On patrons and ransoms

Okay, to follow up on the "big bullet-stopper books" post, I thought I'd talk about something rather different… patronage and the ransom model of publishing.

Wolfgang Baur is the author of a great number of D&D books, and he's started this Open Design project in which patronage pays for the development of a new D&D adventure. You pay up-front from $5 to $50 and get to influence the design. For $5 you get to vote on the level of the adventure, for $50 you get to put some of your own ideas in, and everybody gets to discuss and make suggestions.

Without strong editorial control, such design-by-committee projects are usually doomed to failure… but have no doubt, Wolfgang is writing the adventure, not the crowd of patrons. Patrons get to make suggestions, but in the end, it's Wolfgang who makes the decisions.

I went in for the $5 level… not because I'm interested in a D&D adventure, but because Wolfgang is writing about the process of adventure development while he does it. He's presented outlines of the top four picks (he gave eight proposed setting titles to vote on initially), and has written four design articles so far.

This isn't terribly unlike the ransom model that has produced various wargames and some of the Godlike RPG supplements. Basically it works along the lines of "when we receive $1000 in pre-orders, we'll print the book" kind of stuff. Generally, if they don't reach the goal within a specified period of time, all money is refunded. (Fundable.org manages this process for you and doesn't take money from the customers unless the goal is reached.)

The patronage model just takes it one step further and gives the customers a way to influence the process, saying "Will you pay more to get more control over the outcome?" Interestingly, Wolfgang is enjoying the process, because he's never received this much feedback during the planning of a project. (He hasn't written anything specific to the adventure but the outlines.) I'm wondering what happens when one of the $20 or $50 patrons feels that he didn't get anything close to his money's worth when it's all over.

While I'm not sure that paying to influence the design is a highly useful model, I do think the ransom model has something going for it. The only trick to that is, you have to be fairly well-established with your target audience, and you really have to come through. Nothing like collecting $1000 of customer money and then finding that writer's block is killing you. (I believe the Godlike ransoms were for projects that were fully written before they went up for ransom.)

I keep wondering how people in the Fudge community would react if I said, "Pay me ten dollars and I'll write a fully-realized Fudge Fantasy book, complete with basic world information, character templates, skill trees, weapons and armor lists, monster writeups, a Gramarye-based magic system with over 100 spells and so on." Ten bucks would get you the PDF, and you could pay more to get a print-on-demand paper book.

I'd even discuss the development in public on a blog for people to give feedback. :)