Creator Consumer Friction
This post has been mulling around in my brain for some months now. When Into the Oddish was Heistfunding, I came across an article that made me stop and pause. I can't remember how I stumbled upon it, but I found the Dungeon Dogma post that talked about the monetization of Into the Oddish. By the time I read it, I already pre-ordered the Into the Oddish collection, knowing Prismatic and being a longtime fan of Pokemon. I still haven't gotten the books to the table, and I still haven't played in a game of it. I remember feeling bad about my purchase while reading the post and then went to read both Prismatic's argument for the commercialization of the RPG space and then Marcia B's argument against it. Where did I stand?1
I compartmentalized these ideas as I put the final touches on my first Mothership trifold, excited about getting approval to sell it to Tuesday Knight Games. My trifold was going to be on the TKG store!?2 Was this real life!? I was having work validated, gaining visibility, learning layout, etc. I was building skills up I didn't realize I had. I was doing my due diligence, reading blogs, engaging in Discourse, and writing a blog. As Tom Van Winkle points out, now I'm a creator, not merely a consumer, therefore I'm obviously more powerful!
My goals for 2026 were/are to (1) release a ttrpg product and (2) write 52 bog posts. The first was much easier to achieve, while the second I'm still working on. This year, I've released a Mothership trifold, a system agnostic module for the Appendix N jam, and a solo game for the One-Page RPG jam. Why did I set release a ttrpg product as a goal? Past me thought it must be very difficult to do, and it is in some ways. You have to have the time, dedication, and desire to see it out there in the world. I also benefitted from having communities support and encourage me to release them. On the other hand, it's stupid easy to do. I'm joining the minimalist jam, and it has 0 layout. Write the damn thing and hit publish. It is that easy, but we make it more difficult. Why? We're gunning for Social Dignity or Prestige.
In Prismatic's argument for commercialization, there's a reference to another post by Tom Van Winkle. Reading it solidified how the commodification wins out when given the choice of a scrawled notebook with ides against shiny D&D books. He highlights some choice quotes from an essay called "Copyrighted Subcultures" and points out how fantasy worlds curated and put on display acquire a currency of Social Dignity. Social Dignity is the currency all hobbyists are vying for. I think I prefer the term Prestige here, personally. It is a tepid thing that's earned from a combination of money, what your subculture thinks about your work, and how the work is presented. With the internet and social media, anyone can work towards generating Social Dignity. The desire for it is the crux of the should we commercialize or not discussion but is also hinged on which subculture of ttrpgs you're part of.3
Another conversation in a Discord server talked about how to structure your itch.io game page. Do you provide community copies, do you make it pay what you want, free, or require purchase? It was a lengthy discussion, and I don't remember all the solutions. What I typically do is provide X community copies and then have a sale price set. I've yet to run out of community copies, so I haven't been faced with being asked to provide more and/or if I should. What would you do or what do you do? It's tricky, because access matters. Why are we selling PDFs to each other to talk about ideas? As Marcia points out, most of us aren't making a career out of this. However, I imagine a lot of us are using it to supplement and/or justify the time we spend making the work. Regardless, what is driving and informing us to do this?
Communities and relationship are fragile things, especially in a digital space. Look at forums. Look at G+. The tides of time erode most digital communities before any preservation can be done, so we become a snake eating its tail. Something can happen to make communities grow at an unsustainable rate. A series of interactions between another community can upset the curated intentions and goals of a community. Discussions can shift focus in a way that feels repeated, overstated, or unwarranted. I've only been in these spaces for a few years now, and I'm exhausted. I'm overwhelmed that I don't know all the theory and what's been done already. No, I haven't played that iconic game that won a bunch of awards. No, I don't know what tactical infinity means. No, I don't really care about Gary Gygax. No, I don't think this taxonomy is useful beyond stuffy academic discussion. But I'm still making stuff, since to me the games feel fun and interesting.
It's part of why I'm drifting more and more to solo games. The only player to get on the same page is myself, and I can still explore the ideas of a creator at my own pace. There is no scheduling conflict, because I set the schedule. This year, I think I've purchased more solo games than anything else, and its been nice. Most of them I can pick up and play whenever without much stress. I still get to roll all my pretty dice, and I have a rich narrative too!
Last year, I ran a bunch of one-shots, averaging 2-3 a month, because I bought a ton of RPG books and needed to try them out. I couldn't justify having them if they were just gonna collect dust. Even if I only played it one time, I was still digesting the rules and getting it to the table. I'm an improv-heavy kind of GM, so scheduling something last minute is not a panic for me. Let's rewind a little though. Why had I bought so many RPG books? I had no collection, big sense of FOMO, and I was new in the hobby. I keep a spreadsheet of all the RPG books I own and have played to justify their purchase. I've even considered doing a cost analysis of my books to justify backing the Kickstarter. If I play 27 sessions, I can back Seven Part Pact at the $878 tier which I did. That still comes out to roughly $32 per session, and 27 sessions is a pretty decent campaign length. I did this not only because I own and enjoy all of Jay's other works, but I consider Jay a friend. It sounds kind of insane to be doing cost analysis breakdowns for backing crowdfunding campaigns, but there's too much stuff to consume. I've bought so much stuff from Tuesday Knight Games that I got an automated shop email saying thanks.
Backerkit has started doing the X Month system. This year, we had OSE Month, Orbital Blues Month, Megadungeon Month, and more. I participated, to some degree, in all of them, I think. There was some very cool stuff with OSE I wanted to scoop up. I knew some of the folks who created Orbital Blues content, so I wanted to support them. All this to say that the onslaught of projects and community work happening nonstop, but if I had a crowdfunding campaign, I'd want my community to support me. I'd love to participate in Zine month with something, so shouldn't I do the same? I've now started asking myself a series of questions like when would I feasibly run this, do I have something similar already, do I need anything else to run this, can I wait and get this later, etc. A questionnaire of stop signs to prevent myself from backing yet another thing I won't use anytime soon.
This leads me to another area of fatigue I'm seeing around the Blogosphere. Recently creator of Cloud Empress, watt, cancelled their Kickstarter campaign, Rust Wings. It met its fundraising goal, but watt deemed it wasn't enough for production. Backers felt blindsided, because the campaign met its goal. This is a common tactic that's been encouraged and reinforced which is its own can of worms as creators. Ultimately, watt said they would release the system as a PDF and move onto future projects though no timeline has been given for its release. We're back to selling PDFs to each other, but this is watt's livelihood and career. Cancelling the project cost them some Prestige, in a way, if we're using the same system mentiond by Winkle.
Fast forward a bit in time, and they wrote another post claiming they couldn't be your favorite designer. They talked a lot about their design process and how it isn't suited well when it comes to designing a commercial product. This is the entire commodity discussion happening real time to a real creator. I thought this was bold and incredible to write. Couple this with elmcat's, Death of a Hobby, post, and it all clicks into place. The snake is eating its tail. Alongside this, we have aspiring designers who zero in on a gimmick, or idea, and get stuck in an endless cycle of creating complex mechanics and rules without much tinkering/change/fixes that Dante calls out in their post the Designer's Drug. I'm sure we've all fallen prey to it at some point in our game design journey. Throughout all this, Dwiz's blog, A Knight at the Opera, goes offline. Everything is purged, and we're given one final post about why. Lastly, we get a first blog post called No One Can Take Your Game, reminding people what games are and what they can mean. We don't need permission from production schedules to play.
All of this signals to me that something is wrong in the hobby, and people are trying to process it in their own way. I'm feeling stuck myself and not sure how to resolve it. What's the resolution mechanic for wanting to set a price on the labor you did but also wanting to provide unfettered access to your work? There's a friction people are feeling as both creators and consumers. There's this constant pressure to make stuff and put it out into the world, no matter what the type of content. Game, Blog, Video, Crowdfunder, you name it, and we'll turn it into a machine to churn content. The infrastructure is built that way, and we, as community members, are advocating people do it. Make a blog! It's so easy! I've only made 2 blog posts in the last 2 months, but I feel bad about that. I'm failing my second goal for this year, which I set so my little circle on the Blogosphere graph could be a little larger with a little bit more visibility. Why does the visibility matter? Who am I racing against? On the flip side as a consumer, you're inundated with emails, preorders, limited editions, X number of copies only, etc. When you wear both these hats, and a lot of people do, it's difficult to reconcile churning out content and consuming it.
- I found it gross that the comments on Prismatic's post applauded it for being thoughtful, while the first two on Marcia's were negative!
- I've mailed them as of this writing. Whoops - sorry TKG folks!
- I continued to read the post, and a second thing caught my eye where a quote from Tim Kask in 1981 said, "More and more FRPers have never played in any adventure other than a commercially produced one." This made me wonder if we in the OSR, NSR, POSR of it all are repeating the exact same steps those before us did.