D&D 5E The Monetization of D&D and other Role Playing Games

[Malmuria]

Since the pandemic started, I’ve spent a lot more money on RPG products, especially from Exalted Funeral and through kickstarter. Overall I’ve been happy with these purchases, and thankfully have not experienced any kickstarter disasters, aside from very long but understandable delays in shipping physical products. Many of these products are clearly labors of love, and exhibit a high quality in terms of materials, art, writing, and design. Yet, at the same time I sometimes look at my shelf of games and think, “why?” Why do I have all these games, which together consist in content that I probably do not have time to play through. For example, I’ve backed several Mork Borg kickstarters, including this deluxe vinyl record-slash-adventure module, and yet have managed to play exactly one session of Mork Borg thus far. It’s not that I haven’t been playing games at all; I have, sometimes with multiple groups, but that’s been a lot of 5e. And of the non-5e games I’ve run, half of the time I’m running a game that is free or very cheap, especially as a pdf.

I mention the above because it’s my personal version of what might be a problem with the TTRPG hobby, namely it’s relationship with consumerism, collecting, and exhange. This dynamic goes back to the origins of the hobby, when dnd evolved from a very DIY practice with very different cultures of play to it’s codification for the sake of commodification in AD&D. In a consumer society, this ensured that the game would become popular or endure, but players did ask at the time if something was lost in the process.

The contemporary version of this would be the explosion of 5e as a “lifestyle brand,” and along with it all the deluxe products people are making for it (I’m thinking, for example, of the announcement today of the Beadle and Grimm’s platinum Spelljammer set). There’s also the constant kickstarters, which are easy to hype on the front end but can be rather disastrous in some cases, either because of incompetence or actual bad actors. Meanwhile, the influencer-driven aspect of the hobby and the idea that when you buy a product you are also buying into a “community” can have toxic effects and enable abusive people.

I realize this is perhaps an irrational worry—if other people want to spend their excess capital on deluxe editions and $600 DM screens, how does it affect me? Yet I do see aspects of this that mirror monetization in video games—i.e., fine for most people, but predatory for some. There’s a general lack of accountability for kickstarter projects gone awry. At its most extreme, the mindset of buying and collecting opens the door to “products” like NFTs that are truly exploitative. At its least extreme, and most intangible, it turns a hobby that’s about DIY and creative imagination into yet another corporate product.

What do you all think? Am I wrong to find something distasteful in consumerism in the hobby (even my own)? Is there a line to be drawn somewhere (perhaps at NFTs)? Is it still a DIY hobby, or has that not been the case for some time now?

Some recent blog posts and articles on this topic. They express a range of positions on the role of commodification and commercialization in ttrpgs:

Prismatic Wasteland - Hey, You Got Commercialization In My Hobby

If you are, like me, interested in maximizing the reach of your hobby-writing, you basically have to commercialize it. Charging money for your games makes people think “oh this is an important thing I should pay attention to!” Whereas, giving it away for free strikes people like you’re trying to hand out your mixtape on a busy city street. They don’t want it.

Traverse Fantasy - Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby

Something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-commercial interactions between members. This is not to say that the issue is grounded in the culture of the hobby, but that the culture of the hobby has developed to reproduce the sorts of relationships we have with each other. No more indie publisher guilds masquerading as unions (?) and misappropriating the language of anticapitalist critique (!) to convince you to buy their zines. No more Twitter pseudo-personalities taking offense at people pirating their work. No more snake oilers arguing with walls that Wizards of the Coast is selling trash, and therefore you should instead buy their trash. None of this makes anyone’s lives better, except for those fortunate enough to profit off of everyone else. Fortune here is mostly a function of being early to the chase and having a strong force of personality directed towards marketing. I want an exit.

Tom Van Winkle - The Commodification of Fantasy Adventure Games

And there is also the endless dream of living as a full-time hobbyist. But generally, putting a price tag on a game makes it socially real and legitimate in the ways described above, not just for others but also for ourselves. Only with $$$ does the fantasy of today become more than private. It became a part of mass culture when it cost money, a shared medium of exchange. Somehow, that is disappointing to a dreamer like me, as it was to Kask in 1981, yet one must acknowledge that the hobby would be much, much smaller and lonelier without this system of valuation of fantasy.

Helpful NPCs - Dungeons & Dividends (Or, D&D's Monetization Problem)

The Helpful NPCs team rejected several potential FLGSs due to their exorbitant table-rental fees–one even had the gall to offer free spaces unless the group was playing D&D, at which point they’d have to pay to rent a table! (Presumably, this fee was an attempt to siphon off of D&D’s popularity.) Companies crowdfunding vaporware and shovelware products are all over the Internet.

Jacobin - Dungeons & Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity.

 

[Stormonu]

Laughs in 2E.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think being concerned about the attempts of WotC and others to turn D&D into a lifestyle brand are pretty reasonable, because it's likely to move it away from being a relatively well-designed TT RPG, into a specialist product for collectors and lifestyle hobbyists.

Turning into the latter will change what books and other products WotC put out for D&D, and will change WotC's priorities. I mean, we're already seeing it to some extent. Adventures for 5E, at least since about 2015/16, have been 100% "written to read" rather than "written to run", for example, because they're not aiming at DMs who are actually necessarily going to run them, but rather collectors and readers. And that's the least of it.

I don't think it'll happen overnight, and I don't think we need to worry about the hobby vanishing, but I do think that unless there is a change in direction (which would likely only happen, sadly, if the brand starts to be less successful), D&D is going to end up primarily marketed to as a IP which isn't an RPG.

Laughs in 2E.

I mean, that's like the arctic blizzard laughing at the firestorm - normal humans don't want to be involved with either. 2E screwed things up by just marketing tons of cool AD&D stuff it was barely selling. 5E seems likely to eventually go the other way - being a success at selling stuff, but it's not really stuff about actually playing D&D, but rather living a "D&D lifestyle" or collecting everything D&D.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Yes, you are probably wrong. It is a game you can still play at very low cost. Additionally, the ability to monetize had created and explosion and creativity and quality. Yet, it still hasn’t slowed the amazing amount of free content and i I’m tact it has helped it. Ever check the UA Reddit? Tons of creative free stuff there

 

[Malmuria]

Yes, you are probably wrong. It is a game you can still play at very low cost. Additionally, the ability to monetize had created and explosion and creativity and quality. Yet, it still hasn’t slowed the amazing amount of free content and i I’m tact it has helped it. Ever check the UA Reddit? Tons of creative free stuff there

That's true. I have probably hundreds of games on itch.io from some bundle or another that I might never look at, much less play, but I'm happy people are creating things and that these games exist.
In terms of monetization, it has produced some nice products, but I question to what degree it has produced better games. Impossible to know in general; all I know is that I have some very nice products sitting on my shelf that I do enjoy but probably don't need.

 

[overgeeked]

What do you all think?

Capitalism is one of the two worst evils humanity ever created.

Am I wrong to find something distasteful in consumerism in the hobby (even my own)?

Nope. The blind groping for wealth is beneath human dignity. Subsisting on scraps even more so.

Is there a line to be drawn somewhere (perhaps at NFTs)?

Yes. About 50 years ago when Gary Gygax took Dave Arneson's notes, mangled them, then turned around and sold them for profit.

Is it still a DIY hobby, or has that not been the case for some time now?

The periphery of the hobby is still DIY. The mainstream of the hobby has fallen for the "official rules, official books, etc" lie hook line and sinker. People will gladly drop $100 on a 3PP book while sneering at other people's homebrew. It's all homebrew. It's only a question of how much money you spend to publish your homebrew.

 

[FallenRX]

Yes, you are probably wrong. It is a game you can still play at very low cost. Additionally, the ability to monetize had created and explosion and creativity and quality. Yet, it still hasn’t slowed the amazing amount of free content and i I’m tact it has helped it. Ever check the UA Reddit? Tons of creative free stuff there

Yea, a lot of 5E is free totally, they're plenty of free resources to fill holes, you can basically play the game without spending anything.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In terms of monetization, it has produced some nice products, but I question to what degree it has produced better games.

All the evidence I can see is that heavy monetization produces a product-centric approach that really doesn't produce better games.

Pretty much all the "WOW!!!" RPGs I've bought and played in the last two decades were fairly small-press or totally indie (4E being the obvious exception), and most of the really game-changing stuff (like PtbA and BitD) has come straight out of the indie realm, not out of the "publisher" realm. Stuff like Spire is slightly in the middle, but Rowan Rook and Deckard aren't really a publisher in the normal sense, they're more a highly organised indie.

We saw this in the '90s where a lot of games started just pumping out products rather than looking at what was good for their game, and stuff like Spelljammer being two-thirds (or less) the page count, double the cost, much higher production values than other settings really screams "lifestyle product, not intended for actual play". I'm sure plenty of people will play it, realistically, but ten years from now when we're looking at whatever evolved from that approach, I feel like "play" may well be an entirely vestigial concept.

The big concern for me is the OGL. Uni talks about creativity and stuff, but if we're talking in relation to 5E, that can only happen with the OGL, and my suspicion is that as D&D progresses towards being a lifestyle brand, it's going to want to lock things down a bit more, and will either do a new edition which doesn't have the OGL, or more likely just gradually get more hostile to OGL-licenced stuff - it's already less friendly now, I'd say than it was a few years ago. Notice how hostile Beyond has been to third party stuff, and how it's been accepting then suddenly hostile - all signs suggest this was WotC kicking them under the table. I expect them to be more solidly hostile now WotC owns them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think it's wrong to be concerned. On the flipside, creating content that a small number of people will pay top dollar for may enable more cool things to happen that don't have to be super profitable.

It all comes down, sadly, to the self-control and enlightened self-interest of the people making the game...which will ever be questionable even when things are going well. Perhaps especially when things are going well.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Hobbies are not free, but there are freeloaders.