Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pleroma" data-source="post: 8211280" data-attributes="member: 7029838">Not unskilled labor, just very low-skilled white collar labor. Moderate writing ability. Organizational ability sufficient to plan, execute, and complete a medium-sized to large (usually only largish) project, including enough skill to use some common electronic publishing tools. Familiarity with genre, something bright 15-year-olds are often already overqualified in. Basic arithmetic for most games, plus stats knowledge at a "Fun With Stats and Probability!" middle-school level.  A lot of this can be ripped off and "repainted" from the material you used to get genre familiarity. And much of this work is handled for you if you work for WOTC: you create content to pre-defined specs, much as you would for any corporation. At most media firms, this job is largely handled by young, junior folks with occasional older/senior supervision. That gets improved upwards a little bit at WOTC, since job demand is higher and market several orders of magnitude smaller, but not too much. Basically, WOTC can get a little more bang for their buck--but not too much, because the real talent won't do something as crazy as work on pretend elf games. Play 'em, sure, but Goldman's a better place to work. Or Spotify.  'Cause here's the thing. "Quality" doesn't matter. It's a complete cliche to complain that 5e books are a tsunami of flaming hot garbage. Of course they are! That the extended modules/adventure paths/whatever are overcomplex, difficult and ungainly to run, and railroad-y. Of course they are! They're not designed to run, but to read and think about running if you could ever get a group together/have friends to do this. Sure, if that ever happens, yeah, you could run it, sure, knock yourself out. But if we published these things optimizing them to be played, we'd go broke. You'd probably be all like, "Well, I'm in the middle of this thing that will take a year to resolve, so I'm not going to buy any year-long things for a while." Can't have that! Oh and here, have another dog's breakfast of game-breaking crap. We know you'll lap it right up, you gun-toting warlock artificer tiefling-draconid-tortoiseperson you. We Make Lonely Fun(tm).I'll put it this way. If you read Brandon Sanderson, who after writing several million words has heroically clawed himself up to the standard of a prep-school ninth-grader's command of written English, you don't know what quality is. (Anyone reading this read "Sharks in the Time of Saviors?"  Go read it. It even has magic shapeshifters in it. That's quality fiction, folks.) The audience for RPGs doesn't know what quality is, not in any way that matters and that is economically sustainable. It's possible things would change if that were so, but probably not. The market's too small.</blockquote>

Verification