Still Another Business Lesson From Dungeons & Dragons: Give Away Free Stuff

I think part of the reason I am a writer is because I am trying to understand human nature, which as we all know, is an unending puzzle that often defies explanation. As humans, we are both simultaneously rational thinking creatures and irrational to the point of self-destructive madness. People can both stun you with their generosity and amaze you with their perfidy, and sometimes this inexplicably happens in the same person.

And a recurring theme in human history is how often a group of smart people put together a plan that somehow backfires and has exactly the opposite result of what they intended.

I’ve written before about the latest legal controversy engulfing Dungeons & Dragons. (Though, to be a honest, based on what I’ve read you could put together a history solely of the many, many lawsuits and legal maneuvers around Dungeons & Dragons and arrive at a very nearly complete history of the game.) I should mention that I haven’t actually played a table-top RPG since like 1999 or so, but as a self-published fantasy writer I’m sort of living on the next street over, so to speak, so I watched the controversy with interest.

Anyway, to sum up – for the last twenty years D&D has had an Open Game License, which lets people create compatible content (settings, adventures, and the like) for D&D without paying royalties to Hasbro, which owns the rights to the game. Recently, a draft of an updated OGL leaked (probably by a Hasbro employee who recognized what a bad idea the updated license was) imposing far more restrictive terms and including the right for Hasbro to take any D&D compatible material without payment. Predictably, a massive, snowballing uproar ensued, with a variety of interesting consequences. Paizo, which makes the 2nd biggest TTRPG after D&D, sold through eight months’ worth of inventory in a few weeks. Many other RPG publishers announced high sales. D&D Beyond, Hasbro’s virtual tabletop site, lost a ton of subscribers. And Paizo and a bunch of smaller RPG publishers announced plans to make their own version of the OGL, the Open RPG Creative License, which will have the clever acronym of ORC.

So what Hasbro wanted to do was to increase D&D revenue and drum up publicity before the new D&D movie this year. Instead, the actual results of the plan were 1.) reputational damage, 2.) loss of monthly subscription revenue, 3.) increased sales for competitors, and 4.) the possible creation of a new long-term rival in ORC.

I doubt it would be any comfort to Hasbro, but this kind of thing happens again and again in human history, though often with far more serious results. Unintended consequences can be nasty. When King Richard II of England seized the estates of Henry of Bolingbroke, he didn’t think to himself “this plan will end with me starving to death in a prison cell.” Richard just wanted to rid himself of a potential rival. But what actually happened was that Henry gathered an army from other nobles whom Richard had angered, seized the crown for himself, and Richard was deposed and died of starvation in captivity. Or when the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius stabbed Julius Caesar to death. The plan was to rid Rome of a dangerous tyrant and restore the rule of the Senate. Instead, within a few years, all the conspirators were dead, and Caesar’s nephew Octavian would rule Rome as a far more competent and ruthless tyrant for decades. (A common joke among historians is that Caesar was a merciful man who forgave his enemies, and so he was stabbed to death, while Octavian was a ruthless man who killed his enemies without mercy, and so died in bed of old age.)

No doubt we can all think of examples in our own lives or from our own employers where what was supposed to be a good plan blew up in everyone’s faces. And, without naming any examples, I’m sure we can all think of recent political and economic plans that have produced somewhat less than desirable outcomes.

However, it seems that cooler & more farsighted minds have prevailed at Hasbro. A few days ago the company announced that it was releasing the core rules of D&D to Creative Commons. Of course, the “core rules” are a massive 400 page PDF document that’s actually quite well written – it’s basically a condensed version of the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide without the excellent illustrations and artwork.

This was actually a clever move on Hasbro’s part. It defangs a lot of the criticisms, since anyone can use Creative Commons stuff so long as they attribute it. Of course, one of the things I learned reading about this is that you can’t actually copyright game mechanics thanks to a Supreme Court decision dating back to the 19th century. (This is why if you go on the Google Play Store or the App Store, you can see a lot of free games with names like “BusinessTown” that basically use a lightly modified version of the Monopoly rules but none of the trademarked terms, images, or iconography associated with Monopoly.) So if Hasbro tried to sue over it, the odds were not in the company’s favor. And if anyone makes their own RPG stuff using the core rules in Creative Commons, the Creative Commons license means that Hasbro can’t sue about it.

It also means that people will continue making RPG stuff compatible with the core D&D rules, so that’s a win for Hasbro. One of the reasons that TSR went under in the 90s was that they kept making campaign settings with beautiful illustrations and maps, but the books were so expensive to print that TSR frequently lost money on each copy sold. With the Creative Commons release, people will make compatible RPG campaign settings, which will encourage sales of Hasbro’s Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. And if Hasbro wants to go to a more restrictive license with a future version of Dungeons & Dragons or the virtual table top software, they have a clear avenue to do so. If people complain, Hasbro can always say “well, the core rules for 5th edition are in Creative Commons, go use those, but enjoy premium features in our new version of the game.” The welcoming invitation is usually a better tactic than the coercive hard sell. “Freemium” is a successful business model for a reason.

It might even remove ORC has a potential long-term threat. The table-top RPG world is a notably quarrelsome one, and getting a lot of RPG publishers to agree on anything would be difficult. It’s too soon to predict what will happen, but it’s easy to see the project devolving into infighting. To use a lightly exaggerated example, it’s hard to see a military veteran-owned RPG publisher that specializes in wargames about the Global War On Terror agreeing with an RPG publisher that specializes in romantic furrykin adventures and prominently has the phrase “we recognize that words are violence” on the publisher’s social media profiles. However! Stranger things have happened, and nothing unites people quite like a common enemy…though to return to our starting observation about human nature, nothing inspires bickering and infighting quite like a common enemy.

So, after that lengthy introduction, how does this relate to indie authors?

It shows the value and the goodwill generated by giving away things for free. I don’t mean the copyrights or anything like that, I mean the value of giving away free ebooks for people to read.

Right now, as of this writing, FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST, SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP, SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND, and THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS are all free on the various ebook stores, and I will probably make AVENGING FIRE free as well when it comes out of Kindle Unlimited later in February. (In fact, when I was typing this, I forgot that I made GHOST IN THE RING free as well a while back.) That comes to over 800,000 words of fiction that I give away for free almost every day across multiple platforms. At my absolute top writing speed, at peak health and with nothing going wrong in Real Life, I can write about 100,000 words a month, though I’ve slowed down in the last few years.

That means, every single day, I give away like eight months of work for free. Eight months!

Taken on its own, that sounds like utter insanity.

But! In January 2023 I sold 3 times as many ebooks as I gave away for free. The free ebooks are an excellent way to draw in new readers and get them to try the paid books in the rest of my various series. And anecdotally I have heard from many, many readers who say they got started reading one of my free books and kept on reading.

I also wrote about 50,000 words of short stories or so that I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers in 2022. Again, that’s several weeks of work. But it encourages people to sign up to my newsletter, which is my best tool for selling books. It also has the salutary effect of increasing my newsletter engagement since people click on the links to get the free story, which means fewer of my newsletters end up in spam folders.

So I think the lesson for indie authors here is clear – don’t be afraid to give away ebooks for free. I don’t think I would have found nearly as many readers if I had not.

-JM