I am a former subscriber to both Dungeon and Dragon magazine. I subscribed to Dragon for over 15 years and Dungeon on and off several times. I like the content because I’m primarily focused on D&D as a player/DM. However, I found that I just wasn’t able to use the content of the magazines they way I wanted. I never use the articles as printed, sometimes only a few spells or maybe changing a monster, NPC or a P class. Likewise when an adventure is posted in Dungeon I want to rewrite parts of it for my campaign. Spending time copying and/or retyping adventures, NPCs, spells and P classes just got to be a pain. I like reading the content, but I just wasn’t able to <use> the content the way that I want to, I feel that many players and DMs that I know are in the same position. I have also downloaded the art work that you are now posting, this is a very nice step in the right direction, but I doesn’t get to the core of my type of problem, easy access the written work so that I can modify it to suit what I want.
My suggestion is that the written content be made available to paid subscribers in an editable format (such as MS Word). I’m sure that there are issues such as rights with authors, however I’m sure that they could be over come if desired.
I realize this is a big risk because of the value of content. I’m not sure what you could do to stop the content from being passed around, however I know that I would become a subscriber again if I knew that I had <access to the text of articles>. I think the increased subscription rate would be a significant benefit to outweigh the disadvantages.
I also know that you sell the entire current issue as a pdf, I guess you have to weigh the sales there with printed sales. I’m not thrilled with the idea of paying for a magazine twice and a pdf does not really solve the specific problem I have since most pdfs are locked and don’t permit copying of text. You could start with a few articles more than one to two years old and then move forward on a monthly basis. You could just sell just older articles individually, 50 cents an article might be a good price point. This would allow picking and choosing and be a price point that I think would be a huge incentive versus copying and/or retyping.
In summary I think there is a market for articles/text that can be modified by the customer to suit a customers needs and that there is a large group of people willing to pay for it.
Later
Mark Middleton
Long time D&D and RPGA guy
Original creator of TSRs Spell Compendium Book “content”
IT Project Manager, PMP
