What Would Happen If (Almost) Nobody Paid for RPGs?

[comrade raoul]

Since we're all talking and thinking about piracy a lot right now, I'd like to see what people think about a question I've had for a while. Suppose that, over time--within five or ten years, say--most RPG developers came to believe that the RPG industry's traditional business model was unsustainable. (By "traditional business model," I mean the system where RPG content is generated through a game company's internal development process, generally sold in the form of books, and only (legally) available to people who pay for the content.) Instead, under this scenario, almost anyone who produced RPG content would do so with the expectation that the content would be freely available, to anyone, online. (Maybe some people would still profitably print and sell books, but not enough to support a substantial development house.) RPG content would be freeware, or open source, by default.

If this happened, what would happen to the hobby? More specifically: who, if anyone, would still produce RPG content? How would that content be disseminated? What, if any, mechanisms would be in place for helping gamers find and recognize quality game content? What would be the consequences for the more social sides of the hobby--for attracting new players, building communities of existing ones, and enabling groups to settle on content with flavor and mechanics that worked for them? Would there be a place for any careers in the RPG world?

I suspect some readers will be more sympathetic to this possibility than others. I personally think there's a lot of room for optimism, but I want to ask these questions as impartially, with as open a mind, as I can, and I'd like people to answer them in the same spirit.

Again, from my perspective, this doesn't seem so bad. This is because of what I take to be two essential facts:

1. The hobby invites the best kind of amateurism. Smart people will willingly produce RPG content for free.
2. Many of the most important criteria for good RPG design are pretty objective, yet still complicated and difficult to obtain. As such, peer review and experimentation can and should play a large role.

(1) is pretty obvious. I've spent hours at a time on amateur design projects, with no expectation of actually playing with material I've designed, just because they present me with challenges and puzzles I have fun toying with. Seeing other people engage my design seriously enough to offer a thoughtful, detailed critique is probably the best part. I'm sure I'm far from alone in this! (2) should be almost as clear-cut: at least within a particular game, like D&D, most of us want rules that facilitate a certain kind of play. We all want rules that are balanced, flexible, and fluid, and we all mean pretty much the same thing by those things--even if we disagree about the right way to get there. Because getting there is hard--and rules can have complicated implications that are easy to miss at first--collaboration can make all the difference, and getting things right can take the efforts of a whole community, not just one or a few people. For most RPGs, open (but structured) critique and exchange is probably way more important than preserving a particular designer's creative vision. These two traits aren't unique to RPGs--they hold for academic research and software development, among other things. Open-source software development clearly works, so why can't open-source RPG design?

If it CAN work, though, I think there need to be some big structural factors that just aren't in place yet--primarily, some kind of effective structure for collaboration and peer review. Right now, we have a lot of smart people writing a lot of great house rules and homebrew systems, but none of these have gelled into an actual SYSTEM, coherent enough for others to recognize and play with, the way a collaborative coding project gels into a program that others can download and run.

I think getting people to work together, produce coherent, comprehensive game systems, and make those systems available to a mass audience is the most important role the traditional business model plays, and it's the role that amateur designers have the most trouble emulating. That is, I think the good thing about professional game design studios isn't that the designers they employ produce better content than most amateurs, either because they've been selected for their talent or because they can do it full-time--instead, it's that design studios get people to collaborate, and give players a brand to organize around. They set in place a structure where designers are responsive to other designers and to playtesters, and give the whole community game content that everyone can learn and play, and use as a basis for further modification. When you pay for a professionally-produced RPG like D&D, what you're paying for, I think, isn't for the talent or creativity of the designers (you can get comparable talent or creativity for free) so much as for the institutional factors that give you a particular set of rules that your friends are likely to know, and likely to be willing to play and enjoy. D&D is worth the money because that money buys a corporate structure that gets designers to work together, a brand that gets people to recognize their decisions as authoritative, and distribution and marketing that get a lot of people to pay attention.

I think the big question is the extent to which an open-source RPG design movement can duplicate those institutional factors, and, if it can, what steps supporters of such a movement can take to facilitate its doing so. Can amateur designers find a way to organize themselves that's structured enough to produce a balanced and unified system, but open enough to get a whole community to participate? If they can't, then a future of profitable design is vital to the success of the hobby. If they can, then maybe we as both consumers and amateur developers stand to gain a lot if current trends continue.

(But maybe others have completely different predictions!)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Ok first I want to say I want to live in the star trek utopia where noone wants or needs anything becuse eveyone does there best work and hardest work for the greater good...but one thing stops me from living there...the real world.

In the real world if that happened then no one but the wealthy could aford to work on them full time. Most Wealthy people would not do so, so we would have very small independant games...and the hobby would be all but destroyed...it would be the final nail in the coffin.


to put this in prospective...imagin working your job for 40 hours aweek, giving your all, and never slacking...then not getting paid for it. What could possible make you go back day and day and week and week?

If I wrote a rpg book, and it took me 3 months to write playtest and have it printed (what you din't know I was the flash?) then I looked at that 3 months as 12 weeks...40 hrs per week...480 hours...if I need to make $12 an hour to keep my faamily feed (I guess it might be possible...) that means I need to make $5,760 proffit (over cost to make and print) just to stay afloat. So if I make $10 per book profit (That sounds high, but it makes the math simple). I need to sell atleast 576 books. If I sell 300 books, but someone puts it up for free and 300 people down load it...well then I can nolonger afford to make books...hopefuly noone wanted a sequal...

 

[comrade raoul]

You're absolutely right--if most RPGs were free, almost nobody could afford to work on them full time. That's pretty much a given, I think.

That's not the question I'm asking, though. What I want to ask is: could there be good, established, accessible RPGs if everybody who worked on them, worked on them part time? I honestly don't know the answer to this.

I think your skepticism about that kind of coordination is pretty justified, though.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That's not the question I'm asking, though. What I want to ask is: could there be good, established, accessible RPGs if everybody who worked on them, worked on them part time? I honestly don't know the answer to this.

ok I thin it could work...but it would be a long shot. It would requare someone to be able to have a company that had full time people...if just for upkeep. Ask Morris how easy a fansite is to run, now imagin edting articles, and aproveing content to go with it...

I think your skepticism about that kind of coordination is pretty justified, though

Ok so I am going to switch sides for a moment...If we tooke the SRD and OGL stuff, and got a good comunity working on optional rules...and since it would be a free site we out right steal non ogl content from Wotc and 3pp, and keep adding our own stuff, and modfing it. It could work...


Off had I will say possible but not plasable...

 

[drothgery]

It'd be awful.

There are certainly people who would tinker with RPG mechanics, draw game art, and/or write about their favorite setting just for the fun of it (though not as many, because no one could make a living at it). However, the boring parts of RPG development that turn some interesting rules and an interesting setting and some artwork into an actual rulebook someone who's not your friend will game with... that won't happen.

 

[resistor]

You're absolutely right--if most RPGs were free, almost nobody could afford to work on them full time. That's pretty much a given, I think.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

For example, I am paid full-time to write software that is given away for free. Not just for free, but under the least restrictive of open source licenses. The only requirement is that others using it have to give attribution (BSD license, for those in the know).

Plenty of other programmers get paid to work on software under share-alike license ("you can use my stuff only if you make it free too"), which is a bit more restrictive in some sense, but also works to enforce the "everything is free" ecosystem.

Now, I don't know how exactly this would play out with respect to RPGs, but I think it's wrong to write off the possibility entirely.

 

[JBeatnik]

Tri-Stat DX is completely free for download, and look how popular that is. They make money on selling 'genre' books that give alternative rulesets. GURPS lite is a free download of core rules, enough to play as well. Between both of these, I'm willing to bet you don't have much of a strong following in the market, whereas DnD has a huge following. If people don't buy the books, they wouldn't be in the business. They're taking the legal fight to their intellectual property and until it become unprofitable for them to change, they'll continue to do so.

 

[Crothian]

One thing it would do is shrink the numbers of gamers. Without books in stores people won't see the products or the games and they wouldn't know what was out there.

 

[Jhaelen]

Tri-Stat DX is completely free for download, and look how popular that is.

Well, how popular is it?
I don't think I've ever heard of it - or is that the point you're trying to make?

 

[Caliber]

The problem with comparing creating a gaming system and writing software is that a gaming system is much more a subjective work of art than a piece of software can ever be. Look at open source projects out there; they all DO something specific. If someone can contribute a bit of code that makes it do that something better, everyone wins.

Now imagine an open source gaming system. Someone contributes a feat (just to use nomenclature people here are familiar with) that they feel makes the game better. Some agree, seeing it as providing an ability they felt the game was missing before. Others disagree, seeing the feat as broken, overpowered, underpowered, both(?) or something else. Repeat this hundreds, upon thousands of times, and not just with feats but with classes (if they exist), races, even basic rules of the system. How do you judge the objective advantage a rule gives a system over another?

You would end up with either numerous game systems with small followings of pretty happy people (who will hopefully be able to find friends to play with) or a few large systems with followings of people with numerous house rules (and hopefully anyone joining the group is willing to abide by whatever set of rules the group agrees to)

I just don't see it as a tenable situation. More likely, to me, is that those who currently play will continue to do so, using whatever is left from the current model, recruiting others when possible but slowly decreasing in population. Eventually, I think it would be an end to this type of gaming.