Dungeons & Dragons has opened the gates to its ivory tower. Earlier this year, the behemoth role-playing game franchise announced the launch of its Dungeon Masters Guild, a platform for players to publish lore, maps, character designs and adventures based on Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property. In the process, content creators can earn a few bucks off their D&D-inspired materials. Calling it a âmassive communal design network, one that is officially recognized and sanctioned by [publisher] Wizards of the Coast,â D&D has found a way to harness the creativity of their fanbase to improve the game without exploiting those fans.
Before the DMs Guild, there wasnât a specific place Dungeons & Dragons players could go to pick up the sort of homebrew materials the DMs Guild collects. A few months after the DMs Guildâs launch, the community around it has congealed. D&D players critique and build off each otherâs designs, appropriate material into their own campaigns or just peruse content for inspiration. (For now, DMs Guild materials are limited to D&D 5th editionâs Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft settings.)
Itâs pretty code-breaking to allow players this level of involvement in an official RPGâs licensed material. Although royalty rates are only 50%, some of the more popular DMs Guild writers I spoke with have made several hundred dollars a month off their D&D adventuresâbelow the industry standard, but not unsatisfactory for a hobby theyâd do anyway.
Mike Mearls, the gameâs lead designer, and Chris Lindsay, architect of the DMs Guild, spoke with me earlier this week about their plans for increasing player involvement in the D&D franchise while protecting their intellectual property.
Cecilia: Iâve spoken with a few Dungeon Masters who put their content on the DMs Guild. They were all extremely impressed by it! Where did the idea come from?
Chris: Dungeons & Dragons is about creativity, whether youâre a player making your character or a Dungeon Master designing campaigns. There are a lot of kids out there who arenât professionals, who may not be interested in being a professional, but who create really cool, neat things for their Dungeons & Dragons games. I wanted to provide a place for them to form a community.
Cecilia: Do you feel like, at this point, youâve adequately cultivated that community? Do you feel like the community has become stronger or just moved onto this new platform?
Mike: [The DMs Guild] has given focus to what otherwise were scattered conversations.
Itâs is a natural next step from homebrew stuff, and itâs also kind of drawing into focus what players talk about on blogs or Reddit. Itâs not a social network itself. I donât want to compare it to Steam, which is basically the go-to place to buy PC games, but now everyone knows where to go to find this [homebrew] stuff.
From our end, weâve just scratched the surface of what weâd want to do with the DMs guild. Chris has mentioned having face-to-face seminars. Weâre looking into doing more online stuff, talking how to design things on YouTube, and making more of a dialogue between ourselves and creators out there.
Cecilia: Youâre spinning the DMs Guild as something that could help bring D&D content creators onto the D&D team. Has that happened yet? Have you been in communication with any Dungeon Masters?
Mike: Not yet, in terms of like, talking to someone whoâs started work on the Guild and now theyâre working on projects for us. Weâre starting to take steps in that direction. A lot of that is just because of the way we schedule things out. There hasnât been a project weâve needed writers for since we launched the Guild, usually because weâre scheduling people ahead of time or we have specific people in mind for something.
Now, we have a couple of writers weâre looking into bring on who have done D&D Adventurerâs League stuff through the Guild. Not exactly people we didnât know, but this is the first step in that direction.
Chris: I will say that the administrators of the D&D Adventurerâs League, our organized play program, are taking a close look at DMs Guild adventure authors whose adventures are doing well. Theyâve started doing so with an eye toward currying them to create content specifically for the D&D Adventurerâs League.
Mike: The next step from there is working on the official D&D books we publish.
Cecilia: With regard to that, sources have speculated that content created for the DMs Guild is a way to tide people over between these bigger official releases. It seems like Wizards of the Coast has been putting out more comprehensive, longer, higher-production-quality campaigns instead of smaller stuff. Is that the case?
Mike: Exactly. We drive books on big projects because thatâs where weâre at our best. We have resources to work with multiple people, do a complete level 1-10 campaign.
Thereâs always a tension between adding stuff to the game and adding too much stuff to the game. There are people who want even more. Some people want new stuff for their campaigns; some people want shorter adventures to run in one night; some people say the official character classes arenât enough or like crunching new mechanics. If we try to sell books to that person, DMs in the middle of the curve feel like itâs overwhelming. The DMs Guild is a nice middle ground where no DM would expect all of it to be in play. DMs can pick and choose what content they want to use.
Cecilia: Have you guys seen anything on the DMs Guild that youâve consciously appropriated into the D&D Forgotten Realms canon?
Mike: Not yet. If we see something popular in the Guild, it kind of benefits us as game designers to say, âHey we want to include this in an upcoming book.â Weâd pay that person for the design. Thatâs an obvious step to take.
With the Forgotten Realms canon, thatâs a little tricker. We plan our stories three or four years in advance. We have this attitude that the Realms canon really isnât really something weâre trying to sell to people. Itâs more of a tool we use to keep track of our own stories. The Realms are only as real as the DM wants it to be. Itâs more a general outline of events that happen.
Cecilia: Thatâs so fascinating. In your eyes, was there a problem in the past with people using copyrighted material for their own DMing purposes? Was this part of why the DMs Guild was created?
Mike: Yeah, thatâs a good way to look at it. Like Chris said, people have the tendency when theyâre running a D&D game to create material for it. If youâre running a Realms game, youâll create Realms material. People who want to post the new class they made up, distribute the town they made or show their map of a level they made… thereâs this natural tension. Obviously, we have to protect our intellectual property. We donât enjoy doing it, but itâs what you have to do. [The DMs Guild] is about giving people an outlet to be creative and we donât have to worry about intellectual property law.
Weâre always trying to work with the community. We can say, âHey, you published a PDF of Forgotten Realms lore that Wizards owns, but if you bring it over here to the DMs Guild, itâs totally cool, and you can even charge people for it.â Itâs really kind of the best of both worlds.
Chris: From that perspective, itâs really like weâve opened up the Chocolate Factory and weâve let players come in to play with the Oompa Loompas.
Cecilia: Oh my god.
Chris: Itâs cool, as long as they play by the rules.
Mike: When it went wrong was when people were kidnapping Oompa Loompas. Kidnapping is a crime, so please donât do that. But if you want to come and hang out with them, sure!
Cecilia: I like what you guys are doing with the DMs Guild. Iâll put some of my own stuff on it, too.
Mike: Role-playing game publishing has been, for a while, an old boysâ network. You had to know which convention to go to, who to talk to to get attention. What I really like about the DMs Guild is that we just get to see what people are doing. We donât have to count on, like, this person knows that person, and thatâs how we hear about them in terms of hiring them to write. Its cool when you meet people at conventions, but this makes it easier for us to find new writers.
Chris: And for those interested in becoming professionals at some point, the DMs Guild is a fantastic way to employ their craft and get real feedback from fans on the material. Itâs really a nice workshop.
Cecilia: Yeah, when you guys had opened 5e to user commentary, I had never seen that before.
Mike: People think of games as a service. For us, this tied into that concept. We are creating a platform with our ruleset that lets people play adventures, whether we create them, they create them, or someone on the DMs Guild does. Itâs more like, these rules are about what people using them want to do. So unless we understand what people are doing with them, we canât create an effective ruleset.
