Why Don't Adventures Sell?

By Rich "an edgy man, and easily riled" Redman

For all you doubters out there: They do sell, it's true. It's not like anyone puts adventures out on the market and they just gather dust. Adventures sell, they just don't sell well, and by well I mean they don't sell well enough to support a writer, an artist, a cartographer, an editor, a layout person, and the assorted expenses (like printing or web hosting) that go with them. Now some knee-jerk fan boy is out there muttering in his dark corner wondering where I get off and how I know. The latter is a good question. I'm basing the position that adventures don't sell well on three things:

1. Sales numbers I observed while working at Wizards of the Coast. Few of the adventure path modules ever sold well.
2. Sales numbers of Come for the Reaping—which continues to sell, but never broke the top 10 hot sellers on RPGNow.com. It spent most of August at #34 on the top 100 products (all categories) for the month, and it sold less than 25, so that tells you how few you need to sell to get high marks on those lists. Buy my adventure!
3. The dearth of good adventures on store shelves. Sure, you can find super adventures, rules supplements, and campaign settings, but few adventures. Don't take my word for it, look for yourself. Better yet, ask yourself how many adventures you've bought over the last 12 months.

Adventures really paved the way for 3rd Edition and the current d20 marketplace. All those companies publishing adventures gave people reasons to play D&D, and that did nothing but good for the marketplace, right? Right? Is this thing on? The thing is, every "publisher" on the WHEEZE-L mailing list gripes about the "d20 glut." No one buys their product because there's too much of everyone else's product on the shelves, the marketplace isn't big enough, retailers aren't buying new titles in large quantities because "d20" is no guarantee of either quality or sales numbers, yadda-yadda-yadda, blah blah blah. Don't get me wrong: There's no denying that adventures helped launch 3E and thus d20. However, they may have falsely raised expectations and glutted the market. I mean, let's face it, a lot of the first d20 material published was crap. If I offend you, cowboy up and take an objective look. You know I'm right, even if you disagree about your own product, and what makes you think I'm talking about yours? See a counselor before your insecurity complex gets any worse.

Popular wisdom in "the biz" is that adventures don't sell well because their only market is GMs. There are, again according to popular thinking, anywhere from four to six times as many players as there are GMs. So products that target players automatically have a larger audience than products that target GMs, and generally have higher sales numbers. One person suggested recently, and quite seriously, that the pricing structure of adventures was inherently flawed. The GM may run the adventure, but everyone at the table plays it and should pay for the privilege. That person suggested that your typical adventure scenario should be priced around $30!

The limited appeal of adventures only partially explains their relatively low sales. The way people talk about how little time they have for gaming, and the articles in news magazines about how American leisure time is evaporating, you'd think every GM needed professionally published adventures to keep his game going. It seems like no one has time to write his or her own adventures (I know I find the time by convincing myself that I'll find an opportunity to make some money off whatever I write), which would seem to indicate a vast, untapped market. The sales numbers don't reflect that vastness.

It's important to consider the role of the adventure in RPGs both as a hobby and as a business. The hobby simply cannot function without adventures. Making up characters can be fun and all, but character sheets are just low-grade toilet paper (except in the UK, where they're high grade) if you're not going to do anything with a character. Adventures are the stories our characters inhabit. I can remember when hobby stores bought comic book racks and stuffed them with adventures. I remember great titles like Against the Giants, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horrors, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Over time, I noticed those racks going empty. Most adventures came out when the core rulebook came out, as a way of demonstrating what kinds of stories you could tell with the game. They were sort of marketing tools, trying to lure you into buying the game because of how cool the game's adventures were-even though you would be writing those adventures in a month or two when your group finished the published ones. To me as a businessperson, the role of adventures is to get people playing the game, and to keep people playing the game. Dungeon magazine was founded for that very reason-to give people a source for adventures to keep them playing D&D. However, I also see that many companies would rather publish a campaign setting and license adventures to other companies. High-quality products from licensees draw consumers back to the main campaign setting from the licensor, and theoretically everyone makes money.

When you're thinking about publishing adventures, there are some important questions to consider.

• What are you going to charge? There is a point of elasticity where you lose so many customers that you cannot make up the loss of revenue by raising prices further. Ideally, you want to charge just under that, but as close to it as you can get. Then you have to do some math based on guesswork. Guess (hey, you can call it "estimating" or "approximating" but that's just some shiny-faced college way of lying to yourself) how many copies you'll sell and multiply that by the price. Figure out how much you need to take to pay your corporate bills. What's left is your budget for the adventure, which you have to divide up among author, editor, artist, cartographer, and layout person. You may combine some of those roles if you're multi-talented or have multi-talented employees, but that's not to their advantage. Unless an employee is going to get more money for doing multiple jobs, they have no reason to do the extra work.
• Who's going to buy it? Obviously GMs running games that use the same rules set you used when writing the adventure, but not all of them. Even if you have perfect marketing and simply every GM in the world knew about your adventure, some wouldn't buy it. Some don't have the money. Some are close-minded, snobby, adventure-phobes who refuse to run anything they didn't write themselves, even if they have no time to write. Now pay attention, because here's a reason I think holds more truth than I can truly express: Some can't fit your adventure into their campaign. I bet you've refused to buy an adventure because the location, foe, or theme didn't fit your campaign; because the tone (too funny, too mature, too edgy, too serious) didn't fit your campaign; or because you thought the writer was a no-talent hack who'd write better adventures if he threw his own feces at a blank sheet of paper. I'm sure some of the people who haven't bought Come for the Reaping (and we don't have perfect marketing by a long shot…yet) won't because they have one of those opinions. If you think I fall into the "feces thrower" category (what are you doing reading this far?), you can run but you'll just die tired.
• Who's your audience? Your "audience" is composed of the people who will experience the adventure, either as players or GMs. They are people who are fans of your writing, fans of your campaign setting, or fans of some aspect of the adventure. Let's face it, some things are sexy, and sex sells. A modern d20 adventure where succubi use a strip club to attract their victims will sell more than an adventure about rescuing a stolen teddy bear from three delusional kobolds with palsy. I'd name some sexy monsters here, but most of them got taken off the SRD. You can sell some number of adventures because you use a sexy opponent, or because you include things like new spells, new feats, new classes, or new equipment (man, I bought a lot of adventures for the original Top Secret game because of the new equipment they presented).
• How much do maps cost, and how many will you include? You have to have maps. Even if they're just flow-charts, RPG adventures need maps. You've got your budget, so figure out how many pages of maps you can afford before you start writing. A dungeon crawl requires more maps than, say, a murder mystery in a small apartment (You think I'm kidding? It's the premise of Rope, an Alfred Hitchcock movie). Knowing how many maps you need helps you determine what kind of story you can afford to tell.
• How much does art cost, and how much will you include? There's no doubt in my mind that art helps adventures. Especially art you can use as player handouts. Some things are just hard to describe in words, and showing the GM is a viable alternative. Art costs money, and many adventures sacrifice art to provide more, or better maps.

But, at the end of the day, if you market it right, price it right, pick the genre-of-the-moment, write it well, provide good art and maps, stick within your budget, and produce it, will it sell well-enough to support your business? Maybe not. Maybe (and these are chilling thoughts for me) our fan base isn't growing. Maybe it's not even staying roughly the same, but shrinking instead. I've got an Xbox, a PC, and two jobs, so I know all about things competing for your time (don't get me started about my 2 dogs, 3 cats, and 6 rats-I think that's how many rats my wife has, I've lost track). Maybe that's why adventures don't sell. Maybe all the d20 publishers are fooling themselves into thinking there are enough hungry consumers to devour the entire d20 pie, and that's why so many slices are rotting on hobby store shelves and stinking up the joint. Maybe adventures don't sell because people aren't playing our games as much.

Your Turn

And now, your homework: Go to our message boards and discuss the following questions:

• How much should adventures cost? Feel free to approach it from a business standpoint or a consumer (how much you would pay) standpoint, but use real dollar amounts.
• Why don't adventures sell, and how do you get around those challenges? We've already discussed piracy, so let's leave it out of this for now.
• Are adventures really a barometer for the health of our hobby?