I've always been more of a "consumer" than a contributor to these boards, but I came up with an interesting idea the other night after talking with a few friends, and I thought I'd throw it out here to see what you all thought.
We all know that the RPG world is driven by community, and that some of the most important contributions to the RPG community come from its individual, seemingly innocuous gamers (read: we consumers who shell out lots of dough to a select few).
With this in mind, here's my suggestion:
Why don't we gamers (or amateur designers, if you will) take it upon ourselves to collate all the little shards of genius which permeate the online RPG community and reward the creators of such gems? People like Monte Cook or Brude Cordell or Sean Reynolds are great game designers, and I have no problems buying products by them, but there's not a spell, magic item, PrC, or piece of creative lore in any of their works that I haven't seen trumped by the independent effort of some no-name gamer or another.
Specifically, what I'm proposing is that as members of an RPG community, we produce a high quality, professionally edited gaming supplement, or even a series of supplements (say, in the style of Book of Eldritch Might) and publish it to someplace like RPGnow.com. This would present the opportunity for us little people to showcase our talents and receive a bit of recognition and reward for our efforts. Granted, no one's going to get rich off of such an endeavor, but I think it would be awfully neat and exciting. Even if it's something we couldn't get published, we could still release it as a free download on someplace like . . . here!
So... what do you all think?
Hathren
ejt8@cornell.edu
We all know that the RPG world is driven by community, and that some of the most important contributions to the RPG community come from its individual, seemingly innocuous gamers (read: we consumers who shell out lots of dough to a select few).
With this in mind, here's my suggestion:
Why don't we gamers (or amateur designers, if you will) take it upon ourselves to collate all the little shards of genius which permeate the online RPG community and reward the creators of such gems? People like Monte Cook or Brude Cordell or Sean Reynolds are great game designers, and I have no problems buying products by them, but there's not a spell, magic item, PrC, or piece of creative lore in any of their works that I haven't seen trumped by the independent effort of some no-name gamer or another.
Specifically, what I'm proposing is that as members of an RPG community, we produce a high quality, professionally edited gaming supplement, or even a series of supplements (say, in the style of Book of Eldritch Might) and publish it to someplace like RPGnow.com. This would present the opportunity for us little people to showcase our talents and receive a bit of recognition and reward for our efforts. Granted, no one's going to get rich off of such an endeavor, but I think it would be awfully neat and exciting. Even if it's something we couldn't get published, we could still release it as a free download on someplace like . . . here!
So... what do you all think?
Hathren
ejt8@cornell.edu
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