Category: GMing For Fun and Profit

D&D’s 3rd edition had, as part of their development process, a mission to find out what things were so core to D&D that the audience would revolt if they were changed, and which they could overhaul as completely as they pleased. For example, there had to be some use for all the funny shaped dice, because D&D players like their funny shaped dice, so you can’t switch everything over to standard six-siders even though that makes it easier for new players to get started. It was determined that numerical bonuses on magic weapons and armor were too beloved by too much of the playerbase to be dispensed with, so instead the game’s power curve was built to accommodate +2 longswords and such.

And they decided that they could not change the six D&D stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. This is too bad, because those stats are bad. They do a poor job of describing characters and a poor job of defining what parts of a character are expected to be under the player’s control and which are expected to be abstracted away by dice.

The need for some kind of perception-based roll is obvious. The GM can’t very well just declare that the monsters have surprised the party because they prepared an ambush – clearly, there is some chance the party might spot the ambush using their eyes and ears in a way the players at their tables cannot do, on account of the thing to be spotted being imaginary. Equally clearly, certain character archetypes, like the elf or the ranger, are much better at noticing these ambushes than, say, the fighter or the wizard. So your stats definitely need to cover spotting things like clues and ambushes, and definitely need to vary from one character to another.

But why is the associated stat Wisdom? You wouldn’t necessarily expect a perceptive thief sort to necessarily be extremely wise (though you wouldn’t expect them to be extremely foolish, either), but you would expect them to be very good at spotting ambushes and traps. Why is Survival associated with Wisdom? While that specific skill is from the 5e skill list, earlier editions also associated similar skills with the Wisdom stat, despite the fact that “impulsive barbarian who is nevertheless very good at hunting deer” is an obvious archetype (I have a fanboy compulsion to point out that this does not describe Conan the Barbarian as originally written by Robert E Howard, but it’s been a long time since Conan was the only or even primary inspiration for the Barbarian class and archetype). You can hack your way into it by giving the barbarian proficiency/skill points/whatever your specific edition uses to make skills improve with level, but a Cleric trained in Survival (or equivalent) will always be better. Characters with strong willpower are automatically better at working with animals, despite “easily startled animal lover” being a pretty straightforward Druid concept. You would expect someone’s Wisdom score to either increase or plateau with age (old fools exist aplenty, but they were fools when they were young, too), and yet eyesight and hearing get worse the older you get, starting almost immediately – few people can hear the “teen buzz” by the age of twenty, which is why it’s called that.

The division between stats is inconsistent. STR and CON are split apart, which leaves the conceptual space for the two stretched so thin that CON has no skills associated with it at all, and STR only gets one. CON gives HP and is a common save against nasty effects, but STR only contributes to attack and damage – DEX does that, and it has three skills (plus Thieves’ Tools, the rogue skill which has cunningly disguised itself as a tool proficiency) associated with it, and it’s associated with a common save, and it increases your AC in most armor. And there’s an obvious point of division between full-body agility and manual dexterity. Sleight of Hand, Thieves’ Tools, and ranged/finesse attack and damage would be covered by Dexterity, while Agility would cover the AC bonus, Acrobatics and Stealth proficiency, and get the saves against area attacks. Alternatively, combine STR and CON together to bring it up to par with DEX, which is probably better balanced with the other abilities (although as we’ve already discussed, WIS is a dog’s breakfast of concepts already).

Plus, while the mechanical function of Intelligence is fine, both it and Wisdom are named after things which should be coming from the player, not the character. A lot of Wisdom’s problems as a stat come from trying to tie together several unrelated mechanical functions, but also the basic concept of being too wise to fall for a trick is something the player can and should be doing themselves. Likewise, being smart enough to out-maneuver an enemy in a fight or politically or whatever should be based on player decisions. These kinds of decisions are the core of the player’s input into the game, strip them away and what game do you even have left? Roll an INT check to see if flanking that enemy is a good idea? Roll a WIS check to know if the princess is trustworthy (Insight already gets close to this)? At some point you’ve automated every choice a player can make and are playing a particularly cumbersome idle game.

The things covered by the INT stat – a collection of skills, casting for the Wizard and some wizard-flavored sub-classes, and a very rare save – would be much better represented by an Education stat. WIS needs to be redesigned entirely, either renamed to something like Perception (the skill would be cut and its functions turned over to Perception saves) or else cut entirely and its functions split up between other stats. Either STR and CON need to be combined, or else DEX and AGI need to be split (depending upon the balance considerations, which vary depending on exactly what edition you’re talking about – DEX is much stronger in 5e than in 3e, for example).

And also we need to move away from stats going from 1 to 20 with 10 being the average which gives you +0 and instead have a system that goes from 1 to 10 with 5 being the average which gives you +5, and then increase all DCs by 5 to compensate. This is the kind of thing that would break backwards compatibility so it’s a very bad idea at this exact moment, but whenever we’re breaking backwards compatibility anyway, please cast off this final remnant of the jank era of the 70s and 80s when people were still figuring out how roleplaying games worked and the resulting systems were overly complex and showed the scars of being on their twelfth revision when the creator finally said “fuck it” and pushed it out the door, ready or not.

People occasionally try to mount a defense of D&D 4e. It was the edition war du jour from 2008 to 2014 when 4e was the current edition and Pathfinder was continuously pushing its teeth in, and that time frame being what it was, that edition war started off with people openly harassing one another over elf games and by the end had morphed into pretending that supporting the wrong elf game was racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever because it was no longer considered acceptable to harass someone over elf games, so people had to pretend that the other side’s community was guilty of some kind of actual wrongdoing. I bring this animosity up in advance because you will sometimes see people who are very committed to defending 4e or PF1, and they might wander into this post, and if they do I want everyone to know in advance what’s up. At some point, the broader 4e/PF1 community entangled their favorite TTRPG very strongly yet also completely baselessly with their sense of moral worth, and you still get lots of people who act like “4e was bad, actually” automatically implies “and therefore everyone who has ever enjoyed it is a bad person,” so instead of shrugging their shoulders and moving on they become a SungWon skit.

But anyway: Why did PF1 outperform 4e by such a wide margin? Why did 4e dwindle to nothing while PF1 consolidated nearly the entire TTRPG market around itself? PF1 got crushed by 5e just like 4e got crushed by PF1, so it’s clearly not that PF1 is some kind of unassailable holy grail of gaming. The math between skill points, attack roles, and saves are incompatible, so you can’t do things like rolling a spell attack against a Willpower save or whatever. The balance is a joke – PF1’s approach to making content was to produce huge amounts of it to the point where there are twelve different ways to make any given character concept and let the community figure out which of those builds is actually viable, to the point where their PC Shifter class is weaker than their NPC Warrior class, a class designed to be simple enough that the GM can easily slap levels of Warrior onto an existing stat block to make it stronger but not any more complex, and it’s not a huge deal if levels of Warrior are much weaker than levels of proper PC classes as a result, which they are – except the Shifter, which is a wreck. A lot of PF1 classes and prestige classes seem to have been designed by figuring out how many cool ideas they had, and then spacing them out from level 1 to level 20, while paying no attention to whether or not the abilities they were giving to a level 20 character were remotely on par with what the other classes got. And the power scale on PF1 was much more expansive than 5e’s, so a character build that fell behind too badly (and some of them did) wasn’t something you needed a calculator to notice, they were unplayable, totally unable to contribute anything to combat.

And yet, despite these flaws and the considerably larger starting capital available to 4e, 4e did not outperform PF1. 4e still does not outperform PF1, according to the Orr Group Industry’s report for Q4 2021 (the most recent as of the writing – they’re usually a quarter or two behind). 4e’s frequent use of aura effects makes it far easier to play on a virtual tabletop than physically, so Roll20 should, if anything, be giving it a slight advantage, and yet 4e is not only less popular than games still in print like 5e and PF2, not only less popular than its own competitor PF1 and predecessor 3e, not only less popular than non-English D&D alternatives like Tormenta and Das Schwarze Auge (which get some advantage in their home markets, but D&D is available in Portugese and German), not only less popular than indie spin-off games like Dungeon World and Savage Worlds (I think? Savage Worlds is listed twice, one more popular than 4e, the other less), it’s also less popular than AD&D, making it the least popular edition of D&D period. It is more popular than 13th Age, though, so it’s still more popular than games that attempt to continue iterating on 4e’s own ideas.

For anyone defending 4e, the first question to answer here is: Why do so few people want to play it? 4e benefits from the endorsement of Matt Colville and the Penny Arcade guys, and it’s still the least popular edition of D&D ever, even on a platform that makes running it quick and easy, where it’s cumbersome and difficult on most others.

D&D 5.5e – they’re trying to call it “One D&D” but they tried to call 5e “D&D Next Edition” and I’m not playing along with the new dumb name anymore than I am with the old one – is mostly the same as 5e, but the beta test does show a couple of significant rules updates. One of them is adding in critical success and failure for skill checks: On a natural 20, you always succeed, on a natural 1, you always fail. This is a bad idea.

The reason why this idea gets support mostly seems to come from greentext stories about rolling a natural 20 and causing something insane to happen – the Bard seducing the BBEG mid-fight or a dwarf being too stubborn to fall in a pit or whatever. These greentext stories make great memes because they’re funny enough to be worth the two minute time investment it takes to read them. For some fraction of the playerbase, the point of D&D is basically to create an environment that generates these greentext stories. But that’s not a very big fraction. Most people balk at the idea of spending four hours playing a game in the hopes that a two-minute joke will fall out that they can post to Reddit.

And for everyone who plays D&D to tell a full-length story at the table, rather than to boil it all down to one funny moment posted to Reddit, critical success and failure both have negative effects on the flexibility of the skill system. The possibility of critical failure means that no one, no matter how high their bonus is, will ever reach a point of being able to do extraordinary things as a matter of routine. A character with a +5 ability bonus, +6 proficiency, and another +6 from expertise cannot roll lower than an 18, which means DC 15 checks succeed automatically. Removing the tension from die rolls is usually bad (abilities that do things like allow you to reroll any roll below a 10 are usually bad), but the massive investment of character resources required to reach the point where a DC 15 check is automatic means that it’s not a common thing. It’s a high-level superpower, which arises emergently from the game’s systems. You can kludge that back in with a special 17th-level ability for Bards that grants them autosuccess on DC 15 skill checks for any skill they have expertise in (or whatever), but it’s much easier to just let it happen as an emergent property of the skill system, that way you don’t have to write another rule into the books to cover it.

And critical success is, counterintuitively, very disempowering for players. Part of the GM’s job is determining what’s even possible to accomplish with a skill check. Under the current system, skill checks can be capable of achieving some pretty spectacular results on a DC 30, 35, or 40 (the latter in particular achievable only by stacking buffs on someone who’s also got a very high passive bonus). You can make it possible to do things like climb rain up into the clouds or convince a guard that he’s been polymorphed into a wombat, because you can assign these things an extremely high DC, so they’re available only to very powerful characters.

But some things might just be flat-out impossible. No amount of Arcana lets you cast spells without a slot, no amount of Perception lets you observe things from ten miles away, no amount of Athletics allows you to strike the ground and cause an earthquake that levels a city block. Which of these things needs to be impossible no matter what you roll and which are possible but only at extremely high DCs is left up to GMs – and if a character always succeeds on a natural 20, a lot more stuff is going to be moved over into the “impossible no matter what your bonus is” category. Most people’s D&D stories have room for legendary Barbarians climbing rain into the clouds, but not for a random farmer who tried it every time it rained and got lucky after a month or two.

Critical successes and failures push D&D towards slapstick, and while that’s definitely a style of play, it’s also definitely not the primary style of play, and the default rules shouldn’t be supporting it at the expense of the standard high fantasy pulp-not-parody tone that most people play in. And if you’re creating optional rules to encourage a wakcy playstyle, critical successes and failures are a good place to start, but don’t go nearly far enough on their own.

The Traveler’s Guide to the Goblin Fells finished crowdfunding on August 16th. It had 268 backers and raised $4,415.

It’s not a particularly inspired panik-kalm-panik. A bad thing happened, then it went away, then it came back.

I’m going to try and give the Kickstarters more generic sounding names going forward, to see if that’s the secret sauce that made Elemental Chaos more successful than the rest. I’ve only got two books left before the series either lives or dies, and it’s starting to look like “dies” is just about locked in. It’s not over until October, when the final book of the first six Kickstarts, but it’d need to be a pretty dramatic turnaround at this point.

Marketing-wise, running ads on PodCastle is slightly profitable, so that was cool, although unfortunately there’s not really any way to make it scale. I learned about PodCastle by happenstance, there isn’t a larger network of podcasts I can branch out into (the PodCastle people do have several other podcasts, but they’re on other genres, which means my fantasy D&D book probably won’t get the attention there that it did on PodCastle, and the margins on this are already pretty slim). I also had a commissioned class from Alex Bobrow, the Caltrop Core person, and while that doesn’t seem to have brought in more than it cost, it did bring in some new backers, and might plausibly grow over time if I keep at it. Hopefully the time it takes is three months or less, because that is the amount of time that I have.

The Kickstarter for the Traveler’s Guide to the Elemental Chaos ran from July 1st to July 16th. It had 326 backers and raised $5,900 on the dot.

Of course, I’m not out of the woods yet. For starters, I’m setting myself up for the third beat in a panik-kalm-panik meme, which I probably should’ve realized ahead of time when I used the panik face in the last one. Oh, well, too late now.

It’s possible that my guess from last time was correct: Darkwood benefitted from being the first book in the new series and getting pitched in updates directly to the entire Chamomile’s Guide to Everything audience. Drachzee picked up some momentum, but updates for it were only pushed to Darkwood backers rather than all thirteen Chamomile’s Guide books, resulting in a massive contraction. Now Elemental Chaos is picking up momentum again, with a 20% increase in backer count comparable to the 30% increase I saw fairly regularly during the ramp-up period of the early books of the first series. Comparing Elemental Chaos (the third book of the new series) to Bianca’s Guide to Golems (the third book of the old), Elemental Chaos is doing a lot better. It’s possible that the new series got a stronger start due to the success of the old, and is now rising up towards the old 400-450 plateau, with the rate of the rise being slightly slower only because the starting point was higher.

However, it’s also possbile that Elemental Chaos was a much stronger topic (the name, to begin with, is immediately familiar, as opposed to “the Darkwood” or “the rogue city of Drachzee,” which are designed to be evocative but which are not existing generic D&D locations). The old series stabilized at 400-450 for most topics, and it’s possible that the new series is going to stabilize at 275-325. That’s an average of 300 which is exactly sustainable (assuming other variables also stay consistent), which is probably not actually sustainable in practice. It’s much more likely that an unexpected event costs money than saves money, and without any extra profits to tuck away each month to absorb those expenses, my savings will dwindle away with each unexpected obstacle until there’s none left and the whole house comes down.

The good news is that it looks like I’ve found a replacement for the $25 tier that’s actually going to work. The first series used signed copies, which worked well until I hit the cap of 100 copies for the first book in the series, which I’d established to make sure I never had a project bottlenecked on a massive signing and shipping process. This proved to be wise, because addressing the signed copies proved to be extremely time consuming, but also popularity of the signed copies noticeably declined (and completely collapsed for back copies) after the complete set was no longer available. I tried to replace it with low-tier vanity content, a mention of a character in a vignette, but these have been very unpopular.

But serendipity struck when I realized that if I reprinted everything from Caspar’s Guide to Elementals that’s relevant to the Traveler’s Guide to the Elemental Chaos – what I usually do to make sure new backers get a complete experience – I would be reprinting nearly the entire book. So instead, I offered both books for $10 in .pdf and $25 in print. It was a very popular option, and the average pledge increased from about $14.50 in the first two books to $18.10, slightly higher than the $17.50 that the first series usually got. So I’m definitely using future books to spotlight a specific earlier book from Chamomile’s Guide to Everything in the future, to hopefully keep that average back high.

Ongoing advertising adventures are pretty inconclusive this time. I reached out to several people on Twitter in hopes of commissioning work from them, which they could then drop a tweet or two about. One of them was too busy, three of them never responded at all, and one of them was too busy to have anything ready in July, although they will be contributing to a stretch goal in August, so we’ll be hearing more about them in the next post-mortem (hopefully in a good way). I guess this month the advertising takeaway is that if you do not spend $200 on advertising, you will have an extra $200 at the end of your campaign. Also, possibly people were seeing the ad campaigns I was paying for in the first two books and actively deciding not to support me, but that seems unlikely.

It remains unclear whether this series can sustain itself, but I have a roadmap out to book six and should be able to get at least that far, and cap things off on a reasonably satisfying note if I do have to shut down there. Plus, the latest campaign is only weak evidence in favor of a sustainable series, but it is evidence in favor of a sustainable series.

The Traveler’s Guide to Drachzee finished funding on June 16th. It had 276 backers and raised $4,237.

I’ve already got the Traveler’s Guide to the Elemental Chaos written up, so I may as well Kickstart that and see how it does, but this isn’t sustainable. The series can hypothetically go for two dozen books, but if 250-300 is the new plateau, I’ll probably have to shut it down sometime around book six. That does give me some breathing room to try and find a solution.

It’s possible that two of my previous speculated scenarios were true simultaneously: This series is picking up steam over time, but is also benefiting from a lot of returning readers from the first series who only looked at the first book of the second series. It’s worth noting that I did not post updates to the old series announcing the second book in the Traveler’s Guide series, but did post updates for the first. Theoretically, everyone who wanted to support the new series would’ve done so and gotten the update announcing the Drachzee book because it was posted to Darkwood, but it’s possbile some people expected updates for other books in the Traveler’s Guide series to be posted to the Chamomile’s Guide series. The final updates to the Chamomile’s Guide series explicitly stated this would not be the case, but you can really only be confident that an audience has received a message if you’ve told them at least three times (if you need to get something across immediately, tell people three times one right after the other in a single paragraph). These people might drift back into the series, and it might rebuild momentum over time. The series is presently unsustainable, but the first series didn’t really hit sustainability until book six (four and five were borderline, where whether the books were covering my monthly expenses depended on exactly what my monthly expenses were that particular month). Drachzee did way better than Irena’s.

I’m also accelerating my plans for what will hopefully be actually effective marketing by commissioning people who are popular enough on Twitter to hopefully expand my audience but not so popular that they won’t accept commissions. Drachzee’s marketing outreach was socialmedia-outreach.com, and it was also clearly a total failure. There was some kind of problem with their Facebook, so they offered me a partial refund and ran the campaign purely on Twitter instead, but also their press release was so clearly written from a template intended for video games that I had to edit it for accuracy to remove things like references to a gripping plot and characters (I guess the Traveler’s Guide series does strictly speaking have sort of a plot and a few characters, but they’re a faint outline intended to be fleshed out by GMs, not a major selling point intended to stand alone). My original plan was to give three of these crowdfunding advertising services a shot just as due diligence before writing them off as useless, but with the series’ health critical, I need to pivot immediately to things that are at least somewhat more likely to work.

The Traveler’s Guide to the Darkwood crowdfunded from May 1st to May 16th. It got a total of 347 backers and raised $6,007. This is a 20% contraction from the average 437.2 backers I got for Harlequin, Kessler, Caspar, Ozaka, and Cora, the five books of the previous series where I’d hit a plateau and was getting fairly consistent results. We’re in a new series now, so it’s not clear how much data from the old series applies, which means we’re back in speculation mode.

It’s possible that the series is totally unsustainable, kept as high as it is only by the momentum of the previous series. If this is the case, my backer count will steadily decline until it falls below the 300 backers (ish) needed to justify the ongoing existence of the series and it shuts down halfway through.

It’s possible that I’ve immediately hit the plateau for this series, and 300-400 is the new normal. This is going to be extremely punishing on my budget, because that is enough to justify the series, but barely.

It’s possible that the new series just needs to build up momentum and get exposure effect working for it just like the old one. If this is the case, we should see at least 10% growth from each project until a plateau is reached, most likely in the same 400-500 range that the last series plateau’d. A backer count of at least 380 (roughly 10% growth) in the next project would indicate this is the case.

There’s also another variable, which is that I’ve started experimenting with buying advertising services. The idea is to buy some ad services’ fairly affordable packages and see if they’re profitable, and if so buy a more expensive package and see if it scales. Today’s candidates are Olivia and William, the “duo expert crowd funders” who send lots of Kickstarter messages to everyone who tries to crowdfund anything. That certainly suggests they’re not the most effective crowdfunding marketing that exists (when you’re the best, clients usually come to you), but I probably can’t afford whoever that is anyway, and they don’t have to be literally the best ever to be worth it. If sending a DM to every crowdfunding project on the platform works, then that means they have successfully advertised themselves and can probably do the same for me.

But the results are looking pretty grim for them. It’s impossible to say for sure how much worse the project would’ve gone without their support, and from the analytics they sent me, they did successfully get three thousand people to click through to my project. If we assume that 1% of those clicks actually pledged and the vast majority of them are being hidden in the “direct traffic no referrer information” category, then they might be responsible for as much as 30 of my backers, for an average of $520. Considering I paid $200 for a 10-day advertisement package, this most optimistic estimate suggests that they were worth it, albeit barely, and that there’s little room to scale for a project that only lasts 15 days anyway.

But that’s blindly assuming that 1% of all clicks turn into pledges. More careful examination paints a more pessimistic picture. A little over 400 of the clicks came from Twitter. Only one backer came via Twitter (backing at a fairly standard $17). If we assume a standard rate of 1 backer per 400 clicks backing at an average of $17, that’s about $127.50, which means they aren’t even making me back the money I paid them for the campaign.

This assumes both that the rate for other pledge sources (which are too vague in Bitly’s dashboard for me to draw firm conclusions about) had an identical hit rate to Twitter, masked by Kickstarter’s “direct traffic no referrer information” category, and that the one Twitter backer actually came from this advertising campaign and not from my own tweet. My Twitter presence is really bad so this is a reasonable assumption, but as a counterbalance to the very optimistic $520 scenario, there is also the very pessimistic $0 scenario where that one Twitter backer was a lucky pick-up from my own tweet and the entire advertising campaign accomplished nothing. Certainly the only tweet that ever mentioned me (and it came from an account I’ve never seen before that does nothing but tweet about crowdfunding, so I assume it’s part of Olivia and William’s campaign) got a grand total of four likes, one of which was from me, so while I put my money on the $127.50 scenario being closest to the truth, I think the $0 scenario is more likely than the $520 scenario. In fairness, I was biased that way from the beginning – my thought here was always “I should at least check if these things work” rather than “surely this is the missing ingredient to push me over 600 backers!”

So long as the budget permits, I still intend to try other advertising services to see if some are more effective. I’m worried that effective advertising has a floor cost of several thousand dollars, which my campaigns just don’t make enough to justify, but it’s possible that effective advertising that works at small scale does exist, even if it’s lost in a sea of mediocrity. For that matter, if this second series does pick up momentum over time, I might give Olivia and William a second chance. It’s possible that this first campaign was let down by a weak product rather than a weak advertising campaign.