Matthew Sernett's page

Matt,

I also read about your impending wedding in the latest DRAGON. Congratulations and wishes for all the best!

Thanks! I'm super excited, but there's still a lot of details to iron out--like the wedding cake. Our bakers are being difficult about some pretty simple cake decorations, and we might need to change the design. Maybe we should do the Monster Manual. They could make the eyeball out of a giant gobstopper.

"I would tend to agree with the masses that the computer game and samurai vs knight articles seemed like filler and weren't really on target for what was touted to be new era of a D&D magazine."

I agree. No more of that kind of thing, please.

I also agree with the many art complaints. It was a worthy experiment and there were good THEORETICAL reasons to try it, but, well, the customers have spoken, haven't they? Pretty darn monolithically, too. Buyers want a magazine that looks like Dragon, not Wired. Go back to the old issues, see what worked and go with that. We're not warming to it now and we won't start later.

Readers of these boards shouldn't take the expression of some of the posters in this thread to mean that the plurality of readers dislike the new design or content mix. There are multiple outlets for feedback to the magazine. ENworld had a long thread of folks happy about the new design, we've received many positive emails to Scale Mail, we received an overwhelmingly positive response to the new magazine at Gen Con, and (the ultimate indicator) subscriptions have picked up since the redesign. The balance of those opinions leads us to believe that Dragon's new design and content mix is on the right track but requires some refinement.

Even so, the number of readers who've chimed in with their opinion of the new magazine hasn't exceeded a couple hundred. That's a tiny fraction of the more than 60,000 readers of the magazine and not enough information to make informed decisions. To get a better sense of what our readers are looking for, we'll soon be putting a survey online. It should be up within a few days (I think) so when it's online, please take a minute or two to tell us about yourself and what you think.

Matthew Sernett wrote:

The Epic Level Handbook, Oriental Adventures, and Ghostwalk are particularly problematic because they have so many new rules systems that an article would have to avoid or reprint to make the article useful to most readers.

James Jacobs reminded us on the Dungeon message board that "basic" epic level rules appear in the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide. I know Dragon is now generally aimed at players, but surely most players have access to the DMG even if they don't own a copy.

It should be possible for Dragon to run articles on new epic feats, prestige classes and magic items without having to reprint chunks of the epic level handbook.

That's true, and Dragon might print such things on occasion. However, it's unlikely to be a regular feature because most D&D campaigns don't reach such high levels. Epic-level characters can easily use all the material presented in Dragon, but not every reader can use epic-level material.

What Mike said is true, but a special article for a particularly popular setting can increase sales, and Dragon will occasionally offer articles that reference and are enhanced by owning a particular supplement.

The key to having such articles in the magazine is making sure that they can be used by any reader without the need for the related supplement. The Epic Level Handbook, Oriental Adventures, and Ghostwalk are particularly problematic because they have so many new rules systems that an article would have to avoid or reprint to make the article useful to most readers.

Before I worked on Dragon, I submitted a few short stories to the magazine. To my mind, because Dragon wasn’t mainly a fiction magazine, it wouldn’t be as hard to get a story accepted. Also, I liked writing genre fiction like I read in the TSR novels, and it seemed to me that I’d have a better chance with Dragon than anywhere else.

Boy was I wrong.

Mike's 95% rejection rate is a little generous for Dragon. I worked on Dragon for three years while it was reviewing fiction submissions. We usually got at least three submissions each day and often received as much as ten. Of those 5,000 or so submissions that went through the review process during those three years, Dragon accepted none.

What it boiled down to was that Dragon has, at most, twelve chances to publish a short story each year. Established authors increase the sales of an issue because some consumers recognize their names and purchase the magazine based on that recognition. So accepting unsolicited fiction submissions meant that submitters faced the nigh impossible task of beating out thousands of other submissions, the skills of established authors, the name cache of established authors, and the value to our readers of putting in a D&D article in the short story's place.

I made the decision to stop accepting unsolicited fiction not just to save the staff a couple hours of work each day but also to save thousands of hopeful writers from wasting their energy on Dragon. If you’re one of those hopeful writers, I know it seems a door has been closed. I’m sorry for that, but I couldn’t in good conscience continue Dragon’s daily crushing of such author’s hopes and dreams, or expend our small staff’s energy in doing so—especially not when Dragon needs good authors to write articles, and the acceptance rate on articles is so much higher.

Dragon #299 had tournament rules. You might try checking that issue out if you have it. If you don't, I think it's available as a back issue.

WoW! You guys at the editorial staff amaze me. How man folks since yesterday logged on said "i don't like the white space," and still you guys fire back with "Well, but we like it," and "research blah blah blah," and "everyone else in the magazine industry does it so we should."

It seems that maybe you guys should be equally concerned with what your paying fan base thinks as much as you are with magazines outside the industry, or ones that aren't concerned with the industry at all.

So far I've seen folks write in and say "the articles are cool," or "I hate this article" etc etc on a variety of issues, but all of them also seem to include: "dump the extra white space, looks ugly, don't like it" seems like you guys would see that common thread and take that into consideration.

I'm happy to see readers posting their opinions about the redesign of the magazine, and I look forward to seeing more opinions. Please understand however, that a dozen or so people's opinions don't represent the plurality of our audience.

We take the feedback from our messageboards, but we're also reading emails sent to Scale Mail and paying close attention to issue sales and subscriptions. We premiered issue 323 at Gen Con this year, and we sold six times the normal number of subscriptions we typically sell at the convention. We've also seen a general increase in subscriptions to the magazine since the release of 323.

That said, we will be refining our approach to the design and content of each issue as we recieve more feedback. Already, issue 324 and 325 have less white space and more art. However, the magazine's general design philosophy—which emphasizes ease of reading, easy entry to articles and the issue, and an enegetic feel—is not likely to change.

Dragon needs to appeal to more than the hard core D&D player; it must appeal to the casual D&D player and the new player as well. Their needs are somewhat different, and so each issue will contain a broad array of content. Will every page or every issue of Dragon be appealing and immediately useful to every player who picks it up? I hope so, but it's unreasonable to expect that.

If you'd really like to change the direction of Dragon, tell us what you liked and what you'd like to see. It's nature of people to say something when they have a complaint. Few go out of their way to compliment. Thus, when we don't receive much comment on something, we assume people liked it, but without real positive feedback, we don't know for sure why people liked something—making repeating that success difficult. If you liked something, in issue 323 or from older issues, and want to see more of it, let us know what and why.

Thanks!

Matthew Sernett
Editor-in-Chief