My first thoughts were, “OMG What am I doing here?”
Seriously, it makes me want to crawl into a hole for about a week and subsist off of coffee, Chex mix, and video games. I’ll come out long enough to shave my noggin, maybe bathe, pet the cats, and forage for not-Chex mix. (Vegetables or something.) Otherwise my family can come try to poke me with a stick to see if I growl at them.
Aw crud. This is the first full week of school. No crawling in a hole for me. Kids need rides to and from school. My wife needs clean clothes, clean dishes, and meals cooked. Guess I have to live with other humans, not in my cozy hole. Boo.
Why the fuss? Well, go on DriveThruRPG and search up Dungeon Crawl Classics. 1.397 entries! Yes, many of those are from Goodman Games, around 451 of them give or take. But still… That’s a lot of entries.
Can I even compete in this market?
Seriously? Is it even possible? With the announcement of One D&D, and the massive bloat that is third party 5E publishing, I won’t touch that market until at least 2025 if/when they announce a new open license agreement. There’s no sense putting out a whole 5E module just to have to rewrite it. IFF it actually sells.
I figure I’ll take my chances with DCC. at least it’s only 1,397 competing products. Maybe I can make enough credit to get more OSR stuff. I want to try monkeying around with some of the OSE stuff from Necrotic Gnome. I’ve heard good things for years about them.
Which is tougher: Fear of failure or fear of success?
Suppose I put a module out with my meager mapping and art skills. My goal is to make sure it’s carefully written, edited, and creature stats in order. I want to make sure all of the OGL licensing is in proper order. Oh, and I want the adventure to be fun, too.
As I’ve said before, my fear and loathing of criticism runs extremely high. At least with a game product I have the option of ignoring all of the negative comments and updating fixes based on the constructive ones. Still, I find the whole process terrifying.
What to charge? Pay What You Wish? Do those ever make money? $1.99? 2.99? $6.99? More? What’s fair? I wish I truly knew.
What’s the best that can happen?
Well,. I’m going to go grab the Chex mix out of the kitchen and put on another pot of coffee. Hopefully some video game therapy will help me figure things out. I’ve been back and forth with this for over two weeks now.
I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully things will seem brighter in the morning.
Jeff's Game Box 