Are the Best RPGs Independents?

Episode 1.

Tabletop role-playing games began with Dungeons and Dragons, which is now the most well-known and the most-played role-playing game. But does this make it the best? Do indie tabletop role-playing game producers have the potential to make the next best paper and pencil roleplaying game in the tabletop RPG industry, and will role players eventually move on from the indie? Joining me today is Professor Dungeon Master. I am theDMG.

Why are most indie RPGs just shelf fillers?

Professor Dungeon Master: Well, I think that you've got a lot of path dependency with Dungeons & Dragons is the most it's iconic. It's got the most market penetration. However, just because something is on a shelf and not as many people play, it doesn't mean it's not good. Because I remember the days back in the eighties when there were tons of roleplaying games, like there are now, but Dungeons and Dragons wasn't nearly as big as it is now. Games like Pathfinder do about the business that Dungeons and Dragons did back in 1988. So the whole market has grown. Even back in the day I played Warhammer fantasy role-play, which is still available today and I thought it was a great game. I still think it's a great game. So does that mean, because it doesn't sell as much as Dungeons Dragons, does that mean it's not as good? I don't necessarily think so. It's sort of like with music, with popular music. I think David Bowie once said, “the Beatles sold a lot of records. But I think The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed are way more influential”. If you ask bands who they like, he's like Lou Reed. Lou Reed was a guy that didn't sell a whole lot of records. He had like two top 40 records. Great ones, by the way, New York and Transformer. But, everyone's got the White Album. And I just think that just explains commercially ubiquitous doesn't mean it's necessarily the best or only that should exist.

TheDMG: Yeah it's the same with things like films where the blockbusters are not necessarily the best films, you know, they just happen to be the ones that have the most marketing dollars, have the most shelf space, have the most star attraction and so on and so forth. So I think that it's very important to kind of distinguish between what an actual indie game is and how it is important. Because yes, there are a lot of games that sit on shelves. And one of my favorite little ones that I've never played right is this one called Shadow Sword and Spell. There's a lot of really, really cool ideas in there. I've never heard anybody ever talk about it or anything like that, but there's some great little bits of rules and things, and I think that's one of the things that you take away from a lot of these ones that sit on the shelves is that they are great for mining ideas and sometimes you don't want to play the whole game, but you just want to use one particular piece of it for your game. So for instance, Luck Dice that DM Scotty put out, right, that's a great concept that works in most games. You don't necessarily have to use it for D&D. You could use it in a range of games as you have. I think that's part of the part of the appeal of certain indie games is not the fact that people are going to necessarily everyone's going to play this game, but is that they do influence games that do actually build upon that and actually do gain wider appeal.

So as your IRPGs and EZD6s and those sort of really independent games take off a lot of the inspiration behind those are even smaller games like Pocket Fantasy and things like that which, deserve more play. But may never get to the heights of a D&D because I think they really are just something that becomes ephemeral of the moment. It's just something that someone felt they wanted to put out. But there wasn't really the community impetus behind it. I think that's what really caught on with D&D because it was so new and it wasn't like anything that had ever come before. It kind of got that wellspring of fandom behind it that kind of pushed it to where it is today. And it didn't get to the size that it is now, it didn't happen immediately. It did take five decades. You know, it's not an overnight kind of thing. It obviously was big in the seventies and eighties, but nowhere near as big as it is now.

Professor Dungeon Master: It's about five times bigger, by my count.

The top three indie RPGs that don't just sit on shelves?

Professor Dungeon Master: If you consider Pathfinder an independent, you'd have to put that at the top. If you consider it, you know, we consider it still a major corporation. So I think that is what I'm seeing from what I'm saying, Old School Essentials, Shadow Dark have really exploded. That's what I say. Call of Cthuhlu could if you consider that an independent game I think it dominates the horror market, but Old School Essentials and Shadow Dark have really exploded in a way that I am very pleased and surprised by. TheDMG: Yeah I mean that's the help of the internet really is what's come to the fore. Where something like Shadow Dark maybe without the internet would never have gotten to where it got in terms of its funding. Old School Essentials, in terms of people coming back to D&D and finding something they didn't like and then wanted more of what it was, an expansion upon what it was. And I think that's what's kind of brought that back into the fore as older gamers sort of returned to the market because it seems like there's always that gap where there's the initial uptick of a game and then there's that sort of plateau period, and then it dips and then someone discovers it and it skyrockets. And that seems to be the way things happen. But some games obviously will always be the obscure ones on the shelf, and some of them will obviously take off and be more mainstream. When does a game become mainstream? Professor Dungeon Master: I don't know, because it's such a small niche hobby, you know, So like are Dungeon Crawl Classics, Goodman Games, which is a great game. I go to Gen Con, they have a huge room where they're running Dungeon Crawl Classics and it's a vibrant community. You look on YouTube, Twitter, people talking about that game and, and whenever I go into that room, I stop in that room, I see tons of people having fun. Now, is that mainstream? I don't know. It's mainstream I think for Gen Con, you know, I see it at every convention. However, it's a very small. Role-playing games in general are a very small niche market, but I would consider that game, you know, a mainstream hit. Call of Cthuhlu too. It really depends on how you gauge it. You gauge it based on does the average person, the muggle out there, have they ever heard of it? Is that your measure of success or does it sustain itself? Because when I go to conventions, I'll see games sustaining themselves like Goodman Games has. That booth is crazy, like it is there at Origins now. And I've seen pictures. Big booth, tons of people. At Gen Con, you can't even get near the booth. Like you got to wait on a line just to get online. So they're doing gangbusters there. So within the gaming community, that's a big deal. In the mainstream community, I don't know. But I think it's awesome because they have an awesome game and I'm sitting on another game here Fate of the Norns: Ragnarök, which is a Viking game, there's no dice. Instead, you use these tokens, right? And so it's a diceless role-playing game. It's an outstanding Viking game. Like if you asked, “Hey, I want to play a really cool Viking game”, you know, this would be the one that I choose. I played it. Yeah, they use Rune tokens because the Vikings use runes. Now that game sustains itself, like the Creator is at Origins. Now I see him at Pax, see him GenCon. So these people are making a living. And if you can make a living in the game business, I think that's successful. And it's just also, you know, it's cool. It's cool to make a game.

TheDMG: So really there's three main streams. There's mainstream where the average person in the world, if you said the name of the game, they would have an idea of what it may be. And I think Dungeons and Dragons kind of meets that. If you say Dungeons and Dragons, people kind of know that it's a game and they may they may think that it's running around in a forest with floppy swords hitting one another. I think that's a popular perception of what it actually is because, you know, they don't have the kind of exposure. But I think as mainstream media wants to touch on it more then people have more of an idea of what it is. And I think that's why there's so many more people coming into it now because that's sort of mainstream kind of little hole and people are starting to pour in from that. And I think one of the roles that D&D has is to widen that whole, to get more people into the bucket of the RPG industry. So I think that's where the mainstreamed, to continue the metaphor, for the mainstream the waters coming through D&D “the hole” and then the mainstream within the buckets is really then your DCCs and your Pathfinders and so on and so forth, which the outside world has no idea what they are. If you were to say Pathfinder to someone they think you're talking about a car or a thing on Mars, it doesn't have that recognition of the brand of D&D. I think that's important to recognize. And then the third one, which you mentioned, is when a person is making a living from the actual game. And if you're making enough money to sustain yourself in the modern world from your game, your passion and so on and so forth, then it's a going concern. And therefore it is mainstream. Now, whether you're published by a larger concern. And so Paizo, Wizards the Coast or Fantasy Flight or any of those kinds of companies or whether you're doing it on your own, I think it's the spirit is really the thing we're talking about. It's the spirit of the independent person who created the game first and then found a publisher rather than a publisher who came to them and said, “We want to make this game”, which I think is really the route that happens the most as most people will develop a thing and then find a publisher for it or self-publish the game. And really that's what I want to start focusing on with this podcast is to really look at the starting now. How do you come up with the idea for the game? How do you actually break into the Zeitgeist of just the bucket that we're in? You know, how do you get Death Bringer in front of more people? How do you get EZD6, 7DSystem, ICRPG, and all these great games, how do you put them in front of the audience and the players, who are the audience?

What are we as independent game developers doing wrong?

Professor Dungeon Master: Well, I'm not sure we're doing anything wrong. I think that I'm very happy with where Deathbringer is right now. It's been in the DrivethruRPG top 20 for like a year or whenever I released it. It was like a year ago. It's still there. It's Adamanteen selling. It's one of their bestsellers. It's like how much bigger could it be? And if I wrote a full version for those of you out there that don't know, I'm a full-time teacher, right? And then I'm a full-time YouTuber and I have another full-time job. So then after that, I get to design games and there’ll be eventually a full book version of Deathbringer. But that takes a lot of time. But you got to figure this is the way I'm looking at it is like Shadow Dark did on Kickstarter $1.6 million. And there’s been Milton's Knave and I am good friends with Ben Milton. He did like $600,000 on Kickstarter. And they've got an audience, both of those games with like 10,000 people each, and that's a lot. So I think that Death Bringer could eventually reach an audience between those two games and that would be big enough. I'm not sure I would ever want to have a game the size of even Pathfinder because what you mentioned about the mainstream, you know, they don't necessarily know. My question is, do I want them to know? There's when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, right. In America in the eighties, Bon Jovi was a very popular band. Right. And I hated their music. Now, if you're a Bon Jovi fan, I'll give you Wanted Dead or Alive like those guys can play their instruments. And that's a great song, but I didn't care for it. I like The Cure. You know, The Cure was my band and it was a bunch of goth weirdos that no one knew. I remember seeing them when they played Madison Square Garden for the first time was like it was a big deal because of like a breakthrough moment. And eventually, that band had top ten hits in the U.S. But it was like it was like a secret thing that not everybody knew about. And that's part of what makes it cool. Like, if everybody's into it, then it's just like, “yeah”. So I would never want it to be that big. And I think that with ICRPG is it's a big game and I saw a picture of it in a library recently. With EZD6, I think that game is driven by Scottie's personality, but it's out there. It's in the bestselling chart at DriveThruRPG. So the question is what makes a game really super big over a long time is you need an ecosystem, meaning a support system of people, not the creator, but other people designing stuff for it. That's what. I don't know. My game doesn't have to be the biggest game for me to think it's successful. If it were that Deathbringer is never bigger than it is now, I'd be all right.

TheDMG: I think people don't... When people get into things they don't really define what they feel is success before they start the thing. And it doesn't apply just to RPGs it applies to anything you do. This is what I believe is successful for my business or for my week or for my game or whatever like that, that's different from someone else's success. Never define your success by what something else is defined as successful, you know, because I can tell you that Hasbro has a different definition of success for D&D than we would have, and that probably is dollars based. If it's not making X number of dollars a year, we're not going to put more into its budget. That's when the bureaucrats get involved. And I think, that's where things start to get ruined and that's when it stops being independent. All right. When the bureaucrats actually come in and ruin things because they're not… You did a video on this that you put out about a week ago. I think it is where, you know, you talked about the various stages and D&D started as a sort of independent thing. And then, yeah, you know, became a company and then it became a thing. It was bought by wizards and then that was bought by Hasbro. You know, Hasbro has never made its own game. It's just bought games. And that really gets to a point now where at the end of the D&D movie that just came out, they don't even mention Gygax and Arneson, which is a tragedy in and of itself. But I would argue half of the people playing D&D today wouldn't even know who Dave Arneson is. You know, which is sad, you know? But when you're building something, I think where you say your measure of success is I want my family to live on this for the next two or three generations is a different level of success to when I go to conventions, I'd like people to come up to me and shake my hand and say, thank you for changing my way of playing games. Like, to me, that's a huge level of success. When I put out my game, if someone comes up to me and says, “Gareth, thank you for putting that out. I enjoy using it. I, I don't play it every day. I wish I could play it every day, but you know, I got a lot from it” and so on and so forth. To me, it hits you in the feels and that's success for me. All right. One can argue that it didn't make any money, but if you don't define your success by that, then you don't need to worry about that. But if you want to be the best-selling RPG on DriveThruRPG, you're going to be in for a shock because you need to know what it is that you're getting into in order to find that level of success. And beyond, if that's what you do.

What does Wizards of the Coast get wrong?

Professor Dungeon Master: You could make the argument they get nothing wrong because it's more popular than ever. I think what they get wrong about the game for me is it is it's made for, in my opinion, for a younger demographic. It's a power-based game. It's about optimizing the character and about having the most powerful character, having a character that whatever you imagine, you can be a super powerful Thundercat and you're multi-class and you're optimized in every way. That creates a very short-term campaign and it ultimately creates a short-term player, because the people that stick with role-playing games generally, in my experience, there was always the kids that like that had to have that character. That was the super character. And they came and, oh, I role this character myself. I have three eightteens and 17, 16 and I just noticed that those kids don't play anymore. The people that I play with are my friends, and I are the ones that died the most. And if you don't have a game where the characters can die, there's really nothing at risk. And it becomes an ephemeral thing. And you get people. I think too, that the interest in, and this is a perception my perception has nothing to back it up, but the interest may be a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's a group of people that buy Dungeons Dragons merchandise that don't actually play the game. They watch it played on Twitch, but they don't play it themselves. And so I think that too, if that's the audience that Wizards of the Coast has, they have to constantly keep replacing it and they're on the right track because what they're doing is that the reason they're doing this version of the game is not just to they're leveraging the 50th anniversary with introducing a virtual tabletop and they want to migrate this game to the virtual tabletop. They don't want it to be a tabletop game anymore because people in virtual land can pay $9.99 a month for the latest updated books and access to adventures and all these different supplements. That's where they're moving it. Now if you like that. If a person likes that, great, then they're doing it right. If you like playing around a tabletop with human people that's the way I prefer to play. And I really don't care like what the outside world does. I only care what my friends and I do.

TheDMG: I wrote my master's thesis on the universal structure of narrative, and I focused on televised sports, roleplaying games and computer games and how the sort of a universal narrative structure moves through all three and everything else, obviously. But the thing that I started to see early in the birth of sort of Internet and connected games and audiences and things was that you look at Starcraft as an example, huge player base, and then it started to become a thing that people watched. It was really the first game where people actually watched games, computer games on the Internet and obviously in South Korea it became like a televised thing that they actually had on TV. And I think what's happening with D&D is becoming more of a sport where you have fans that watch D&D streams that don't play the game. It's like people who watch soccer games but don't play soccer right there are kids that play soccer who go through and try to become soccer players and then they get to real life and they stop playing soccer. And I think that's really what happens with the D&D is that real life kind of happens. That's why people disappear from D&D and then they come back and then they go, “Well, you know, it's changed now. Now it's all sort of Champions League and you've got all these people televising” or “I just want the simplicity of what I remember.” That's kind of where I see it at the moment is that it's actually moved into a different paradigm. It's transcended beyond just a game. It's become a sport. That's not something they're doing that's wrong. I think that's right in a way, because that does, as we talked about, the sort of the hole that people come through, it does widen that hole. So, you know, Starcraft got a lot more people interested in it in multiplayer computer games, arguably than a lot of other games that did as well. But in the sort of zeitgeist of human history, that's really the one that kind of drilled the biggest hole into the mainstream. And I think that's as independent people, when you're creating a game, you kind of have to have that in your mind because YouTube is the big thing that pushes most RPGs at the moment. I mean, you and I are in it. It's like Shadow Dark. If it didn't have the support of YouTubers who said this is great, I don't think it would have done $1.6 million. I think it still would have done well because 30% of the people who backed it would have come just from Kickstarter alone who'd never heard of it. But then you got another 30% who would have gone and done a little bit of research about it and find a whole bunch of YouTube videos. So there's your next third. And then those people would have spoken, who heard about it from YouTube, would have told their friends, shared on social media and so on and so forth. So I think having a game where you appeal to an audience rather than actual gamers is one of the things that you can do to elevate a game more so than you would if your level of success is “I just want people to play the game.” And I think that's where those sorts of games do it right.

Professor Dungeon Master: YouTube because you mentioned YouTube being integral, it's integral to Shadow Darks success and that she wrote a very good game and she did what WoTC didn't do. First of all Kelsey knows personally Rune Hammer she's his game master and stuff. And so she tapped into the circle of people that I know like you, like Baron de Ropp, Dungeon Masterpiece, and Ben Milton at Questing Beasts and Hankin Ferinale. And we all started talking about that game, you know whereas WoTC probably doesn't know that I exist. And if they do, they probably don't like me very much. And I but she was able to tap into that and leverage that. She was able to you know, that's the first game I think that really leveraged the power of YouTube. Yeah. And took the independent or maybe Dungeons of Drakkenheim by the Dungeon Dudes was a similar thing where they used their YouTube channel as a springboard to make a really cool game. That's another one.

TheDMG:And I think that's what's happening now with Critical Role is they are trying to do that as well.

Professor Dungeon Master: They are and I would do the same thing if I were them. They have a bit of an advantage in one regard in that they have a larger fan base. The disadvantage is they have a lot of people in their structure and that's a lot of people who pay. Yeah. To make a game and to mass produce the game numbers that they would have to do would have to be unbelievable. Yeah and I'm not sure their fan base… I want to be careful not to incur the wrath of the critters because I like the show and I like Matt Mercer and all those players… but I'm not I think there's a segment that just watches critical role and so it's difficult to judge, you know, their success. It's going to… I couldn't predict it. The numbers that they have to do would have to be much bigger than Shadow Dark, assuming that even a fraction of their audience comes along for it. And I think that where games get it wrong, I think with independent game this is where they get it wrong. I think that what you have to do is you have to have a lot of experience with game design, right? So I started with writing at Dungeon magazine. I got several modules published there and so did Chris Perkins and Chris Perkins, eventually, you know, he became Chris Perkins over at Wizards of the Coast. A lot of that's how you cut your teeth, you design monsters, you design adventure modules, you learn how a system works, then you build a reputation, then you release a game. You know, you have that. Now with YouTube, Death Bringer wasn't successful just because I was on YouTube. It was also I knew how Dungeons & Dragons works intimately. And then I had a good partnership with Hankerin Ferinale over there, Rune Hammer, who knew how to market it and make it look unique. So I think people rush into it like you can't just create a game system and sell it. It's that's an uphill battle because you're competing with a bunch of other game systems and they don't necessarily know your work, even. Kelsie You know, with Shadow Dark, she designed 5e modules for the longest time until she had enough experience, enough a reputation that she could put her own game out. So if anyone's watching this and thinking, I want to make a game, the first thing you should do is probably start with designing monsters. Then you design modules and like Shadow Dark right now would be a fertile ground for doing that because she needs to grow that ecosystem. And I'm encouraging people. I say, if you want to design something, catch the wave, design some Shadow Dark. There's tons of people that'll be looking for material. And then you slowly you get your skills together and then you put your own game out. That was a long, circuitous response, but that's what I think now.

TheDMG: Well, it's perfect. It perfectly sort of encapsulates how I feel about it as well. It's like you, you got to cut your teeth. You don't necessarily need to actually be putting out content that you sell, but you should definitely be getting your toes into and your feet wet in other games to figure out what they do right and what they do wrong. So you begin to learn how it all gets put together and how it functions at the table. I think that's the key thing. Like, again, it's like a lot of people focus heavily on mechanics and it this percentage chance of success and whatever. And I think a lot of people don't really look at what's fun and what actually is the thing that makes the game sticky. Arguably, that's the most important mechanic of your game is how sticky it is for the players. How like to me, the measure of success for my game is when someone says, I'd like to play another session of that or I had fun like that. It doesn't matter if they don't talk about the rules, they don't talk about the story. They just say, “I had fun and I'd like to play that again.” To me, that is the ultimate success. Okay. And if you can get to that right, then you have something that you can then put the rest of the effort behind. And I think what's important that you kind of focused on but didn't say is you need to have a collaborator. You need to have someone who can help you, who they don't necessarily need to be a big YouTuber. They don't necessarily need to be, you know, well known. But it could be an artist, it could be a musician, it could be a business manager, it could be anybody who has a skill that you don't have. All right. Or is better at a thing that you do or can't do, and you get that person to assist you to push it to where it needs to go. I think that's what a lot of people do wrong, is they get very precious about it being their thing and they don't really want to let anybody else in and then they don't realize that it's not fun, you know, and they tinker with it too much and they don't let it fly. And I think that's what they kind of do wrong.

The Danger of FREE

TheDMG:And the other thing that I think people do wrong is free. I don't like the concept of free. Free is a double-edged sword. Now, obviously, you sell Deathbringer and originally it was a Patreon exclusive. Now you could just put that out for free right now. Why? Why would you start charging even $0.99 for it?

Professor Dungeon Master: Because my time is worth money. And I'm good.

TheDMG: And I think that people kind of see all of Gmail is free and, you know, Hotmail is free. And all these free-to-play games are free, you know, And they kind of get all “if you want to if you want to actually be played, it's got to be free.” And that's a huge trap. You know, the reason those things are free is because they make money in another way or the product is something else, like Facebook is free because you're the product, your content that you put on Facebook is being sold to marketers to then sell ads to you and your friends. Really, that's how it becomes a multibillion-dollar enterprise. But a lot of people that just put their thing out for free because they think, oh, you know, more people will play it because it's free. That's not how it works. Not at all. It's kind of like if you don't place value on a thing, why should the person purchasing it place value on the thing? And yes, you can do you know, the 99 cent to get the toe in the door. You know so but I think arguably if no one would pay $0.99 for your game, why should it even be free? Because no one would want it when it's free anyway, you know. Yes, a game, if it was $100, you would have far less sales. You might get one sale every three years or something because it's $100. And that would have to be quite an influential person to kind of push that game at $100 pricetag. So pricing is a very delicate subject, but free is a double-edged sword that I think people should really avoid doing.

Professor Dungeon Master: Yeah, I want to say because we're in total agreement and I'm going to go back two points, which is if you want to design games, you have to play a lot of games. Like so when I was a teenager, I'm like 19. I've been going to Gen Con since 19, 20 years old and I played everything if I didn't know the system. Yeah, I'll sit in Pendragon. I'll sit in Elric, Stormbringer. I'll play Vampire the Masquerade and Paranoia like every single game I could get my hands on. Because once you play enough games, you realize, okay, well, this is kind of like this game, but I can innovate and add a new mechanic and make it like raise the level of coolness. You know, like there are a lot of these dice pool systems. I love EZD6 because the dice explode like that. Innovation was…, I'm not going to name the other games, but there are a lot of games that are similar. But like that one thing, it's like, wow! And many of the concepts of D&D that exist and ICRPG and all those games, take them from other games like I think a very influential game was James Bond 007 Roleplaying by Victory Games. It's one of those games that if you were alive in the eighties, you borrow. A lot of games today borrowed ideas like the idea of hero points to succeed stuff from that game that was the first game that did that and when people ask me for advice on games like with patreon I'll respond “well it's like this game do you ever read this game because…” Everything you think you've done has probably been done before and it succeeded or failed to some extent. You have to know what that is. Then in terms of a collaborator, you're absolutely right. You know. Have you been collaborators even before working with Rune Hammer. Back with Dungeon Magazine, I had collaborators on it. I published one of the Adventures by myself, but I had co-writers for them. One of them, Christina Stiles. She writes for Goodman Games. She's written for Pathfinder stuff. And so it is important to have collaborators and not in. And when you're new, you may only be able to get your friends, but you definitely have to have people to bounce ideas off of. And then as you you know, your games get traction, it will attract people. So like Hankerin Ferinale came to me and said, “Yo, Deathbringer’s, dope, I want to do it. I have a way to make it cool, you know, with the fold out.” And and so he approached me, right? So that's the kind of thing and you approach me with MacDeath stuff, which was a good collaboration in my opinion. And so, yeah, people find each other, they'll gravitate toward each other. But yeah, free. It's not even a double-edged sword. It's a no edged sword. It's like a spoon. Don't ever give away anything for free. And I have told that to patrons. They're like, I design this thing, it's my first thing. I'm going to give it away. And I'm like, No, charge $2, you know, not even $0.99. You charge $1.99 because no one, no one who would pay $0.99 wouldn’t pay $1.99. You know, never give away something. Especially it's good. And I've seen some good stuff like my patrons, you know, they have they've shown me things that it's professional level stuff and I've encouraged them go out there and, you know, sell it because then you get a rep, you know, you get a reputation for quality. And more people will look at something if you charge money.

TheDMG: I did eight years of retail sales. I've done business-to-business sales, I've done online sales, I've done a wide range of different sales things. And to me, discounting means you haven't actually given enough reason to buy. Yeah, you got to say I got a discount that down to $0.99 to sell it. You haven't given the people enough reason to buy it and some people have looked at what Scotty and I did with the North Road, which obviously, you know, you got to do shameless plugs, but, you know, that's on its own the book is USD$59.95. Now that's expensive for a role-playing game module book, but arguably you're actually getting 16 modules. So if you were to buy them individually which you can, they're $7 each, you know, you're going to spend a lot more money individually than you would have them all together. Now, if, if I were to put that on the DriveThruRPG, it would probably be the most expensive book on there. But it still sells. It still sells because it's niche and people can see that we put the time and the effort into it. And I haven't got anyone who said to me like, “I want my money back because this it's not worth what I spent.” That's never happened. Right. And you know, if it were to happen, I would gladly give them their money back because I don't want to put something in your hand where you feel you got ripped off for your money. I want the value that Scotty and I put into it. Right. And you should feel like it was worth what I spent. Right. And when you get to that sort of happy medium, that's when you know you're both going to have a success that the customer succeeds in terms of getting a thing that they really like and enjoy and are happy with and you succeed in the fact that you actually got paid for all your effort. It's not a bestseller. It's not something where we sell hundreds of copies a week, right? We might sell three or four copies a month, right? But we didn't do a massive print run. We did a very small print run. I could have spent an extra USD$350 and printed double the amount of copies, but I would have spent more in storage for those extra five hundred that would've taken many years to sell. And I'm left with the last hundred or so copies, you know, that will still sell a few copies a week. So it can still continue selling for about another year, maybe a year and a half, unless you know, someone does a review of it or whatever, and it, you know, gets a spike in sales and then it sells out and then it will only be a PDF. But the next one we bring out will do a little bit better because all the people who purchased before, who liked what we did before will want to see what we've done next. Right? And then you. But you've got to do it again. It's not like you can just rest on your laurels and like, you know, the next one's going to outsell. You've got to put in the same amount of effort you put into the first one, into the second one, and arguably even more so. I mean, that's really I think what people need to focus on is like if you do have a success and you do put out a little module where you sell 20 copies, right. And that was your goal, like, I want to sell 20 copies, and that's my level of success. Your next one, you should say, okay, I wanted the art to be better and I want to sell 50 copies of the next one and build and build and build and build and build until you know you are reaching what you define as your own level of success, because what tends to happen is if you put something out for free and you like, I want to get a thousand downloads and you get two people to download it and it's like, all that work and all that effort. And arguably if you sold it for $0.99, you probably would have sold more than you would have got free downloads. It's because the businesses that are selling the thing also need to make money. So they're going to push the ones that actually sell and have a price tag because they make their percentage from that. Free things cost them money, so they are less likely to push free anyway.

Professor Dungeon Master: Well, The North Road, for people out there don't have it. It's very good. It's very good. It's one of those things that you just look at it and it like this is so much better designed than the mass produced stuff from down to the artistic choices like you made, like where like certain pages of have coffee ring stains. But just beyond that, I'll never forget the image of that wheel that was the wheel powered by the goblins, like rolling down the hill. It's just so great. It's that is a great product. And I gave a positive review and people should get the North Road. And I'm about to review Scotty's Book of Quests.

TheDMG: Yes, that is phenomenal. I was not involved in that. Obviously, Scotty and I really close friends and, you know, but yeah, I was not involved in that. But it is really, really good. I've already got the hard and soft covers. I did a video for it, but I didn't release it. I'm going to redo a new video because it needs to be better for Scotty. It needs to be better.

Professor Dungeon Master: That's going to be my first review, one of my first reviews, one of the first two for Independent Games Month, if not the first, the second, But I'm probably shooting it tomorrow.

TheDMG: And for those who don’t know Independent Games Month is July 2023 and hopefully every year there should be an Independent Games Month and then two months and then three months, then four months until it's like that's all there is.

Professor Dungeon Master: We'll see. That's when it's tough to know what's going to happen.

TheDMG: Yeah. I mean, also when we talk about Scotty, you know, and years of experience, you need to recognize that Scotty's EZD6 system was not just he sat down one day and wrote out a system he played games for 40 or 50 years. I've been in his basement. His basement is just like a games museum. It's just board games, role-playing games. It's fascinating. I stayed at his house for a week and we were down there every day and we only scratched the surface of what he's got there. So if you ever get invited to Scotty's house, go.

Professor Dungeon Master: Yeah, one GenCon. I have to go. I have to stop by.

TheDMG: Yeah, and but he runs those games so he doesn't just buy the games and, and read through them, which is what I generally do because I don't have a huge group of people that I can play with because most of my RPG friends are international. So I don't have a lot of local gaming friends. So, you know, I do everything virtually, but there's something that's lost in that and you want that sort of touch and feel of a game. And that's what Scotty has with going to conventions and trialling things for years and years. Started his channel and then using the terrain and going to conventions and building up the rabble-rouser base, you know, so that when he put a game out, it's like, you know, this thing works. You can tell by reading it that this thing works.

Professor Dungeon Master: Yeah. And that's that is a great game. I love the way it's written. I love the way it's written. It's fantastic. I use it as a reference for my own writing. I just love it.

TheDMG: And that was the collaboration with Rune Hammer. Now, originally, you know, Scotty and I were talking about EZD6 and, you know, with Birth of My Child and things like that, I, I didn't have the time to really focus on it. So we would talk in the background and we'd kick around ideas and he was really struggling with the magic system in that, and I'd give him some ideas and then he would go away and, you know, and I'm not going to say that, I was super influential in the making of EZD6 because that would really take away the decades of experience of him actually doing it to get there. You know, I maybe helped with a monster, you know, but Rune Hammer really took it. And when we talked about the collaboration, that's what really sort of put the polish on it that, made it what it is, the polish that it sort of needed to get to where it is now. So that's why those collaborations are important, is that you have people you can sort of trust to get you to where you need to go.

Professor Dungeon Master: Absolutely.

Are indie RPGs the best?

Professor Dungeon Master: In my opinion, they're the most innovative. That's where you get the most innovative because as you mentioned, that previous video that I did, and for those of you that didn't see it, know probably has its lifespan. You have when people come up with the original product, then it explodes in popularity, then it gets bought by a major corporation and that corporation becomes the curator. They are the ones that make sure that that product is on shelves in stores and it becomes ubiquitous. That's what they do and they branch out into other media. They make people aware that a name like Dungeons and Dragons exists. But they stop innovating at that point. They're not going to innovate. Dungeons and Dragons will no longer innovate. Even something like Advantage and Disadvantage. That was very innovative. And they're not going to have that. Future editions of Dungeon Dragon won't change the scale with which the, you know, the early scores go. The way the spells work, nothing will change because they need to program it. That's what that's about. That's why they're going to create this evergreen system so it won't be innovative, you know, an innovative idea that is in that game in the Dungeon Master section is the idea of proficiency dice, right where you roll it D6 because you're good with swords and you roll it with the 20 sided die. It's a very innovative idea. And they didn't take it because they were coming back from fourth edition and they were afraid. “Well, that's too radical. That's too different.” Now, Robert Schwab, who worked on the fifth edition, took that idea and built Shadow of the Demon Lord around it, around that concept. It's a great concept. So that game is much more innovative than Dungeons and Dragons. It's a better game, because of his influence and stuff like that. So the innovative ideas, like the most innovative ideas I see like mind-blowing stuff that I've never seen before, comes from an independent creator, not a mass market game, which everything in that is about “Let's continue the success of this game. Let's follow this formula and the product should look a certain way. We're not going to change anything.” And so best it depends on the but certainly the most innovative ideas come from independent games by far.

TheDMG: Thank you very much for coming on and having this chat with me on the first run through of Indie Gamer Jones. This podcast is brought to you by Quest Givers, QuestGivers.com, where you can get system-neutral modules, including The North Road, which we talked about. And of course our guests modules, which is Professor Dungeon Master's Frankenstein and MacDeath!, which are great, great modules and other interesting and wild and wacky things you can try out, including DMScotty’s Luck Dice. I'd also like to thank Danny Valentine for creating the music for this podcast. His band Nefarious Creatures. You can look them up, the wonderful, wonderful music that will warm the cockles of your heart. So thank you, Dan. Dan is the Professor Dungeon Master from DungeonCraft YouTube Channel. All the links to things we've been talking about will be in the show notes and down below in the description. Thank you very much and see you in the next one.