Leatherhead
Possibly a Idiot.
At the risk of sounding cynical, professionals aren't necessarily out to make a good product, they are out to make a profitable one.
What Would Happen If (Almost) Nobody Paid for RPGs?
The potential pay off from the mass market is necessary to justify the immense risk involved in using high production values while delivering a picture to market quickly.
I doubt such a project would materialize. Not only do you have to contend with the capriciousness of Entertainment, but you have to deliver a product that 5+ people at a time can agree to play. That exponentially increases the difficulty involved with making an Open Source Entertainment Project that caters to individual consumers.
Leatherhead said:
True, and consumers often buy unhealthy or just shlocky products for irrational reasons (especially food and entertainment products).
- Marty Lund
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Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
How much intended-to-be-free music, books and games do you enjoy now? If you don't enjoy that stuff, why not?
Kerrick
First Post
I dunno. If, all of a sudden, everyone stopped charging for their products, we would almost definitely see an immediate stop to print products - it simply costs too much to do that for free. Online pdfs and netbooks would keep going strong, though the quality would probably take a dip. In the days of 2E, the net was flooded with netbooks. Sure, most of them were crap, but there were some gems in there, made by people who cared nothing but the love of the game they played, and their wish to share their stuff with others.
Many computer games like Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and Oblivion have huge communities of people who spend hundreds or even thousands of hours making mods for free to share with others.
You still see it these days, though not nearly as much - the OGL enables anyone with the wherewithal to publish and sell their product. It's also a lot less restrictive for fansites, which lets people put any old thing they want on the net without fear of reprisals from the folks who make D&D, so the free content community is still going strong.
So, would it be a bad thing for the hobby as a whole? Maybe - with the lack of new print products, fewer people would be drawn into the hobby, and eventually it would be reduced to the folks who spend a good deal of time online and can find/download netbooks and free content from sites. Even then, most people (myself included) have a preference for dead-tree material vs. electronic.
D&D has a huge amount of inertia, though; it's been around for 30+ years, and there's a ton of material for it - enough to keep people playing for many, many years even if it vanished tomorrow. With all the spinoff systems we've got now, everyone can find something to suit them. So, it's really hard to call.
Many computer games like Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and Oblivion have huge communities of people who spend hundreds or even thousands of hours making mods for free to share with others.
You still see it these days, though not nearly as much - the OGL enables anyone with the wherewithal to publish and sell their product. It's also a lot less restrictive for fansites, which lets people put any old thing they want on the net without fear of reprisals from the folks who make D&D, so the free content community is still going strong.
So, would it be a bad thing for the hobby as a whole? Maybe - with the lack of new print products, fewer people would be drawn into the hobby, and eventually it would be reduced to the folks who spend a good deal of time online and can find/download netbooks and free content from sites. Even then, most people (myself included) have a preference for dead-tree material vs. electronic.
D&D has a huge amount of inertia, though; it's been around for 30+ years, and there's a ton of material for it - enough to keep people playing for many, many years even if it vanished tomorrow. With all the spinoff systems we've got now, everyone can find something to suit them. So, it's really hard to call.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
I've got a different take: The described results are not sustainable, and thus could only be a transitional state, not the end state.
1. If amateurs are putting out mostly crap, then the hobby effectively dies, as a hobby. You'll have it lingering on or living off scraps for some time, but no new blood means death.
2. In contrast, if some amateurs are putting out some good stuff--they or someone else will not stay amateurs.
Because if you create value, you create a demand. If you can satisfy that demand, you have a market. If you have a market, then you can do things to make money. Granted, if everything is on some kind of creative commons license, you can't sell that content as your own. You can, however, sell services--packaging, printing, organizing, yada, yada, yada.
Some people will get really good at making money with the "new rules". These guys will use that money to encourage new content to feed the market. People they pay will sometimes want to give them what they want--to get paid more.
You can dance around this with various suppositions that impede or accelerate the process, but you can't totally escape it. For example, if no one can get paid directly to put out free stuff, then some academics/government people might put out free stuff--because they are interested in it and can arrange for it to fall under the purview of their job, and people that want to do that kind of thing can only make a living by getting that kind of work. I suppose if a computer professer can justify doing open source work with his class, then a clever psychology or ancient history professor can do the same thing with roleplaying. Or even someone in a defense department job, given the right parameters. But note that all we did was change the mechanism of pay to be funneled through the government from taxes, rather than through a corporation via payments. And we are still back to the original point--either what they do is sufficiently valuable to generate an external market, or it isn't.
1. If amateurs are putting out mostly crap, then the hobby effectively dies, as a hobby. You'll have it lingering on or living off scraps for some time, but no new blood means death.
2. In contrast, if some amateurs are putting out some good stuff--they or someone else will not stay amateurs.
Because if you create value, you create a demand. If you can satisfy that demand, you have a market. If you have a market, then you can do things to make money. Granted, if everything is on some kind of creative commons license, you can't sell that content as your own. You can, however, sell services--packaging, printing, organizing, yada, yada, yada.
Some people will get really good at making money with the "new rules". These guys will use that money to encourage new content to feed the market. People they pay will sometimes want to give them what they want--to get paid more.
You can dance around this with various suppositions that impede or accelerate the process, but you can't totally escape it. For example, if no one can get paid directly to put out free stuff, then some academics/government people might put out free stuff--because they are interested in it and can arrange for it to fall under the purview of their job, and people that want to do that kind of thing can only make a living by getting that kind of work. I suppose if a computer professer can justify doing open source work with his class, then a clever psychology or ancient history professor can do the same thing with roleplaying. Or even someone in a defense department job, given the right parameters. But note that all we did was change the mechanism of pay to be funneled through the government from taxes, rather than through a corporation via payments. And we are still back to the original point--either what they do is sufficiently valuable to generate an external market, or it isn't.
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resistor
First Post
A goodly number, actually.
I really like Jonathan Coulton's music, a large percentage of which he gives away for free. In fact, most of the ones I like most are free, though I've donated their value to him anyways.
Books not so much, though I've read plenty of not-for-profit short stories and other forms of fiction that I enjoyed very much. I enjoy some of the story hours on this very site more than some of the fantasy novels I've read recently.
For games, very much so. Lots of my favorite computer games are fan-made mods on top of existing games. For example, the Fall from Heaven 2 mod for Civilization 4 is entirely fan made, and has significantly more content and better production values than the Warlords expansion pack, which cost me $30. I used to love Starcraft, mostly for all the fan-made maps. While it's not my thing, Counterstrike was AMAZINGLY popular, despite being a fan-made mod.
As to tabletop games, my current favorite is Fate 2e, which is, again, free.
Celebrim
Legend
I just want to say that that is exactly the situation that I feel we have now. So, while I don't want to see gaming companies go under, if that would actually be the result, it would be a change that constituted no real change at all (except for those that lost their jobs).
You average monster manual might have 300 monsters. I might actually admire the concept, design, and execution of like 12 of them enough to want to use them in a game. The other 288 pages are basically wasted ink as far as I'm concerned, and yet I'm forced to buy the useless pages at the same rate as the useful ones. I'm not allowed to spend $1.99 to just buy the portion of the book I want. So what do I do? I don't buy the book. I don't download the pdf. I carry the idea I saw home in my head and make the monster exactly how I prefer it. Maybe, years later, when I find the book in a used book store, I might think the price worth the 12 or 20 pages I'd actually use.
The same is true of gaming books in general.
I don't buy alot of books because 90% of them are 90% crap, and most of the rest are 100% crap. There are only a handful of books I paid the full price for because I just had to have them immediately, and those are the books whose spine is in danger of cracking because I've used them so well.
The sad truth of this hobby is that the professionally produced stuff is often no better or only marginally better than what the average hobbist produces as a labor of love. Ed Greenwood? Probably a better than average DM with more time on his hands and more dedication to making his stuff publishable (a maybe a bit more luck) than the rest of us. Was he the best DM/world builder in the country at the time. Almost certainly not, but he was certainly the most influential. But even if he was the best DM in the country, his stuff - like every other game designer's stuff I'm aware of - started out for a amateur audience.
Open source/freeware/donateware software is a completely applicable comparison, because open source software doesn't only include boring stuffy technical applications, but entertainment and gaming content as well. There is nothing less subjective about what makes a good computer game than what makes a good game in general.
This is what I believe, as well. If the hobby dies, its because what's on the shelf right now is crap.
Eventually though, when the mass market, high profile crap dies away, inevitably it just clears room for us to see some genous who has been toiling away in complete obscurity. Eventually the demand for either his stuff or stuff like it will become so great that only a professional market will be able to provide it, so one will be created.
Anyway, the great thing about this hobby is it is one of the cheapest imaginable. All that is required is pencil, paper, dice, and imagination. It's great that there are people out there willing to spend $1000's of dollars on game books that they'll never use and don't need, but its even better that you can run a good game for years on about $50.
Under the current economic model for the rest of the world if any one portion switched to all free content, my guess is that it would be bad and the hobby would die. If however the world as a whole switched the economic model we are living under it would IMHO be better (sorry rockstars and tv heroes don't deserve more than GOOD teachers, surgeons, and the people who keep our streets free of garbage)
This discussion, unsurprisingly, is turning political.
But on what basis are you basing your supposition that The Beatles or Carl Sagan don't deserve more money than a typical teacher or a garbage collector? Clearly society at large disagrees with you, so why should society listen to you in re-organizing its priorities?
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