I often hear new to moderately-experienced retailers asking how to make money with RPGs. It’s a question out of my experience. I came into the hobby from D&D, as a player and as a freelancer, and so when I entered into game retail I must have already had a good understanding of how the process worked. At one point I did a year-to-date sales check and noticed that my three main categories: miniatures, role-playing, and collectible cards—were all sitting at exactly 28.1% each of my sales. I was selling just as much D&D as Magic.
This question often comes from retailers whose background lies primarily in collectible card games. They created a store based around running events and selling singles, and they’re unfamiliar with the rest of the industry. That’s a fine start, but it’s tough running a business based on a small number of products. One poorly-received release could choke cash flow. In an effort to diversify for more stable cash flow and to increase overall sales volume, consider RPGs.
Groundwork
Before you buy your first book, assess what you have and where you need to be. The groundwork you lay down includes staffing, product knowledge, image, merchandise, and a plan.
If you’ve never carried or played D&D, this process is more difficult. Familiarity with the products always helps. YouTube can get you started, but you should play at least one session. As with all category expansions, it helps tremendously if you have someone on staff who knows the game. Being able to field questions from customers helps you sell to them, and that familiarity helps in creating a community.
As always, make your store exceptional. Especially if you charge for attendance, the environment has to be clean. Everything has to work—the bathrooms, the lights, the heating or air conditioning. Ideally the store has a consistent design theme and look. You have signage in place.
Having good communication flow with your customers is critical also. Find out where they congregate, whether that’s Facebook, Discord, Instagram, or whatever. Build your online presence through organic methods (never by buying lists or Likes). You have to be able to inform them of planned events and hear what they have to say about what products they want from you next. If you don’t have that communication, start building it. Collect contact information as people express interest in this new product category.
General Practices
The overall strategy is simple: reinvest capital into more merchandise. Encourage and promote game play. Monetize everything.
Reinvest Capital
Reinvesting capital into more merchandise is critical. When you sell a Players Handbook, buy a replacement Players Handbook and buy Volo’s Guide to Everything, for example. When you sell your first Monster Manual, replace it and buy Curse of Strahd. If you start with a larger investment, you’ll reach that stage sooner.
Prioritize turn rates with your investment. A rulebook that costs $27 and nets $150/year is a better investment than a $27 purchase that nets $100/year. If you have a limited budget for restocks, always restock the item that sells more often. Your POS should be able to provide you with an average time between sales. If not, you can calculate it manually or export your data and solve it with Excel. I talk in detail about turn rates here.
Encourage Game Play
Focus on teaching people how to play. I recommend running Lost Mine of Phandelver–the adventure that comes with the starter box—it’s designed to be a tutorial session, and the shared experience with other players creates a bond with that community. Even those players who decide not to continue immediately have a touchstone experience on which to build. Next year, they might be talking to new friends and somebody will mention that they’ve played it. That familiarity and recognition increases the chance that they seek the game out again or are amenable to play with a different group.
Create an event for your game and share it to social media, your website, and place signs in the store. If it’s your first time, spend some money to promote it. Start at least two weeks ahead of time. Charge a fee for this game; people feel more committed to showing up if they’ve paid for an event. I charge $20.
I run Lost Mine over a 4-week period—which makes the $20 buy-in a good value. Characters level after week 1 and level again to level 3 for the finale. Once they complete the adventure, they get a cool certificate and a coupon for a free set of dice when they buy the Players Handbook.
Other events make people think about D&D, get people interested in D&D, and otherwise encourage play. You might
- Host a character creation tutorial
- Have a character backstory contest
- Host a PVP league
- Sponsor a character painting contest
- Encourage DMs to create and run themed adventures around any given holiday.
Monetize Everything
Charge for the use of your tables. If you come from a background in collectible card games, you’re familiar with charging for events. Consider each D&D game an event.
I’ve seen multiple methods of handling this buy-in to lessen resistance from the community. The best option I’ve seen is to charge $5/player for the session. The DM gets that amount on a gift card or otherwise as store credit. It’s not a big buy-in, and it guarantees a certain spending minimum. It’s an analog for the prize pool in your Magic games—you take in a certain amount of entry fees, and you give out a certain value in prizes.
When you run a painting clinic, charge a fee. Give players something tangible for their fee in addition to the time you spend with them if you like, like a miniature or even an entire paint kit if the buy-in justifies it (and it should).
Apprentice
Start with stocking one copy each of the three core books (Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, Monster Manual) and the Starter Set. Display these titles face out. Replace them as you sell them. When you start to miss sales due to not having one in stock, order 2 copies of that title.
- Order a few sets of Chessex 7-die sets. Order 5-7 colors from each of 3 different price points. When you restock, buy different dice. At this stage, avoid yellow and orange dice.
- Order a Chessex 1” square Battlemat and a Chessex 1” square Megamat.
- Create an account with Uline and order velvet pouches in 3” x 4” size and 5” x 7” size, 5-8 colors of each. Sell them as dice bags for $2.99 and $3.99. The smaller ones cost $.21 each, for a 93% gross profit. The larger ones are “only” 89% gross profit.
This basic buy-in is about $300.
If you have more capital to invest, order more D&D titles. Search YouTube videos for “Best 5e D&D books” or ask retailers for their best-selling titles on the Facebook page Opening a Tabletop Game Store—these will change when the new rules start coming out.
Your immediate goal at this stage is to expand your product selection to include as many Dungeons & Dragons books as you can stock. Display as many as possible face out.
Immediately start soliciting pre-orders for the next release through those communication networks you’ve created. The more accurately you predict sales, the better your cash flow.
Journeyman
Once you have all the D&D titles, check your POS records to see where your stockouts lie. Double up (or more) on the titles for which you run out of stock.
Next, improve your accessory selection. Add more dice, plushes, miniatures, etc. Steve Jackson Games has some excellent dice bags that display well. Check out their site at sjgames.com.
Add miniatures. Order a selection of character miniatures from WizKids. Get a representative selection of races and classes. By now you know which classes and races people play. People don’t play gnomes and halflings as often as the other races. They play humans, elves, and dwarves. People play paladins and wizards. Monks are rare. Prioritize your miniatures purchases with an eye toward expanding into the full line as soon as cash flow allows.
Offer a paint line if you aren’t already. Unlike with miniatures games, not every D&D player paints models for use. However, giving them the option encourages players to start painting. Add basic hobby supplies: primer, sealer, hobby knives, paint brushes, glue, etc.
Add the Chessex Mondomat and the D&D Tiles sets.
Splash core rulebooks from other games. The least-selling D&D title sells more copies than the best-selling products for most other games. Pathfinder is an exception. It still sells significantly slower than D&D, though.
Likewise, experiment with some third-party 5th edition material. Ask your customers what they’d like to see or what they’re playing. Stock those core rulebooks and experiment.
Start offering painting workshops. You or one of your crew schedules a 3 hour painting event. Charge a fee and provide something for the event.
Master
You carry every D&D book. You have a lot of dice.
What’s next?
At this point, looking to expand volume and profits. Go to www.hddice.com/ and order hundreds of dice sets at a time. Order cheap dice. Buy nice dice. Get premium dice. You might have to package them yourself, but that’s a good thing. Order custom clamshells from visipak.com. Print your own labels with your store logo on it and brand your dice with exotic names.
I call mine “First Edition Dice” (for the regular old opaque dice), “Almost Cheating” and “Killer GM”. You could call yours “Old School”, “Elementally Evil”, “GM Restricted”, “TPK” or some other exotic names. Branded things sell better than descriptive names. They’re also something you can trademark.
Order Crown Royal dice bags from the secondary market. I buy mine from eBay for $1 and sell them for $7.99. Have somebody make leather and chainmail dice bags (I don’t have a source for these—I’ve lost contact with both). Both sell well. This unique and expansive range of accessory products will make customers shop at your store even if another store nearby matches your RPG title selection.
I love props for games. I order a set of three chests billed as “pirate chests” from Amazon and sell them individually for $15, $20 and $25, netting 68% margin for each full set sold. They conveniently sell pretty evenly, too, so I’m never stuck with 5 copies of one size I can’t sell.
Players love metal coin props. You can order a bucket of “pirate gold”, bundle them up in your Uline bags in 20s or 50s and sell them for 75% or more margins.
Stock terrain accessories like WizKids’ 4D Tiles. Provide more options. Support these with a tabletop display and events that make use of the terrain. One such method is to “stock” a killer dungeon and allow groups to bring their PCs to try to beat the dungeon.
Carry every miniature. I stock the entire range of Reaper’s Bones plastics, Bones Black, and their paints. I stock every WizKids miniature. Reaper also has bundles of minis and accessories that sell well, from painting cases to carrying cases to learn-to-paint kits.
If you aren’t doing it already, add secondary market products—that is, used games. Display modules and smaller sourcebooks in magazine-size bags with boards from BCW; you’ll protect the product and have a place to stick a price tag without damaging the goods. Some of these high-end collector products sell for hundreds of dollars, earning their shelf space and providing you with an ever-changing display to keep shoppers coming back to see what’s new.
Selling used RPGs is much less common than it used to be in game stores. Now the store that carries them has a distinct competitive advantage over other stores.
If you have not added tables friendlier to role-playing, consider adding some. If you are using the Melltorp tables from Ikea for your card games (which I recommend), switch out your buffet tables for these superior fixtures. Your D&D players can push two together for a perfect gaming table.
Conclusions
It seems simple. Order what sells fastest. Encourage people to play games. Profit.
It is simple. It’s not always easy. Running uphill is simple. It’s not always easy.
The missing ingredient is excitement. I love D&D. I’ve been playing it since 1980, and I started teaching new players right away, so selling it is easier for me than it is for somebody less familiar with the hobby, but you undoubtedly have people with that passion in your market. Hire them.
