Changes
December 27th, 2010
As long-time readers of this column are no doubt aware, I consider myself to be something of a disciple of the quote-unquote “Mark Rosewater school of design.” It was from observing the benefits of Mark’s own column that Dark Designs came to be, as it seemed to be a very succinct and elegant tool which offered a wide array of benefits: it allows me to entertain all of you with stories and sidebars and the like, it allows me to arrange and order my own thoughts on game design (which I sometimes don’t fully discover until I’ve finished writing an article on the topic), to some extent, it even allows me to provide a little edification about the game design process, what it is a design does, and what is (to me, at least) important for a designer to consider when working on a game.
Perhaps most important of all, however, is that Dark Designs, much like Mark’s Making Magic, gives me a proper forum to discuss the reasoning behind some of the more controversial actions and decisions that we here at Necromancers of the Northwest make. Happily, so far there have been very few of these. Though there was some criticism about Liber Vampyr and its overall level of novelty, we here at Necromancers of the Northwest have received decidedly little in the way of reader complaints when it came to our policy decisions. If our decision to start releasing for-pay products back in August upset anyone, they haven’t deigned to inform us yet. If anyone mourned the loss of Nefarious Knowledge, I have yet to hear of it.
Beginning in January of 2011, Necromancers of the Northwest will be undergoing another shift in its production schedule and business model, and I wanted to take a moment to explain the shift, and why I think it’s a good thing for everyone involved.
First, let me start by saying that you don’t need to start worrying, or anything. To most of you, this change is probably not going to have nearly as much of an effect on you as it is on us, which, in my experience, is an excellent sign that it isn’t something you need to be very worried about. Our number one priority will, as always, be to continue to provide our weekly articles to you, which we will continue to do free of charge. So if you come here primarily for the articles (as opposed to the free .pdfs), odds are you won’t even really notice the change. We have no plans to begin charging for articles, in the near or even distant future.
The change is going to come in our approach to our .pdfs. As I said, in August we began playing around with the idea of selling out hard-made .pdfs, and overall we feel that this was ultimately a success (though not as large of one as we might have initially hoped). Though I understand that many of you may not have been thrilled about the switch from for-free to for-pay products, we made sure that both War of the Goblin King and Advanced Arcana were very available at the affordable price of $5.00 (which, in my decidedly amateur marketing opinion, is an absolute steal), and ultimately I don’t think that anyone would quibble that, as a company, Necromancers of the Northwest needs to make some money in order to continue operating, let alone be considered a success.
One for-pay product every other month doesn’t exactly fill the coffers as quickly as one might think however, and, besides, has some other glaring flaws as a business plan when applied to a company like Necromancers of the Northwest. Selling large books like that works great for Wizards of the Coast or Paizo, perhaps, but ultimately I think that NNW is still just too small-name for people to feel terribly comfortable investing even $5.00 of their hard-earned money on one of our products. As anyone who’s dug through the various and sundry titles on www.drivethrurpg.com knows, each third-party-publisher book one purchases is something of a gamble. Will the book be worth its price? Will it even be usable? Is it well-made, or just cobbled together? Do the authors even have a clue what they’re doing? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no, and often it can be very hard to tell in advance.
As such, it behooves us, as game designers, to create products which create a smaller potential risk for our prospective customers. Let me tell you what I mean by this: we obviously work very hard to ensure that each and every one of our products is top-quality, and, between my ego and my ever-growing empirical evidence on the subject, I’m now pretty firmly convinced that we do, in fact, have a pretty good clue what we’re doing. So, when I talk about “risk,” I don’t mean that there’s any real chance that we’re making a bad product (this obviously has a certain amount of relativism to it: just because a product isn’t “bad” doesn’t mean that it’s what the customer was looking for, for example). What I mean is that the investment in the product (ie. the cost) is low, and so the potential reader needn’t worry that his or her hard-earned $5.00 is going to go to waste.
This, by extension, means scaling down the size of our .pdfs, which (since articles will remain free), are going to be Necromancers of the Northwest’s source of income. By making smaller .pdfs at a greater rate, we can cost them lower, making them more appetizing. This will also allow us to focus each .pdf on a single, specific, topic, meaning that we can make products and address issues that we would normally avoid, because they don’t have mass appeal, but instead are written primarily for a more specific niche audience. Our initial hope was to be able to produce one 8 – 16 page .pdf each week, in addition to our existing articles. While it turned out that this was easily within our ability to do when we conceived of the idea, some events have recently arisen which have made drastically reduced the amount of time each member of NNW is able to spend working on, well, NNW, and so now our plan is to put out one book every two weeks until our backlog of books runs out, and then to put out books at whatever rate we are able (articles will still be regular, and free). The pricing of these .pdfs hasn’t been quite locked down as of the time of my writing this, but we’re looking at something in the range of $2.50, based on the works of another company with a very similar business model, Super Genius Games.
If you’re one of the readers who picked up War of the Goblin King or Advanced Arcana and liked it, this should be good news, as it should prove a marked increase in our overall production, and you can better pick-and-choose which products are of interest to you (for example, some people might have preferred to be able to pick up the segmented spells in Advanced Arcana without having to pay for the “fountain” or “quick” spells, not that I don’t think all three are fun and interesting). If you’re only here for the free stuff, there’s not much need to worry, either: after all, articles will still be free, and at five articles a week, we (to the best of my knowledge, at least) produce the most free content each week of just about any roleplaying game company out there (I’m sure you’ll all correct me if I’m wrong). It’s true that there will be fewer free .pdfs, but we haven’t given up on them altogether, and are hoping to still be able to squeeze in a few here or there.
Speaking for everyone here at Necromancers, I’m very excited about the upcoming year and the new direction NNW will be taking. I’m hopeful that all of you are excited as well, and even those of you that aren’t will, I think, given some time, come around to appreciate the benefits of the new system.
Join me next week, for Archon Week. In the meantime, don’t be afraid of change, but take life by the throat (with or without help from Liber Vampyr).