rewards if it works. The fact remains that 3rd Edition D&D books, even loser ones like Silver Marches or Races of Eberron, moves product because of the attitude there might be new material that you can graft onto your old character.

1b) Powers: People should get a lot of powers. But people shouldn't get so many that they become overwhelmed. Winds of Fate is a great system from a marketing standpoint because it forces people to cough up 16+ powers from the outset. But there's also a lot of room for tweaking.

1c) Class features: Yes, people should have the opportunity to tweak one or more fundamental class features, like we saw in several of 3E's racial books / the PHB 2 / Unearthed Arcana.

2) Magical items: While 4E's system of having 12 item slots and making them pathetic bonuses is annoying and insulting, it's not necessarily bad for business. You just need to make sure that the magical items are things people want to spend real money for.

3) Races: Going with the open multiclassing idea, you can sell more books if you implement some kind of bloodline or hybridization feature. 4E's racial system was dumb because of the stat system double-bind and the fact that they didn't have interesting things written about them, but that's a writing thing--not a marketing thing.

4) Contacts: Want non-Dungeon Masters to thumb through the NPC books occasionally? Implement a contact system. If you give people the option to have their characters have Artemis Enteri their on-off again sugar-daddy then you will move books.

5) Backgrounds: 4E failed in three ways. The first and most important reason that these they failed is because they did not make these mandatory; they got viewed as munchkin tools so nobody used them. The second reason they failed is because there was not enough of a mechanical incentive to bother with them in the first place. The third reason why they failed is because backgrounds were conceptually limiting.

Backgrounds should not be 'I was a street urchin, so I get a +2 bonus to constitution'. That kind of character concept determinism makes people sad pandas because it forces them to rewrite their character concept substantially. Backgrounds SHOULD be easily pastable-on things like 'My Grandmother was a famous general for the Empire' or 'I lived across the street from an eccentric alchemist who taught me a thing or two'.

6) Feats: I know that 3E implemented feats in a shitty way and 4E implemented them in a profoundly shitty way. But seriously, the original idea of there being some race/class agnostic character options that people could use to further customize their character has merit. And it also sells books.

7) Paragon Paths / Epic Destinies: In addition to the class system, people should also have these things Copy-Pasted atop of their characters to gain free power for no reason. I don't approve calling them that just because 4E's system left a bad taste in my mouth. But seriously, people WANT to call their characters Grey Knights or Prince of the Abyss and get some game effect from them. So I say let them.

8) Disadvantages: Yes, it does seem weird that people will pay money for new ways to disadvantage their character. But if you make them MANDATORY then people will do so anyway--the ultimate hope is that people pick disadvantages that will increase immersion and role-playing opportunities. These must be implemented in the game with the explicit knowledge that some people will pick disadvantages in a way that they will obviate as much as possible (or turn into an actual advantage) and that some people will genuinely choose to hose their character. Disadvantages should be far-reaching and evocative and should influence peoples' behavior or perception of other peoples' behavior. Disadvantages like 'hemophiliac' or 'blind' are bad. Disadvantages of 'snob' and 'illiterate' are good.

[Username17]

I'm with you on the disadvantages and the backgrounds, and especially on the contacts, I think you're dead wrong on the open multiclassing thing.

Consider: you are going to have a finite number of powers on your list of things to do, right? That list can only be divided so many ways. And the ratios producable by the division and subdivision of that list make the limit of how much multiclassing can be done.

In short, if you have 8 abilities to select from during a combat round - which is really pushing the limit o what can be accomplished without choice paralysis, then it is impossible to have more than 8 classes. Open Multiclassing becomes literally impossible if you take a 9th level.

Multiclassing needs to exist, but it doesn't need or even want to be more complex than Major Class/Minor Class or Half-n-Half.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Multiclassing needs to exist, but it doesn't need or even want to be more complex than Major Class/Minor Class or Half-n-Half.

Is there any way Multiclassing could be made to work by Major Class / Minor Class / Minor Class (50 / 25 / 25) or Third-n-Third-n-Third? Having more slots will move more books, so some work should be made in making multiclassing as robust as possible.

This isn't a character representation thing, since once people have Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies to copypaste on top of their Class/Subclass thing you can pretty much cover any concept anyway. This is a pure 'let's sell them as much crap as possible!' marketing gambit.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Ooo, I missed a pretty important aspect of character customization thar.

9) Skills: This is actually a really hard skill to marketize. Unlike classes or races, people are generally intolerant of being told that they can't craft or tend bars until they come out with a proper expansion.

Thus I don't think D&D should try to go out of its way to sell skills or applications of them. The skill system should more or less be complete at the outset. I think that 3E's skill system was unbalanced and 4E's was sketched too broadly to be interesting. I know it's not a marketing thing, but in 5E there should be enough skills to cover a broad range of activities, the DCs should NOT be ephemeral or ambiguous, and they should be about equal in utility.

Squeezing money out of the skill system, if it's to be done at all, should just be example DCs of certain tasks relating to the sourcebook. For example, if you have the Stormwrack book there should be survival DCs for being on several kinds of deserted islands and example DCs for common sailing task. But not too much effort should be done on these simply because of the fact that people will just make up their own damn DCs if they don't have the book--something that can't be said for, say, feats.

[Username17]

Printing new things that people have the option to buy in order to be able to do things is a double edged sword. While it allows people to explicitly do something, it also implicitly denies the ability to do that same thing to everyone else. The "make it a feat" people actually reduce the amount people can do very time they make a new feat. If you make a purchaseable option that lets people jump onto hostile monsters and ride around on them during combat, you implicitly take the option to do that as a stunt away from every other character. And when you print enough of those things, the number of stunts left for players to aspire to becomes practically non existent.

Powers and special attacks generally don't have such a problem. No one was going to let you shoot heat rays out of your eyes anyway, so implicitly denying that to everyone by explicitly allowing people to purchase such a power is no big deal.

But every time you print a new ability that allows you to climb walls or throw sand in peoples' faces, you aren't making the game broader, you're making the game narrower.

Squeezing money out of the skill system, if it's to be done at all, should just be example DCs of certain tasks relating to the sourcebook. For example, if you have the Stormwrack book there should be survival DCs for being on several kinds of deserted islands and example DCs for common sailing task.

This. If you're going to print up more info on mundane tasks, you should print info on how to allow players to do it with the abilities they already have - not how they need abilities they definitionally do not already have in order to accomplish those tasks.

When you write up Storm Wrack, it should be possible for a Ranger or Rogue built out of the Player's Handbook to deal with those challenges without having to have planned ahead for that and swapped out some abilities for ones in that book.

-Username17

[Doom]

In short, if you have 8 abilities to select from during a combat round - which is really pushing the limit o what can be accomplished without choice paralysis, then it is impossible to have more than 8 classes. Open Multiclassing becomes literally impossible if you take a 9th level.


-Username17

But if you can swap your ability list around in between combats, then it's still good, even if weaker (but hey, if you're taking 9 different classes, you kinda expect to be a bit unfocused).