#ttrpg economics

[gigantic-spider]

November 2023 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I recently became curious about the state of TTRPG crowdfunding (full transparency, it's partially because I am gearing up for a ZineMonth 2024 project *shameless plug*). How much money is actually being made? Who's making it? What are they making? And how many people are backing?

I know that this information is tracked for ZiMo by a variety of people (scroll down for the credits), but what about the rest of the year? What about bigger projects?

Essentially: what about the real money being made?

Well here's the quick stats:

175 campaigns

10 Backerkit

1 Crowdfundr

164 Kickstarter

$10,275,932.48 raised

$1,256,857.98 on Backerkit

$455.00 on Crowdfundr

$9,018,619.50 on Kickstarter

Types of campaigns

7 accessories

2 Actual Play shows

41 adventures

2 advice books

8 campaign settings

1 magazine

58 supplements/expansions

56 systems

39 distinct systems used across all campaigns

66 campaigns (37.71%) used D&D 5e and raised $5,621,468.60 (54.71% of all money raised in November)

43 campaigns (24.57%) developed original systems and raised $751,587.43 (7.31% of all money raised in November)

To read the rest, check out my latest blog post (yes, on a different blog lol) or look at the raw data here.

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

"I’m not stating anything particularly controversial when I say it’s tough to be a game designer. The tabletop RPG market is an economics nightmare; demand is low and supply is incredibly high. Demand is low because this is a niche hobby whose marketing to the public at large is, essentially, Hasbro screaming so loud that nobody else is heard. Supply is driven by the fact that, at a functional level, thanks to crowdfunding Kickstarter, itch.io, and DriveThruRPG, basically anyone can make a TTRPG and get it on sale. TTRPGs and self-published fiction are very much the same, and everyone’s looking for the solution to the fact that 90% of everything in the market is utter crap." - @levelonewonk

[sellsmallthings]

pink and purple dice

https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fvvpesca-Purple-DND-Dice-Color%2Fdp%2FB0CG2PJ87W&t=ZjcxMjZkNGE5OGZiNTQwZjJjMjg0NmY4MDQ5NWU5Y2E5N2NhMjlkYSwyMzQyNDViNDFhNjFkZjMwMzMwNzdkOTMxM2I1OGI2ZTA2NDRlYTE1&ts=1709154464

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

RPGs get a reputation for being all about fighting. How does that work if the RPG is solarpunk? Or utopian even? What is an RPG, in the first place? What is the usefulness of a solarpunk RPG? Join us as we discuss these questions and more.

Art from the Fully Automated website used in episode cover is by Sean Bodley as well as a few other artists and this will get updated to credit them when we track them down :)

Links:

You can find Fully Automated at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/ The Sogorea Te Land Trust: https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/ Solarpunk 2050: http://solarpunk2050.de/ Solarpunk Pioneers Fund: http://solarpunk-pioneers.org/ Coyote & Crow: https://coyoteandcrow.net/ Lunar Echos: https://affinity-games.itch.io/ Neon Black: https://notwriting.itch.io/ Legacy: Life Among the Ruins: https://ufopress.co.uk/legacy-life-among-the-ruins/ Fighting for the Future: https://www.android-press.com/product-page/fighting-for-the-future-ebook “Murder in the Tool Library” by AE Marling: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/murder-in-the-tool-library-a-e-marling/1144354144 “Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto” by Aaron Bastani: https://www.versobooks.com/products/476-fully-automated-luxury-communism “Four Futures: Life After Capitalism” by Peter Fraise: https://www.versobooks.com/products/59-four-futures

[outeremissary]

I say this with no malice at all but I fr hope they kill Abadar. The worldbuilding implications. C'mon. C'mon.

[willknightauthor]

Wraith: The Best Game That Never Was

It occurred to me that even among RPG nerds Wraith is more obscure, and that makes me sad. Like people know it existed, but even at the time it was an also-ran. Among insiders at White Wolf it was a darling, but it never took off, so they stopped its line half way through. Even in high school I had to buy the books used online.

Wraith is one of the most original and compelling approaches to the afterlife I've seen in any medium, but especially in an RPG. In many games ghosts feature as NPCs, but rarely do you get to play as them, and even more rarely in an interesting way that centers the subjective experience of being dead.

The first thing that grabbed me was the art, all faded gray-scale, scratchy, often grotesque and surreal. The cover is striking: stark gray bound in chains. All far bleaker and genuinely scarier than anything else put out by White Wolf. Turns out the art matched the vibe of the setting very well, because the ultimate conceit of Wraith is that if the living knew what the afterlife is really like, we'd all be even more terrified to die.

Wraiths are a violation of the laws of nature. Biological life is already an improbable struggle against entropy, but the continued existence of consciousness after death? An absolute affront to the universe. Reality wants you gone, but you can't be killed. That contradiction manifests as Oblivion: non-existence as a visible, active force; the Freudian death drive become physics. And it goes all the way down into your very thoughts.

The afterlife is a world of ideals, not materials. Your well-integrated mind shatters into pieces when you die, and your "physical" form is a manifestation of it. Your Jungian shadow-self, once an unconscious and abstract thing, becomes a real, tangible person living inside you. All your vices, your self-loathing, your misanthropy, your death drive, become a voice in your ear: your best friend and worst enemy, helping and tricking you, constantly trying to gain control.

But you can't be killed. You're already dead. Instead of death, you just decay, further and further towards becoming your shadow. Eventually all that's left is a nightmare of who you used to be, existing only to torment others and drag them down together into nothingness. The world is full of these monsters, the things that go bump in the night and terrify both the living and the dead.

But that's literally the tip of the iceberg. The thin layer of shadow reality is nothing compared to the much larger expanse of the Tempest: a cosmic plane of dream and nightmare, right on the edge of Oblivion. The deep underworld is Lovecraftian Mad Max: an infinite shifting desert of eternal night filled with screaming storms, incomprehensible monsters, and forbidden knowledge. Pockmarking it are islands of stability upon which societies are built--dysfunctional city-states desperately attempting to project power into a world constantly trying to swallow them.

However, if no-one can die, then every awful political trend and tyrant remains forever. And they all have a huge head start on you establishing political power. Their society is a veneer of modern industrial capitalism, layered on top of mercantile guilds, layered on top of feudal lords, layered on top of a Roman imperial bureaucracy, all built on the back of one ancient wraith: the ferryman Charon.

But the Emperor has been missing for a long time, and the bureaucracy is so massive and old that it's rotting in on itself. Who knows how many are secretly succumbing to their own shadows? Their attempts to rule the rest of the underworld are always tenuous, like the last days of Roman Britain. It's a world eternally mid-apocalypse.

The problem with a world of thought and feeling is: how do you make things? What do you make them with? Sometimes the ghosts of physical objects make their way through, and they're mined like whale fall. Undoubtedly the Twin Towers were a huge boon to the dead, probably the site of an entire city.

But it's not enough. Wraiths are still people. They want clothing, and furniture, and buildings, and machines, and tools, and money. Where does all that come from? The only thing left that wraiths can touch: other people. Wraith society is built on a form of slavery more exploitative and horrifying than anything that's ever existed among the living. Slaves are valued not for their labor primarily, but for their use as raw materials.

The vulnerable newly dead are captured, dragged back to the capital, and molded in workshops and factories into goods for the upper classes. They claim it wipes out consciousness, and thus the finished product isn't suffering. If anything it's a mercy! To release them from the torment of the afterlife! And prevent them from becoming monsters! But when it's quiet, if you listen closely, some report you can hear it all whispering.

The bleak alienness of this afterlife to any human religion breaks the minds of many when they first realize they're dead. Some go into denial. Some reject their old religion. Some invent new religious explanations. And some try to twist their old beliefs into a shape that conforms.

The underworld is full of cults. Cults promising escape from the underworld. Cults claiming they know where heaven and hell are. (At best just projections of the collective beliefs of the living into the underworld.) Cults who claim they're building heaven and hell themselves. (These sorts of "afterlife lands" sometimes become tourist attractions.) But Oblivion is Oblivion. If you could describe its structure logically you would be contradicting its very essence. There is only decay.

Most people don't go to the shadowlands when they die. Where do they go? No-one knows. What happens when you're swallowed by Oblivion? No-one knows. Is there a God? No-one knows.

Just like when you were alive, you don't know what comes next, or why you're here. It's not real death, it's something in between. But maybe real death is just nothingness. Better not to risk it, then... even if that means clinging to the sands of Hell under the yoke of an eternal slave-aristocracy.

Maybe if you can figure out why you're here, you'll find a way out.

[ossifer]

i will not try to make a baru cormorant ttrpg. i will not try to make a baru cormorant ttrpg. i will not try to make a baru cormorant ttrpg. i will n

[letsstatahero-dndpoll]

This is Your Life Poll

[condraws]

my pathetic failson medic whitewater and his gaslight gatekeep girlgroup of fellow takers (it's another red markets game of course)

other characters belong to @/cino-checker, @/poinsettiya and non-tumblr people

[monsterblogging]

"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

[maegaasperion]

You are wanting what for that?

Many people who like playing these RPGs desire the more basic elements. They want to travel from one combat to another, or another social situation to another with little thought about what goes into the background of those situations. Especially if they are attempting to prepare for those important combats, these preparation periods will require something that few individuals look forward…

[highshelfcollective]

🧟 TONIGHT, 8:30PM EST - It's the wrap up that you've all been waiting for - #RedMarkets : The Incidentals Post Zombie Apocalypse Post Mortem! 

It's been a long journey and now that the curtain is closing, WE'VE GOT SO MANY QUESTIONS! Come hang out with us on Twitch and get the real scoop on all the ends and outs of this mega-campaign! We're remembering the good times, the sad times and all that's in-between . . .

Follow us on #Twitch to know right when we go live: https://www.twitch.tv/highshelfcollective

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

"Bicycling is dealing with a lot of similar trends to RPGs, trends like emerging technology, customer diversification, and a tail of niche players who are just as vital to the hobby as the biggest companies." - @levelonewonk

[sellsmallthings]

green venom dice. Transperant dice with green smoke suspended inside.

[gallusrostromegalus]

True/false: you're in at least one fandom that's so small that niche doesn't begin to describe it

TRUE Fandoms include:

My husband's unpublished TTRPG World feat. Fungal Goblins, Memetically Contagious Orcs, Julius Ceasar Acetara, Every Failed Economic Theory Of The Last 500 Years and The World's Best Necromancer

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Given recent surges in @montereybayaquarium IDK if the MBARI Deep Sea Robot expiditions are niche anymore, but it SHOULD be front-page news

The Toronto Maple Leafs

[writingwithcolor]

WritingWithColor FAQ: How do I start writing a character of color?

First, be mindful that no race, culture, or ethnicity makes one inherently predisposed to certain emotions or personalities, despite what stereotypes or TTRPGs may suggest. We are all humans who share the same range of emotions and ways of thinking, even if we have different values.

Understand that there is no single template for a good [race, ethnicity] character. A person’s social, economic, and geographical background influences their life and values just as much as their race, culture, or religion. Consider: a Black American boy who grew up in a California mansion versus a Black American boy who grew up on an Illinois cornfield versus a Black boy who grew up in an apartment one city over. All three will have very different privileges, disadvantages, and outlooks on life.

Further reading (WWC x NaNoWriMo):

The Do’s of Writing PoC

Properly Coded: Creating Characters of Color

3 Ways to Show a Character's Culture

---

This Q&A is an excerpt from our General FAQ for Newcomers, which can be found in our new Masterpost of rules and FAQs. For more general resources on POC representation, check it out!

-Writing With Color