[WORK IN PROGRESS]
In an April 2023 D&D Community Update, Wizards of the Coast mentioned that one of the things they were planning to add to DnDBeyond, was a marketplace for 3rd party content. And now, we are starting to see the fruit of these efforts: 3rd party projects like Dungeons of Drakkenheim, Grim Hollow, and Tal’Dorei are making their way to DnDBeyond’s store page.
In their article, Wizards says they’re only just now starting to think about what shape this marketplace should take… But this is something 3rd party publishers like me have been thinking about for years.
So I thought I would weigh in, share my thoughts, and maybe help nudge this project in a direction that won’t… You know, backfire in the worst possible way for everyone involved?
1) Please just let people do their own integrations
In an interview with BobWorldBuilder, Kyle Brink mentioned something along the lines of this: the DnDBeyond marketplace will probably be limited to only the biggest 3rd party publishers because it’s very expensive to do content integrations on DnDBeyond.
Just… Let us do it for you then? That’s what we do on every other VTT. None of that effort has to come from you, and there are definitely ways you can make it cheap for yourselves.
Start by limiting publishers to something like one new product per month, and one submission at a time, for instance. This should already keep the moderation costs in check on your end. Roll20 has millions of users, but they only need 1 employee to review submissions to their marketplace. Even if the reviews take a couple business days, or if each individual creator is limited to 1 submission per week or even per month, it’s fine. In fact, it would probably be better, to give human authors a chance to fight against mass-AI-generated content.
And you probably don’t need to develop a fancy (=expensive) web interface. Give us a quick and dirty JSON API, and we’ll figure out the rest, even if it takes us a bunch of work. FoundryVTT works like this, and it has one of the most active communities of 3rd party creators out there.
Just let that workload fall on us. It’s fine. We can take it. We’ve done it for years, for every other VTT.
Here’s a couple business reasons why you might want to do this, so you can convince your investors to let you make good decisions:
1) If every other VTT has open submissions, but yours doesn’t, then those other VTTs have a competitive advantage over you. Users of those other VTTs will be able to find more, and better content, than they would on DnDBeyond.
You’ve stated your goal was to turn DnDBeyond into the “one-stop shop for all things 5e”. You can’t be that if you only include a tiny fraction of the 3rd party content that has been made for this game.
2) As was established… thoroughly during the OGL drama, 3rd party publishers aren’t your competitors. They are an army of thousands of brand ambassadors. That is the strength of D&D as a brand and an IP. Every other TTRPG would love to have that, and they don’t. You had that, until 2024. You could have it again.
But while a lot of us would love nothing more than to ambassade the heck out of your brand, you gotta leave the door open for it to happen. If you open the gates and make it possible for thousands of content creators to make 3rd party D&D content and sell it on DnDBeyond, you will have thousands of content creators making 3rd party D&D content and selling it on DnDBeyond. And telling their mailing lists, youtube subscribers, tiktok followers, etc… About how cool your game is (when we help you improve it). It really is that simple.
3) Look at your game design team. Well, what’s left of it anyway. Ask them where they started. Odds are, they started as 3rd party content creators, whether that’s on Dragon Magazine, DMsGuild, etc.
These platforms are brimming with talent. Talent you can make use of. Plenty of people start writing D&D supplements with the dream of working for you (…not me though, thank you very much. I’m French, and you literally do not have the ability to offer me working conditions that will be up to my standards). They aren’t just brand ambassadors, they are your future.
You shut the door, make it harder for people to get started… You shut down the door on your own future. Go talk to your recruitment managers and see what they think about making it harder to find people who are interested in working at Wizards. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled at the idea.
There has already been, in 5e, a “cool kids’ club” like what you are currently creating here. It was called the “DMsGuild Adepts Program”. It did not go well. Accusations of preferential treatment were being thrown around. Jealousy, toxicity. All leading to the silent death of the entire program, and WotC not even mentioning DMsGuild on any official communication for… I think multiple years at this point?
So, let’s learn from history so we don’t start repeating it every five years.
2) Give us the ability to create discount codes
I didn’t compare DnDBeyond with VTTs like roll20 or Foundry for no reason. At this point, that’s what DnDBeyond is: a VTT. You’ve got character sheets, dice rollers, rules compendiums, and now you’ve even got battlemaps. You’re a VTT, as far as anyone is concerned. And this is important because VTTs are usually the secondary form of a book, with the primary forms being the PDF and/or physical version of that book.
This means when a customer buys a 3rd party book, most of the time, they buy the PDF or physical copy of the book first, either on DTRPG, Kickstarter, or the storefront of the publisher/author of that book, and then they’ll go to their VTT of choice and pick up the integration for that book they already own.
But that means a lot of people expect the ability to buy the VTT integration(s) of that book without having to pay full price again. For example, right now, DMsGuild has the following listings for my last book:
Roll20 integration: $25, or $5 if you already own the PDF
To achieve this, 3rd party publishers will need a way to give our customers some sort of a coupon code so they don’t have to pay full price again after buying a PDF or a physical copy on our own store fronts. And this also means you will only be making royalties from that $5 markup, not from the full $25, because we’d be bringing our customers to you, rather than the other way around.
[TODO: make it worth their while too]
2) The Interface
DnDBeyond already includes a library of homebrew, it’s just that this homebrew is shared for free right now. So, I assume the 3rd party marketplace is planned to use a similar browsing interface.
I hope I’m wrong about this… But if I’m not, then here’s the issue.
Ranking products, the bad way. Currently, DnDBeyond can only sort homebrew by views, by how many users have added it to their collection, and by rating. This means as a user, if you try to find the best homebrew on DnDBeyond, the website instead pretty much only shows its oldest homebrew: the older a submission is, the more time it has had to accrue those numbers. And this has a vicious circle effect: submissions from years ago get shown to more people, which means they get more views/ratings/endorsements, which in turn means they will get shown to even more people. New submissions hardly ever get any momentum.
For users, this means if the homebrew from 4 years ago doesn’t hold up to today’s standards (which it often doesn’t), then that player is simply unable to find good homebrew on DnDBeyond. This does not reflect badly upon homebrewers – the good stuff can be found in other places – but it does reflect badly upon DnDBeyond: it has slowly become this generation’s DnDWiki – a comparison I’m sure you will find painful (albeit accurate).
For publishers, if DnDBeyond fails to showcase the stuff you publish on it to its users, then the platform has much less value. Because as explained above, the more eyes a platform brings to our work, the more royalties we’re willing to pay that platform.
So these UX issues, which should be rather easy to fix, are taking away a lot of the value DnDBeyond could have had for its users.
Ranking products, the good way. The way I propose you solve this is by taking a look at NexusMods, the biggest and most popular website for video game mods. NexusMods has a front page, where it shows you the newest and hottest publications from the past couple of weeks (just like DMsGuild or Reddit or Twitter etc), but then, more interestingly, it also has a “mods of the month” page. This page lists the top 5 mods of each month, in reverse chronological order from the current month all the way back to several years ago.
NexusMods created this page because you don’t generally add mods to a game in the middle of a playthrough: you usually go shopping for mods between playthroughs, to avoid making your game unstable.
And in much the same way, you don’t usually add homebrew to an ongoing D&D campaign: it tends to confuse our players if we suddenly change the rules. So by having this kind of interface, you can quickly scroll down and get all of the best mods that have been published since the start of your last campaign. It’s super quick and convenient for users; and for publishers, it strikes the delicate balance between allowing good products to have a long shelf life, and giving new products a chance to succeed. This is the interface DnDBeyond’s Marketplace should have, in my opinion.
4) Let users subscribe to creators
This is mostly an issue on DMsGuild, and I have no reason to believe you would make the same mistake, but I figured, it can’t hurt to mention this just in case. Unlike every single other platform out there, DMsGuild does not let users subscribe to individual creators – it only lets users subscribe to the global DMsGuild Newsletter.
This is how creators grow, on basically… Every single platform: we grind, and grind, and grind, until one piece of content we made gets noticed. And now, when we post our next thing, we can send a notification to the people who liked our previous thing. Eventually, we start being able to make estimates, like “I think this will sell 4000 copies”. And that means we can now justify spending money on art. On hiring a bunch of freelancers to make better books.
Without the ability to get in touch with their audience, creators on DMsGuild struggle to grow a stable income. We have no way to tell whether our next publication will sell 3 copies, or 4000, it’s like we’re starting from scratch and playing the algorithmic lottery with each new release.
The less uncertainty a platform gives its creators, the better it gets for both the creators and the platform. You get more high quality content for your users, we get a roof over our heads. Deal?
[TODO: blurb on no exclusivity because we don’t trust WotC with moderation]
6) Don’t wait 5 years
The early bird get the worm. There is a huge incentive for content creators to “be the first” to cover something. Entire businesses have been built on top of that competitive advantage: if someone googles how to prep a game of D&D today, they’ll find 6 year old articles and videos, made by people like SlyFlourish or Matt Colville, for example.
But if the worm escapes us. On the flipside, if these thousands and thousands of 5e creators can’t make or sell 5.5e content when 5.5e is released, then that incentive is gone too. So we’ll keep making 5e content instead, or move to the MCDM RPG or DC20 or something. Content creators are simple creatures, motivated mostly by self-preservation, who will go to whichever game allows us to have a roof over our heads. Even when we play Starfinder or Delta Green or Shadowdark in the privacy of our own homes, we still ended up making content about 5e for a long time, because it would have be dumb not to. So huh… Make sure we can make content about the current version of D&D, if you want that to continue.
I get that there might be worries about doing this within the walls of Wizards, but huh… This is literally something you have never tried before. There was no OGL, and no 3rd party ecosystem, until 3rd Edition. Then 4th Edition didn’t have an OGL and tried to kill the ecosystem 3rd edition has created (which backfired miserably). And then 5th Edition got its own OGL 2 years late, and it took years to get the ecosystem out of the hole 4e had dug.
But you should try to have the licence on time, for once. I think it will make your shareholders happy when they see thousands and thousands of content creators covering the new totally-not-a-new-edition from day 1.
Conclusion
I sincerely hope the takeaway from this article isn’t “if we make the DnDBeyond marketplace terrible, it will sabotage those pesky 3rd party competitors and finally get to run our own show”. I tried to write this little thing with… as good a faith as I could afford Wizards after recent events, but yeah, this is what we pretty much all expect you to think right now.
Wizards has the potential to build something really, really cool here. I just hope this potential doesn’t get wasted by painfully avoidable bad decisions.
If you’d like to talk about this further, get in touch. I am willing to sign an NDA to talk about this stuff if necessary, though I think this is the sort of discussion that should probably be held in the open.
About the author
Trekiros (he/him) is a software engineer by day, tabletop nerd by night, and a filthy Frenchman full time.
He was the project manager for Mithral Best Seller and ENnie Award winning title, Home-Field Advantage, and now runs a Youtube channel about game design called Critical Eye.
Trekiros 