Only a Company Can Make an RPG

The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the various ‘indie RPGs’ made by corporations with with multiple accountants. But wherever you want to draw the line, it can’t be a single author, because nobody makes a standard RPG alone. Even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits page at the start. Any book with only one person to credit wouldn’t have an editor; and any book without an editor desperately needs one.¹

Only a company can make an RPG. These books have the word-count of a thesis, and have to skip between technical explanations and purple prose, sometimes many times per page. That’s why most have a dozen different editors who start work only after a team of writers have settled down and mostly stopped typing. I’ve never seen IT people credited in a book, but they must be there - any company with a bunch of ‘IP’, and Adobe Licences needs a bunch of engineers to support everyone else.

So if the indie RPG scene wants to stop the word ‘indie’ being used as a synonym for ‘shit’, we need to form companies in some minimal sense of coöperating with each other. Large corporations publish everyone’s favourite RPGs because they are large. They have more editors and artists, the artists and editors have more time to work on the book. They have time to polish their words, while the indie creators have day-jobs. They have fancy specialists for the index and specialists for the layout, while the indie creators just try to be everyone and do everything.

Can You Count, Suckers?

Itch.io currently shows 4,000 Fantasy TTRPG works .

4-fucking-000

That’s just the tagged and published games. If each game took an average of a week to make and has half a session of actual use, then 1% of that energy devoted to a single game would mean 400 weeks of work with 200 iterations of using it.

The slapdash nature of the indie games speaks well of the skills of community far more than any individual work. On their own, they’re ‘charming’, or ‘creative’, or have ‘an interesting mechanic’ or ’nice art’ (and each little compliment comes with a big implied ‘but’). But if we take the best of the writing, art, and layout, and the rest, the indie scene has serious skills.

There’s nobody who cannot contribute to a project if it has a culture of being open to changes. If someone struggles to just read the game, they’re telling you the writing needs improvements. When they can’t find what they want, then the layout or indexing needs improvement. Some of the biggest contributors to BIND have no idea how useful they were; but most of the character sheet layout evolved to respond to player problems as they ran out of space, or put notes in the margin about stuff they needed to remember which was not on the sheet.