What is currently happening with DM Tuz

Who is up for some transparency?

So $3 tier people might have noticed that things have been  a bit slow and that my upload schedule that I kept for the past year has been broken. There are reasons for that. No idea if these are good reasons but I have to be honest about this kind of stuff since I want a no BS relationship with you on the patreon.

Okay so I did finish up 2 player race options, the slime folk and the gnolls over the last month or so. They were a huge success. Truth be told, the slime folk in particular were more successful than i anticipated. I mean look at this:

This is my growth over the last 3 months. Look at March in particular where I released the Slime Folk. Pretty steep! I never had this kind of growth ever and it all came from 2 updates. Yes the gnoll update was a smaller bump than the slime folk but it is a bump nonetheless. A much bigger bump than any of my monster related updates ever gave me.

You can all recall the survey I did to gage what people on my patreon wanted, right? Well the gains of my last updates kind of threw the results I got from the survey out of the window. People voted with their wallets you could say. People want player options. Issue is that I had this huge amount of monsters lineup here that I wanted to keep working on but...looking at these numbers it feels like I’d be wasting my time to work on this. Creating assets, doing the monster stat blocks, playtesting them and then getting the notes for the writer together eat the majority of my monthly time investment for my patreon. Now I am confronted with the truth that in the big scheme of things people don’t care as much about it. This is not me whining or fishing for pity! This is me critically analyzing the situation, don’t get me wrong. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Bringing up the motivation and energy to work on this material that will give me such diminishing returns compared to the more lucrative options was not happening for me. Instead I was just seriously sitting down and contemplating what I should do differently. Analyze and adjust - that is how I have been running the patreon successfully for the last year. But this is quite a major change that I feel like I cannot pass up.

So I will have to change a few things and rearrange where I spend my energy to get the most out of it. This really hit me out of the left field and I am sorry for my patrons that this left me not able to really deliver on my promises. I will make it up though! I don’t know what yet but the $3 tier patrons will be in for a treat. There is still alot of thinking I need to do. I also do think that the whole ‘poll and create what the community wants’ model does not seem to work out, since the releases that I did out of my own initiative have been moving much bigger numbers than what the community polls wanted. So that is another whole can of worms that I need to figure out, huh?

If any of the above sounded like me being a downer, don’t worry! I am doing better than ever, but I am just...trying to figure things out how to go ahead, you know? I just feel like I need to change things quite suddenly and I don’t know how yet. I got more stuff in the works though, and I will try to get back in the saddle of the general updates, but I will give you all a heads-up that I will probably try a few more free-form updates from my own initiative. Let’s try this for a month or two and then look back how it’s working out, shall we? Maybe this will be great and will work out, or it will be back for the drawing board for me. As always I am so so grateful for any of you and for everyone that is currently having to be patient with me while I sort this out. All of these are good changes but I am just a bit overwhelmed by this. Thank you all for your time reading this and you will see some good updates really soon!

Tuz