How to Pick a Collaborative Project
Project Managing for TTRPGs
TL;DR: I explain how we picked our collaborative project. Start small and ask yourself questions (provided below) about your idea. Finally, I reflect on the Theme Selection voting process we used for Encounters (with a template if you want to try it yourself).
This is post three of a series on Project Managing for TTRPGs (here are the first and second posts). Stay up to date by subscribing:
Start Small
I had a clear vision for the “size” of my first collaborative project - a small encounter bundle. I had just finished the Write Your First Encounter (WYFE) course — covered in my last post, Gearing up for Collaboration — and the end result was a student encounter bundle. In WYFE, students write an encounter about anything they want, in any format they want. I thought I could do almost the same thing (an encounter bundle) but with a coherent theme, fewer authors, and a fixed format, so that the bundle felt like a complete product.
This goal was short and felt like the right level of ambition for a first project. Whoever my collaborators would be, we’d all be working together for the first time. It’s easier to convince someone to work with you for a month and write one or two pages than to write a full adventure with a stranger. It’s also easier to lay out ~10-20 pages than a 50+ page book. Finally, I treated this as testing the waters for everyone involved: if all or some of us worked super well together, there’d be time for a larger full adventure compendium in the future. And on the flip side, if someone was really struggling or didn’t like the format, then we were only sworn to each other for a month(ish)-long process.
Picking the Idea
Let’s say you have a few ideas for a project theme and you need to pick one. Choosing the “Radiant Citadel” as our theme was ultimately one of the most impactful decisions I made as project lead. I say “decision” because we did a whole voting process (described at the end of this post) and this wasn’t the most popular theme among collaborators (it was the second). When I picked it, I felt I really needed to justify to my collaborators why we did so over the top choice.
When you’re picking what to write about, here is a list of questions you can ask yourself:
1. Has someone already done it?
Go to DMsGuild, DriveThruRpg, itch.io, and Google. Search for keywords related to the idea you’re thinking of. If you find someone has written something similar, see how it’s sold (metal rankings on DMsGuild/DriveThruRPG give some sense), who was on the project, and how they positioned it. The top-voted choice for our project was to do a “Most Wanted” encounter bundle - encounters about tracking down criminal NPCs. I thought this was an absolute banger of an idea. And guess what? So did this group of folks who published this exact concept in 2020:
Wanted: Dead or Alive is a well-rated, professionally-made book with almost 90 pages of content and a bunch of great authors. I found it after five minutes of searching DMsGuild for “Wanted”.
Finding a similar product isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, when I was researching whether it made sense to make an encounter bundle for the Radiant Citadel, I researched if and how encounter bundles had sold for other D&D locations. Here are a few I found for Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate. They sold well and there wasn’t one for Radiant Citadel. So this seemed very promising.
2. Who is your audience and how do you reach them?
Who is your audience? How will they find out about your product? Are there pre-existing communities specifically for this audience? Who do you, or other team members, know that might have unique insight into what you’re building? I will cover more of this when I talk about how we ended up promoting Encounters, but when I considered the Radiant Citadel, a few things jumped out at me:
There is a dedicated subreddit and discord server.
It has its own dedicated storyline filter on DMsGuild.
There was a possibility to leverage some connections: Taylor Navarro, one of the collaborators, is the senior editor of Journeys Beyond the Radiant Citadel. A friend of mine was a sensitivity editor on the original Journeys through the Radiant Citadel.
I am DMing a Radiant Citadel campaign, so I knew the setting and had empathy for DMs running Citadel games.
3. What do collaborators need to know?
Given your idea, what kind of additional reading or knowledge do your collaborators need to participate? As it became clear we were going to do a Radiant Citadel encounter bundle, it also became clear that not everyone had just read the entire Radiant Citadel sourcebook (I had because I was DMing it). Make sure your collaborators know what knowledge they need to participate and make it easy for them to get it. I put together a Radiant Citadel primer, which included the parts of the book collaborators needed to read, and we made sure everyone had access to the book. Here’s a snippet of that guide:
4. Where will this be published?
I’ll talk about this in more depth in the next post on ~Money~, but basically, if you use Wizards of the Coast IP, you need to publish on DMsGuild. In turn, 50% of all profits made on DMsGuild go to Wizards of the Coast/DMsGuild. In choosing to publish something for the Radiant Citadel, we were making a trade-off of 50% of our profits for the benefit of having an audience (i.e. all the Dungeon Masters, like myself, that are running Radiant Citadel campaigns). Note there’s a huge conversation going on around upcoming changes to the OGL (open gaming license) which I’m not touching on but is relevant for publishing D&D writing.
Theme Selection Process (Optional)
I started my project without a theme for the encounter bundle. The first step of my project was gathering the collaborators to pitch and vote on the theme. There were pros and cons to this approach: team members liked the way I conducted theme selection, but as a project lead, this part of the process felt less streamlined. That’s why I’m marking this as “optional”, but for those interested, here’s how it worked:
The process
Everyone had five days to pitch themes in a Google document. We used document comments to discuss the pitches.
I made a Google form with three options for each theme (Excited, Neutral, Veto). Participants had four days to vote.
I looked at the results, did the research above, and then announced the theme.
What worked
We got a bunch of great encounter bundle ideas and I knew that folks were excited about the theme we picked because of the voting process. If you care more about who you work with, as opposed to what you work on, then pitching and voting on themes could be the way to go. As mentioned above, a few of us had connections to folks that worked on the Radiant Citadel, and because I picked the collaborators first, that ended up factoring into the chosen theme.
What I’d do differently
Maybe skip this step: When I reached out to collaborators, I had every question answered except the critical detail of what the encounter bundle’s theme was. Because of this, I didn’t have folks officially sign onto the project until after the theme was announced. I didn’t want anyone feeling hoodwinked into writing about a theme they didn’t like. But it took an extra week to run this process. If I had a strong idea for an encounter bundle, I’d likely just go with that next time and pick collaborators accordingly.
Be clear about how the final decision is made: When the votes came in, I picked the second most popular theme (Radiant Citadel) after doing the research described above. For transparency and to avoid the perception I “ignored the votes”, I explained all the reasons for picking Radiant Citadel (a small but devoted community, a dedicated space on DMs guild, nobody had done an encounter collection for it, etc). Ultimately, collaborators didn’t disagree with the choice, but were surprised, because the process was called “voting.” Surprising collaborators isn’t great, so if I did this process again, I would stress up front that ultimately the theme is selected via a combination of votes and research.
Pick a better voting and discussion platform: Discussing themes was a little clunky in Google document comments. Maybe getting everyone on a video call was the answer. Another suggestion was using a platform like Dory, which is a combination of discussion and voting.
Try it yourself!
Here’s a template for the theme selection process described above (with the wording edited so your collaborators know you’re not running the process 100% democratically 👑).
Hope that helps! If you have any questions about how we picked our theme, feel free to add a comment to the post. Next up is a post on 🤑money🤑 considerations for collaborative projects.
Finally, a special shout-out to the 20+ folks who playtested Out of Luck - y’all are amazing and I’m excited to share the final module with everyone.
Over and Out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️
20+ play testers! And here I thought I was special