Being a gamer used to be so simple. Designers designed. Publishers published. Stores stocked and we played. With the advent of cheap technology, those boundaries have blurred. Now I can design games from the comfort of my own armchair. I could even write it on my phone and upload it tonight. Well, that’s what everyone else is doing, right?
It can sometimes seem that there as many games as there are gamers. While not entirely correct, it is true that there has been an explosion of home produced material that seems a world away from the poorly photostatted fanzines of yore. The gaming fan is less likely to have a bulging binder of handwritten notes these days, armed instead with a Cloud account and a bunch of digital folders marked “RPG Project”.
Given that desktop publishing is now within the reach of many, it’s no surprise that so many have taken up the challenge and produced their own games. The question then isn’t so much why would you self-publish, but why haven’t you? Which is a question I asked myself recently, while staring at a blinking cursor on Google Docs.
My perfect RPG doesn’t exist. That hasn’t stopped me searching. I have shelves full of games, many loved, others abandoned, all of which have something that made me part with my cash, something that made me think this could be the one. The idea of writing my own game is a natural consequence of years of oh-so-close book purchases. Imagine a game with monsters from there, characters from here, and a magic system of my own devising, all wrapped up in a setting that takes the best bits from that game and a bit from that one.
I know. It sounds like a nightmare.
Enter the democratisation of publishing. You don’t need to have an audience for your work any more. Now, if you write what you want, in your own unique style your opus will find it’s way out into the world and maybe someone somewhere will pick it up. If you measure success in sales units, then this is clearly a fool's game, but that would be missing the point. No-one else is going to write that Frankenstein’s mash up of system and setting I’ve had in the back of my mind all these years, so why not do it myself, and throw it out there to see if anyone else shares my tastes?
So that’s the hardest part of self-publishing your own game; deciding you’re going to do it.
Which is the easy bit, just typing out your ideas into your Word processor of choice. How hard can it be? You’re a GM, you know how to communicate. You know the ideas you want to incorporate. You instinctively know what Initiative is. You can write an example. Surely it's just like playing, but writing it down, then tidying it up?
Turns out, it’s unbelievably harder than it looks.
Next time… Hack or Heartbreaker; the challenge of originality.
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