On School and The Results of Last Month's Poll (Patreon)

(Sorry in advance for the wall of text, scroll down below to see the TL;DR notes in bold)

You may remember that last month, I ran a poll asking for opinions from y'all about patron exclusivity, or to be more precise, my recent lack thereof.

The results were almost entirely split between either "don't change anything" or "Just have the GM Binder Doc itself exclusive." Aside from that, I got a lot of messages and comments from patrons saying more or less that, while something extra would be nice, there's no real reason to gate off existing non-patron readers from what they've already been getting. And I definitely see the wisdom and fairness in that. So to that end, I've decided that I will meet somewhere in the middle.

For the past several months, I've been keeping a GM Binder doc that is essentially just a running list of "miscellaneous creatures" that I've made for various different purposes. Some of them are copies/revisions of my old reddit posts, some are conversions from previous editions, and others are just random one-off monsters that I made either as jokes, or as quick one-off requests or ideas.

From the start, this document has been for my own personal use, rather than for any kind of publication, but as I kept coming back to it and adding more creatures into it, I realized that it's almost kinda like the start of the "ItsADnDMonsterNow Manual" I talked about doing like, a million years ago.

So I decided that maybe this should be the reward for $2+ patrons. And so it will be.

So here's what's up:
Expect a post shortly after this one, exclusive to $2+ patrons, that will include a link to the latest version of this ongoing GM Binder doc of my collection. I'll then post somewhat-regular Patreon updates with an updated link, along with a brief summary of what I've added since the previous one (which most of the time, full disclosure, will just be the stream monsters from the previous week).

Now, to set expectations accordingly, these monsters are largely barebones, and will continue to be so, especially going forward—accompanying flavor, lore and other background will be minimal. In fact, this extra text will be largely kept only to what's integral to how to effectively run the monsters in your own game. The reason for this brings me to my next point...

As many of you have already heard, I've started going back to school to pursue a four-year degree. Now this is very exciting for me, but it also means that, save for maybe summers, I'm going to be taking a full course load for the foreseeable future. Because of this, the time I'm going to have available to work on the accompanying materials for stream monsters and such will be cut into dramatically.

Now, I do genuinely love doing these monster streams, and I really want to continue doing them. The time I spend actually doing the stream is relatively minimal compared to the time I spend writing, composing, and publishing the documents that go along with it. So what this means is that going forward, the GM Binder docs for stream monsters are going to mostly just be the statblock itself, with only as much background detail as is required to run it effectively in your own game.

I'll also be posting the stream monsters each week as a separate, free GM Binder doc for non-Patrons, but these too will be mostly just stats, and it won't include all the previous monsters and such that are in the big, ongoing doc.

Now finally, I do eventually plan to add all the monsters and such from my previous streams to this ongoing doc as well, but I have to ask for your patience, as this will probably take me awhile.

Alright, I think that's it. If you have any questions, criticisms, opinions, outrage, confusion, ambivalence, etc., PLEASE don't hesitate to let me know. Either post a comment below, or send me a private message through your choice of channel (Patreon, reddit, discord, whatever). I'm fully open to feedback and criticism about this plan, so please let me know if you have them.

Until next time, thanks for sticking with me. Y'all truly are the best. <3

~IADnDMN