Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby

[eudyptes]

Previous post also said that lower budget leads to artistically better products. I disagree. If you evolve in any artistic field, you will very quickly realize that you're limited by money and time. I'm not saying that bigger budgets always lead to better products. But there's a scope of products that's hardly possible without having multiple people working together, often full time; and that requires money because people require food.

I thought when I read that post that it represented a conflation of correlation and causation. Lower budgets correlate with more artistic products, but that's not the same thing as lower budgets leading to more artistic products. I'm thinking in terms of film here, I guess, but it could also be products that larger publishers choose to invest in. This is a generality, but mass appeal is often inversely related to artistic content or artistic quality (however you define it). Big publishers or film studios or whatever seem less likely to throw money at artsy projects that they envision (rightly or wrongly) as having less mass appeal. So low budgets and artistic...let's call it "integrity" rather than "quality," since the latter is more subjective...low budgets and artistic quality tend to co-occur, not because they cause one another, but because of how investors view the market.

I haven't thought through how that relates to crowd funding, but I'm guessing it basically doesn't.

I don't know why but this whole conversation makes me think of the old quote about the first Velvet Underground record (paraphrasing)--not many people bought it/heard it, but everyone who did started their own band. I think we are in a golden age, as many have said--there are scads of Velvet Undergrounds out there, waiting for someone to pick them up and make something new from it. The inspiration is astounding but I don't think there's all that much money in that ecosystem (DTRPG/itch/RPGTrader), for good or ill (probably ill), especially for the smaller creator.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

more artistic products. I'm thinking in terms of film here, I guess, but it could also be products that larger publishers choose to invest in. This is a generality, but mass appeal is often inversely related to artistic content or artistic quality

Ah. I had not read it that way at all. It's possible that's what he meant. And I wouldn't disagree with that.

 

[Umbran]

I thought when I read that post that it represented a conflation of correlation and causation. Lower budgets correlate with more artistic products, but that's not the same thing as lower budgets leading to more artistic products.

Here's the problem with this entire point: "Lower budgets correlate with more artistic products".

Upon what is this assertion based? Unless you can point to some large survey of projects out there, that assertion is probably more like, "The lower budget projects I recall or have been exposed to have been more artistic," which is not the same thing at all.

Simply put, there's likely a survivor bias element to this - if a lower budget work wasn't particularly artistic, you are unlikely to have heard of it at all! There's a separate filter that does not allow you to see the bulk of projects that aren't artistic, making it seem like there's a correlation, when there may not be one.

I'm thinking in terms of film here, I guess, but it could also be products that larger publishers choose to invest in. This is a generality, but mass appeal is often inversely related to artistic content or artistic quality (however you define it).

Oh, but there you've lost it. You cannot leave the definition of artistic quality or content to me, and then be sure it is lower in mass-appeal works.

Like, those big-budget works have very many people involved in the work - and I may look at those individual small contributions, rather than the whole, and find tons of what I feel is "artistic quality".

Like, say, I look at the very big, mass market work of the Disney+ series Andor, and look at Mon Mothma's costuming, and think, "Wow, there is some real artistry there!" I can look at a plot twist I didn't expect, say, Cyril's ignominious death and find art in that writing choice, and so on.

If you leave it to others to define the art, you cede whether you have a point at all to those others.

 

[Fenris-77]

I can't see any way that low budget correlates to high art. The creativity of a creator has nothing to do with their art budget. Not in any significant way.

 

[Mannahnin]

Though there's something to the maxim about constraints begetting creativity (part of the reason RPG jams start out with creative prompts and themes to adhere to), it's also no doubt true that most of the examples we see of, e.g. budget-constrained films being amazing and artistic are that survivorship bias. The ones which transcend their budget limitations through clever production and writing are the ones talked about and awarded and shared. For every Reservoir Dogs or Primer you probably get a lot of The Rooms that just aren't quite horrible enough to become famous memes.

 

[CaptAdventure]

Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby

You can quit playing your pretend games wholesale and go back to living an undisturbed life not worrying about what a lyric game is or wheth...

traversefantasy.blogspot.com

Found a blog post about demonetizing the TTRPG hobby. Lists the hows of whys the TTRPG hobby should demonetize. I figure a lot of you would be interested in this because at least some of you want TTPRGs to be about the art instead of the sales.

"Demonitizing the TTRPG hobby" reads to me the same as "I don't think TTRPG creators deserve to be paid for their work."

I'm so tired of creative professions being told their work has no value.

 

[GothmogIV]

If someone wants to make free stuff, that's wonderful. Go for it. But if someone else wants to make some money from selling their stuff...you don't have to buy it. There are, literally, centuries worth of free gaming materials floating around out there.

 

[MoonSong]

I'm just jumping into the convo, and I'm still making my way through the thread. It's long so far. Just wanted to add a couple points.

A big part of what makes RPGs worth it is community. Without the budget and marketing brought by even the small scale commercialization of Indie Games, there isn't enough of a critical mass of people who will want to play the same game at the same time in the same space. Yes free games are a thing, but as a former user of 1kt1ktm, Free RPGs are "a niche within a niche". It isn't enough to just make something free and await for people to find it, you have to look for ways to place it in front of people's eyes or it will languish in obscurity.

Yes, one can market and publicize a free game, but that is a heavy burden to place on hobby designers who aren't monetizing. Particularly if, as in the article, part of the manifesto is about avoiding indie hubs as (paraphrased) "we should strive to differentiate us from those cruel capitalists who have the nerve to demand to be paid for their work and expenses."

I mean, I like Heroes Against Darkness, but most people wouldn't even know it is a thing. To date I've only found a single person willing to run a one shot across the web. I'm not even sure if 1kt1km is even around anymore.

 

[Morrus]

I don't understand what the problem is.

Evidently, it's anecdotal. But from my perspective in the market there is an overwhelming amount of free or cheap material available. There is tens of thousands of products just on DrivethruRPG, without talking about all the free stuff going around in Discords and blogs. Add the fact that making content for TTRPGs require probably a computer, a text editor and an internet connection, which is a pretty low bar in most places where the luxury of game books is a reality.

People talk about art, but it's also... a product. Coming from the video game industry, I've been faced with the awkwardness of the space between art and a product. I understood very early on that we were making a product first. We couldn't afford not to make a product. And if we did our job right and were smart, we'd manage to do something artistically interesting too.

When I bought OSE for example. It's a ruleset that already existed for forty years. There's plenty of artistic components to it: art pieces, some prose, graphic design, etc. But I don't look at the books themselves as the art. It's a product. Just like the book is not play, play is what happens at the table.

Previous post also said that lower budget leads to artistically better products. I disagree. If you evolve in any artistic field, you will very quickly realize that you're limited by money and time. I'm not saying that bigger budgets always lead to better products. But there's a scope of products that's hardly possible without having multiple people working together, often full time; and that requires money because people require food.

An example to illustrate it. If some random math teacher writes some rules or an adventure in Notepad and shares it: no formatting, no art, just black text on white. This has no effect on the quality of the writing or the design. We could also do that, and share .txt files and it'd all be free. If we go up one size, let's take Shadowdark or OSE. Technically it's a size of rules that's feasible by one person part time. But the art, the layout, the editing, the playtesting, etc makes it very unlikely that's we'd see a lot of products of this size if it was only people doing it out of passion on the weekends. And you know what? I much prefer to pay 50$ for a product that has art, a layout and all the bells and whistles. Finally, if we hired a ton of people and spent 10 million, I don't think it would make a better product and I'm not sure I'd want to scope.

I absolutely think that having paid products allow people to work diligently, full-time and with others on products and leads to products of better quality and bigger scope.

Indeed. This is why artists had to have patrons back in the day.

 

[dragoner]

I don't see people playing free games. A lot of things exist on the internet that never make it to real life. I mean from merely what I actually see kind of evidence, is that the more expensive games such as D&D, CoC, and Traveller are known and played. Not to say there isn't a niche, and I feel there are very good reasons for the way things are.