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10 May 09 – Six Months of Tabletop RPG Sales
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About six months ago, I started publishing tabletop RPG PDFs under the name Brent P. Newhall's Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders, starting with the short adventure War in the Deep in November 2008 and continuing with the sandbox setting The City of Talon in March 2009. I publish through DriveThruRPG, which takes a percentage of each PDF sale. The PDFs themselves are unrestricted.
I've always been a bit frustrated at the lack of real numbers about publishing PDFs online. How much money do these things make?
Here's how much I've actually made. Each PDF sells for US$5.00; I get $3.25 of that.
Sales
| Product | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| War in the Deep | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
| The City of Talon | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
| TOTAL | 31 | $140.00 | $91.00 |
Month-by-month for War in the Deep, which was first published in November 2008:
| Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| November 2008 | 4 | $15.00 | $9.75 |
| December 2008 | 5 | $25.00 | $16.25 |
| January 2009 | 4 | $20.00 | $13.00 |
| February 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| March 2009 | 1 | $5.00 | $3.25 |
| April 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| TOTAL | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
Month-by-month for The City of Talon, which was first published in March 2009:
| Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| March 2009 | 11 | $45.00 | $29.25 |
| April 2009 | 6 | $30.00 | $19.50 |
| TOTAL | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
Web Traffic
Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 3,737.
Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum:
| Source | Pageviews |
| ENWorld.org | 32 |
| Direct | 10 |
| Google searches | 7 |
| RPGBloggers.com | 4 |
| Others | 10 |
| TOTAL | 63 |
The keywords used to find War in the Deep: "heroic tier adventure", "printable d&d counters", "rpg adventure plots", "rpg adventure writing", and "rpg for commercial use"
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Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 1,734.
Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum:
| Source | Pageviews |
| Google searches | 29 |
| RPGBloggers.com | 14 |
| 11 | |
| Direct access | 8 |
| Others | 24 |
| TOTAL | 86 |
The keywords used to find The City of Talon: "crimes of talon", "brentnewhall", and "role play blogs".
Advertising
None.
Marketing
I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I'm a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.
Analysis
Making just shy of US$100 with no advertising budget is no mean feat. On the other hand, considering the dozens of hours I put into these PDFs, I couldn't exactly make a livable wage off this yet.
The biggest surprise is the 32 pageviews from ENWorld, a huge D&D-oriented site. Upon further investigation, I discovered that ENWorld has a wiki page of 4E 3rd Party Publishers, and somebody kindly added my Musaeum and War in the Deep there. In writing this entry, I added the City of Talon to that page, so hopefully that'll drive some traffic to it.
I find it interesting that the RPG Bloggers network was much more interested in Talon than War in the Deep. This confirms my suspicion that GMs need higher-level creative resources more than they need pre-generated adventures. Note that Talon's made almost as much in 2 months as War in the Deep made in 4 months. However, Talon required far more time to create than War in the Deep did.
Plans
I plan to focus on settings. I'll continue work on my abandoned underground city setting and my floating city in the sky setting. I plan to publish both in the next six months.
However, given the relatively low time investment in writing an adventure, I'll probably publish one more adventure within the next six months. It seems worth it, especially if the adventure's fun to build.
5 May 09 – Seven Lessons Learned from Running a Tabletop RPG with a Big Group
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We can have up to 10 players at my tabletop gaming group. That's a lot of people to manage; most groups max out at 5 or so. While I'm trying to get better at splitting the group up with another GM, I've had times where I've had to run a game wtih 10 players.
A few suggestions:
- Notify the next few players in the turn sequence. When you tell somebody that it's their turn, point to the next person and advise them that they'll be next. They can then use the upcoming few minutes to prepare their next action.
- Enforce turn time limits. Our group is upfront about the fact that, with a large group, we can't wait for minutes on each person's turn. In fact, I keep out a one-minute egg timer, which I use on anyone who isn't ready with their action when their turn starts (myself included).
- Avoid combat. "True" role-playing, in the sense of acting out a role, is actually easier for large groups. The group can act off each other. You don't have to completely eliminate combat, but dropping one or two fights is probably a good idea.
- Make combat quick. With 10 people, two fights can chew up the entire session. On the other hand....
- Scale your enemies. By the time 9 players have taken a whack at a creature, it might be dead without getting the chance to use that one cool life-draining spell. Just beware making it so tough that one fight takes all night.
- Make combat interesting. In a fight with several different kinds of creatures, different players can concentrate on particular enemies.
- Pay special attention to quiet players. It's extremely easy for one or two players to fall through the cracks in a game like this. At least engage them in conversation.
The good news? A big group feels more like a party. A large group can be just as much fun as a small one, especially if big groups are rare. So have fun with it!