Casual DM plan launched

Anyone who has been keeping an eye on our changelog, will have seen things appear to slow down over the past month. There is a good reason for this, instead of pressing ahead with pumping out new features we have been solidly working on bug fixes, regression testing and stability enhancements.

As a result of this work, Dungeon Weave has become a product that I'm confident enough in to use it for all of my games going forward and a product I'm confident enough in to put in front of other DMs and ask you to try it out for your self.

With this launch, it was time to review the plans and ensure they matched the vision I have for the product going forward.

The plans, in one table

What the free plan gives you

First up the free plan. This has taken a bit of thinking about, I know just from my own groups that the frequency that people play games has huge variance. I have one game which plays nearly every week, another twice a month, a new one starting soon which will be once a month and another which is monthly, but I only DM for half the sessions.

This rules out any sensible options for time limited free plans, so instead I have created a plan with enough resources to allow you to plan and run up to 10 sessions for a single group. More than enough to allow you to see if Dungeon Weave is the right fit for you before you have to shell out any money.

You can use the free plan to Try Dungeon Weave risk free. There is no catch on the work itself. Everything you build can be exported, in full, whenever you like. If Dungeon Weave turns out not to be for you, your campaign does not get stranded in it. You take it with you.

The Casual DM plan

Our first paid plan is the Casual DM plan. This is aimed at DMs who run a couple of games on a regular basis with the resource limits set to a level we think will keep you going for a full year with 4 weekly game sessions. Read on in the next session for what comes after that.

The launch price is worth being plain about what it means. At £3.50 a month, or £38.50 a year, it is well under the regular price we plan to charge further down the line. Dungeon Weave is still a product that is in a beta phase and the introductory pricing represents this. It lasts while Dungeon Weave is in beta or until the first 250 subscriptions fill, whichever comes first. And once you are in, it holds: as long as your subscription stays active, you keep our cheapest price. It does not quietly reprice when the beta ends.

How I got here

I built Dungeon Weave for me, because nothing else existed quite like it. The very first time I used it, running an early dev version directly off my laptop, I knew I'd got it right. Despite having to patch a bug at the table before I could start the first encounter, it still felt like a smoother experience than the combination of tools I was using before.

I quickly realised that what I'd got here was something that other people might find useful as well. After positive feedback from a couple of other DMs I set about adding all the features needed to enable other people to use it too and brought in some of my team to help out.

I would love to be able to give you Dungeon Weave entirely for free, but I have server bills and staff to pay. I also hope in the future to be able to drop my regular work and focus on Dungeon Weave full time. This means Dungeon Weave needs to bring in revenue.

The pricing structure above is the balance I have struck.

Where we are going next

My key consideration when designing the plans and pricing was that I want as many DMs as possible to be able to use this tool. At the moment, it is best geared towards those who write their own homebrewed campaigns but this is far from every DM. Just as many run prewritten adventures either exactly as written or with their own personal spin. I want Dungeon Weave to be a tool for these DMs as well.

To cater for these DMs, we have a medium term plan to introduce a content marketplace, where you will be able to purchase content pre-written by our team and other Dungeon Weave DMs. For DMs who would be making purchases from the marketplace, I didn't want to make them pay twice, once for the content and once for the ability to run it. I also didn't want them to have to maintain a subscription to use content they had bought.

To provide for these users, I devised the idea of a loyalty scheme where purchases from the marketplace would upgrade your free package, forever, to enable you to use the content you'd purchased. From here it made sense to extend that system to those who were paying for a monthly subscription.

I am still working on the exact specifications for the scheme and will elaborate in a future post. The long and the short of it is, the longer you remain a member or the more content you own, the greater the resources your account will be granted.

Start weaving for free, or take the launch price on Casual DM.