Man, they really want everyone to like D&D again. Of course, it’s not as if D&D fans ever turned away from the game as much as the glut of editions, clones and hacks has made it possible to toss your allegiance behind any version you like. This is the real purpose of an open beta playtest. The fact is that for a project of this size, most of the major decisions have already been made, and qualitative feedback wouldn’t be worth it with such a large playtest pool. They may get quantitative feedback that tells them what to cut, since at this stage 5^th is probably overdesigned, not unfinished in the conventional sense. And if the fans really hate something, that might get cut. But by and large, the playtest is there so that influencers believe that D&D is their game again, and that they made it – which of course, they didn’t.

Hand in hand with this you’ll see a marketing campaign where Hasbro/WotC gets an intern/SEO-SEM monkey to crunch data and figure out who would be the cheapest people to convert into influencers, and throw them bones. Again, these people may be told they’re helping to design 5e when in fact, the game almost certainly finished. The time needed to design, iterate, edit, commission art, and lay out a game of D&D’s scale make it unlikely that its final design is significantly unsettled – and if it is, we might see something uncharacteristically shoddy, because there won’t be enough time to do a better job.

(At its core, though, I think any new game will probably have good rules. These guys know what they’re doing.)

Now earlier, I said, “Toss your allegiance behind,” it not “play” it. Most of the cloned D&Ds support the creator’s campaign, some convention play, and endless discussions about D&D that remain unsullied by multiple groups actually playing the thing. Allegiance is what it’s all about. Hasbro believed that allegiance could be driven by the D&D brand. It was wrong.

Let’s be straight: D&D is a shitty brand. Beyond the tabletop scene, D&D represents video games and an archaic hobby for weirdos. It experienced a surge based on the general trend reviving 80s male geek culture. As D&D has evolved, it’s made itself all but impenetrable to outsiders by focusing on systems minutiae that most would-be roleplayers don’t care about. The eminently accessible experience of roleplaying involves making one’s way through a story world, but the D&D brand doesn’t represent this; it signifies complex systems that evoke little beyond a core dungeon-crawling scenario.

The brand is not the game, of course, but the brand’s shabby state is indicative of the whole problem with looking at D&D as a brand, instead of a set of signs that say something about what D&D is and what it means to people. D&D is a set of linked signs rather than a unitary practice. We have the game’s worlds, systems, communities and attached businesses, and the strategies they use to assert similarities and differences. D&D’s owners have long attempted to set D&D apart from other roleplaying games, right down to avoiding any description of D&D as a member of that category in the core texts. WoTC took this a step further and denigrated prior iterations of D&D itself, but this strategy was bound to backfire, since playing D&D (or even just talking about it) requires deep identification: a personal narrative of getting into the game, making characters and campaigns, and weaving it into personal histories.

From 3e onward, WotC rejected the most accessible parts of these narratives, where we could describe what the heroes did and the worlds they lived in, in favour of systems. There was a great deal of anxiety about getting rid of “fluff.” But the fluff cuts across systems, because we can all share these stories and appreciate them in a way we can’t though BAB, THAC0 and powers. When people talk about “disassociated mechanics,” and rules support for types of stories, they’re trying to escape from this trap.

WotC’s trying to repair the damage by telling fans they can make any D&D they want, but the primary concern seems to be satisfying the weakest way to bring them together: rules. This might be the only option left, as the company has made such strident efforts to devalue an approach that looks at characters acting in story worlds, that most off the remaining fans have transferred their allegiance and sense of identity to systems. But those systems can exist without D&D branding, and the rise of alternatives has proven that the hard core, used to bring told that their attachment to this aspect of the D&D brand can be insulted, spat on and kicked to the curb, will commit to these system-focused communities without the two-consonants-and-ampersand label.

So I think 5e’s taking the wrong approach, though it probably feels inevitable to the designers, and much hope lies in marketing it as something these fans – a group that barely cares about the brand – can see as theirs again. By making the Forgotten Realms a canonical setting there might be a glimmer of understanding that there needs to be a common, accessible way to describe the experience without recourse to rules (something which a highly customizable game will make difficult anyway) but I suspect the company is still ruled by a culture dominated by game systems before story experiences, for no other reason that rules represent a more measurable achievement that fits the culture of corporate oversight.

Now I got started with D&D in two ways: I stole the red box when IU was a kid and ran it for my friends, and played in the original Dragonlance modules. Although I ended up running AD&D, the Mentzer era box sets represent something special to me, and strike me as the best model for any new version of the game. I know my nostalgia’s tinting my analysis here, but I’d like to think there are rational reasons for this approach.

First, the core set doesn’t get discarded. Starter sets have traditionally been designed to be discarded in favour of the “real” game, but this makes the activity of playing D&D something to be dropped as well, like any other birthday toy you play with for a month and shelve. The red box is always relevant.

Second, subsequent sets add rules at a reasonable pace, and with explicit links to a new way to play the game. The dungeon-wilderness-domain-epic quest-immortal formula adds options without depriving players of a common narrative about the game (a hero’s journey from underground expeditions to lordship, and world-changing stories). For the most part, new rules feel like they support a story that can be understood without recourse to specialized terms. I can think about battles as battles before getting into mass combat systems. And in most cases, these systems can be projected backwards to enhance fundamental, red box play. This form of presentation seems to work for games such as White Wolf’s Scion and Green Ronin’s Dragon Age, and on a personal note, the blueprint in the five box scheme has definitely influenced my conception of D&D’s story arc without being a straitjacket – and look at that! It made me think of D&D as a thing united around its product.

But that’s just me.

What happens when an archmaster removes the conditions that allows a previously Ascended being to exist?

This depends on the rationale for Ascension. Most Ascensions are pretty durable because an Ascended being exists in a state more fundamental than the Phenomenal, but if they depend on a recurring relationship with the Phenomenal World, it might be possible to dethrone them. This is the sort of thing that brought the Abyss into being, however.

What’s the deal with the Aswadim? They don’t seem so bad.

The Aswadim want to enjoy a spiritual state that allows them to embrace fundamental contradictions. They want to be Hypocrite Buddhas. This is different from knowing a fundamental ground of being prior to categories of existence that may seem contradictory, but can be resolved when you’re enlightened. This isn’t really the same as giving everyone their private universe. It’s more like giving yourself an insane private universe and telling everyone else it’ll be totally cool, unless they’re weaklings.

Is there a way to protect your Imperium Rites from outside interference?

There’s no direct method. You need to adjust the Force you’re pushing into the rite to avoid Aponoia.

What happens when you fail to seal an Omen?

You can’t use it until you seal it. You may design new challenges at a +1 difficulty increase, as per p. 78.

What happens when you fail to Exalt an Omen?

The changes it represents fail to occur, and you don’t Ascend. You may keep trying, but Aponoia may add additional Omens to seal and Exalt to get your plan back on track. Eventually, it may become impractical to continue, as Arcane Experience, Willpower dot and eternal wound costs repeat themselves.

Incidentally, you can’t heal eternal wounds, as far as I’m concerned. Dave may be more liberal about this. Archmages who’ve repeatedly failed probably sacrifice their Physical and Social Attributes first, followed by Wisdom, then finally Gnosis. I can’t think of a more pissed off entity than a sorcerer who’s insane, crippled, and whittled down to Mastery after reaching too far, too often.

Can you change your Omens?

Yes. See p. 77. One common usage is to shake off Profane Omens, since you can’t progress toward Ascension until to finish with them.

So, what can other supernaturals do about all this reality editing?

I assume they can do something, but I don’t know what it is. I personally think the ways in which other supernaturals interact with Imperium is unique to each type, rather than there being corresponding arch-vampires and arch-werewolves. Remember that Imperial Mysteries includes the option that archmages aren’t really altering reality for anyone else — just themselves.

In terms of the wider World of Darkness, the book assumes a kind of Anthropic Principle where the universe necessarily includes the conditions under which other supernatural beings exist. I don’t know why it might be that way and frankly, it’s none of my business. It’s your prerogative.

Let’s get the art out of the way first. Unfortunately, this book was finished in the wake of serious layoffs at CCP that disproportionately hit Atlanta. I don’t blame everyone for having other things on their mind, but committing to a release close to the promised date, but it looks like it hit the art. Cover artist Ken Meyer Jr. is actually pretty good, but this looks like they went with a draft piece just to get the book to market. Some of Kaluta’s art isn’t well used, either, because some character pieces are already used for specific signature characters in the core. Bad! John Bridges’ original art (there is original art in the book) looks good, though. I’ve always been fond of his stuff, and wish he’d been able to do more.

Honestly, if I was worrying about my friends losing their jobs and having my duties kicked around, yeah – a Mage book might not be top of mind. That’s understandable.

(Maybe you guys can produce a cool alternate cover! Send it to me and I’ll post it, assuming it’s legal.)

OK, art’s done. We can get into the content.

This book was a long time coming. Back when we were doing Tome of the Mysteries Bill Bridges and I sketched out what post-Master magic looked like. I teased folks with this fact from time to time. When Seers of the Throne came around, Ethan Skemp proposed a radical reordering of the usual presentation, where we would look at the high level machinations of the Exarchs first – and I was lucky enough to write that stuff. This was my first collaboration with Dave Brookshaw.

Dave came to my attention because of meticulous play reports (among the few I really trust) and the fact that he seemed to get stuff I dropped in the form of hints and subtext. Collaborating with him on Seers was a smooth process that confirmed that he understood the game artistically, beyond bare play procedures, carrots and sticks.

I kind of knew what I wanted archmages to be like: scary, remote, operating at a high enough level to alienate lesser mages, but not incomprehensible, once you understood the context – whatever that was. I wasn’t sure about that part.

Dave approached me to pitch this book. We did an outline. We started to understand The Context.

The original outline was for a big 160 pager. When EWhite Wolf accepted the pitch we got . . . less. But with help from Matt McFarland we prioritized, cut, economized, and ended up with something publishable with fewer pages (we still went over; the book was important enough to us that we basically added material, gratis, toward the end of development).

Dave and I split the book based on our interests. I gave him the old outline for Imperial Practices and he turned it from shooting the breeze into real rules. I took more of the fluff – I like the fluff.

Now before all this, I did Equinox Road, and the Game of Immortals. At some point, I told Dave and Matt I’d make another one of those. I had no fucking idea what I would do, just that I thought I was so cool I could totally pull off a minigame like that again. It wasn’t even in the original fucking outline. A few weeks in, I had designed and abandoned a stupid system with Tarot cards (don’t ask, I don’t remember) and went to the bar with my buddy Kearsley. We chatted about karma point spendy systems and how they end up getting all fucked up (order of declaration becomes a big thing, and everybody spends everything or the minimum) and he suggested I think about Blackjack’s “this high but no higher” principle.

Ping!

In development, Matt added a very powerful idea: that we should mostly ignore fears we might offend partisans of other games and general fears that we might just blow up the whole World of Darkness. Instead, we came up with a scheme where we could play with ultimate power, obscure the big secrets Storytellers want to control, and provide an out for folks afraid that archmages will blow up the world. (It’s based on the Anthropic Principle; since the big changes are retroactive across time, vampires and mages must necessarily live in a world where they can both exist. This begs the question of what now-dead universes might have had crawling around in them, but they never existed!)

So we had a good team, long term preparation and a strong degree of control over the end result. I think that made it work. I would only change a few things (besides the art John Bridges didn’t do). I wrote a fantastic bit of fiction to end the book with, but it got cut. I would have loved to more tightly integrate Imperial Mysteries with other Mage and World of Darkness books, but that apparently broke a strict policy about making books dependent upon each other (which I already knew, but man, this is a capstone for the whole universe, baby! I thought I deserved some slack). I wanted a bit more prose, and less procedure.

But I’m basically happy with it. The length constraint was, in the end, a blessing, since it forced me (and Dave, I think – can’t speak for his process) to convey more information using implication and subtext. There’s a school of thought that says you can’t use those in RPGs because everything needs to be accessible and functional on day one. I don’t believe that – never did. I don’t want books you rifle through, use and put away, except for reference. I want books to pick up again and again.

I hope this is one of those.

This year I’ve decided to cut things back to the most promising, personally relevant stuff. In cause you’re interested:

I’m giving Aeternal Legends to Stew Wilson. I made my money back and the game has great potential, but I’m not really into marketing things any more. Now I never “owned” the game, as Stew retained the rights (minus my writing and design, and the art) but I’m looking into ways to make sure he can freely use all the writing and art assets to develop supplements and a new edition. He’ll be able to sell the current version himself, too (he was always able to do this, but this time I won’t get any of the money). I look forward to handing it over to get the attention it deserves.

I’m looking for help on Knights of the Hidden Sun. In order to get this monster ready in a timely fashion, I’m looking through my connections so I can find the right person to finish development. I have high standards and no budget, but I have faith I’ll find the right person to fine tune Chris Challice’s vision.

I have three projects in mind, minimum. I already have one big-ish contract coming this year. Beyond that, look for some saucy game-related fiction and at least one original game this year. The fiction is almost ready. The game is designed. The contract is presumably in the mail.

I’m letting go of most publishing projects — but not the creative end of things. Knights of the Hidden Sun may be my last commitment to the full process of bringing a game to market. I tossed out a bunch of stuff that wasn’t very good and a few things that were. In the end, I learned that I’m not interested in constantly trying to sell people things, build communities, start profitable conversations, or manage various business-oriented bells and whistles. I’ve done these things in and out of nerd-related trades (at one point I managed a couple of dozen blogs simultaneously) and feel good about my performance, but nowadays I’d rather devote my time to the words.

That said, I’m interested in working with people who want to do all that other stuff. I just want to write and design. Over time, this site will change to reflect that.

Honestly, so much of what floats out has been influenced by marketing that I’d rather set myself apart by not talking about that. I worked in marketing for a few years, I did a pretty good job and I know decent people who do it, but it’s not my thing. (Ironically, people seem to think it is simply because I actually talk about this stuff, instead of blandly pretending to be your Good Buddy.) As far as RPGs go, the marketing cart has been pushed so far ahead of the horse that it’s dragging that thing down the fucking hill. Is there anything less interesting than OSR and indie sub-professional outfits talking about why you should buy something? Fuck that.

Of course, people preening themselves online to support the petty capitalist desire to Be a Boss aren’t the only ones ruining the conversation. Over in RPGland, everybody is fucking it up.

The big news over the past year has been undeniable confirmation that D&D has fragmented across two big games and a bunch of small ones. The two big games are both well-crafted and completely alienating to neophytes. The small games are approachable to hypothetical 1982 12 year olds as imagined by 40somethings. Outside of D&D, the indie experiment failed to bring in the new audience adherents repeatedly declared would be drawn by a supposedly-universal theory of story and play. Other companies sought refuge in retreads and licenses. The former appeals to old fans, and experience has shown that the latter almost always attracts gamers first, and license fans second. Keep in mind that this collection of games includes some great designs, and this attitude is understandable in the face of the current Depression.

This is the end state of what I occasionally call the Fail Era: a vision of games driven by abstract notions of markets and gameable relationships: characteristics of the larger, cultural stupidity that put us in the economic shitter to begin with. In all cases, we’ve lost sight of the objective that should precede everything else: the development of healthy, dynamic relationships between whole human beings. When we appeal to a “core story,” or “Creative Agenda,” we toss real relationships in the trash in favour of what the game demands. When we think about demographic appeal (including the demographic of nerds who came of age playing D&D in the 80s) as a goal instead of an happy result, we restrict what games to a kind of theatre where we play our scripted parts, instead of thinking about how we can get to know each other and share meaningful experiences.

How do we get out? I see a lot of hope in the alternative communities that have sprung up on forums and journals, where freeform roleplaying informed by media properties and original worlds evolve without the influences that cripple our own hobby. Sometimes these communities come to mind in our RPG scene, and I read our gamers give out terrible, unnecessary advice. If they needed us, they would be us. Fortunately, we can learn from them instead, and perhaps find a way out. Over the past few years in which I’ve monitored and studied online RP,  it strikes me that they revel in what the Fail Era declared taboo. They care about “pointless” events and relationships. They care about a world to share, and a responsibility to portray characters truthfully instead of as wish-fulfilment devices. They don’t always succeed, and many of them are deeply silly, but they show us what folks who weren’t initiated into our gaming style need — and what I think we need, now.

Worlds.

It’s hard to make worlds.

And here, I think, is where we come to the missing piece. We’ve lost the craft of worldbuilding. D&D and Pathfinder feature dull-as-fuck committee-built settings and little advice on how to build your own. This isn’t a problem unique to tabletop RPGs, but is endemic to any field where these more abstract creative elements have been pushed to the bottom priority, behind systems and core stories. Game designers like pushing these at fans to prove that they’re not frustrated novelists, and in larger outfits this touchy-feely creative stuff is hard to budget. Of course, it’s tempting to summon the spectre of TSR’s prolific settings or White Wolf metaplots (which is funny, since many of them were actually successful). But it isn’t always about laying out a specific world. One of D&D’s strengths was that by the time the five Mentzer box sets rolled around, key designers understood the patterns of D&D’s worlds, and laid them out as anchors for your game without over-systematizing them. Worlds for specific games require strong creative leadership, specifically two elements that are hard to fly in social marketing venues:

1)      Creative autonomy from the audience.

2)      Trust in the audience to find its own use for the world.

If you just listen to your audience, you won’t give them anything they can’t do themselves. Your receptiveness is really a type of contempt; you’re not ready to do the work needed to excite them. If you don’t think gamers are going to get it, you’ll systematize and over-explain the world, and it’ll turn into a trivial object, maybe the focus of a sub-game to design campaigns without ever playing them – and of course, it also indicates a fundamental lack of confidence that you have anything to give them in the first place.

Making worlds, or talking about building worlds without the safety net of strict systems, is a gamble. For big companies, it takes a lot of words, and those cost money. For small companies, the designer needs to writing ability and stamina. More than, that, there’s a chance that people just won’t be interested, regardless of how good a job you do. But now, at the sputtering candle stage of the hobby, somebody needs the gonads to try. Worlds are what the nerds you don’t know, the panfandoms, and the “Blue Ocean” you wish you could attract understand. This is the most accessible part of RPGs — not rules, not social legalese. In 2012, I hope somebody takes that risk and succeeds. We’ve done systems. We’ve done distrust-based management. We’ve done it all, and only amused various slivers of a stale pie.

The best thing about imaginary worlds is that they can bring us back to being people, sharing an experience and learning about each other, because we know how to live in them. From n00b to the veteran of a thousand edition wars, we can all ask what it would be like to live somewhere else. We can all think of how we coped with new, wonderful, frightening environments, unusual customs, and strangers around us. We can do it more readily that we can be taught to use a “setting hack,” or tag a trait, or modify a die roll, because it’s something we already do. It’s something human. And as we explore together, we can rediscover the deep bonds that come before rated, incentivized, curated, marketed relationships get in the way.

Interested? Take a look for yourself. Keep in mind that this has not been through final editing, proofing and tweaking.

If the response is good, I may release other “raw” chapters. All depends. I don’t want to show too much, too soon, so that stuff doesn’t peak too soon before release.

Next: systems, vehicles and more!

Creative work passes through phases that have less to do with improvement than exploration. Most people recognize that — it doesn’t get a second glance. But if Pablo Picasso was a game designer we’d read long screeds about how he really wanted to do Blue Period work all along, but the art world made him move on to Rose, or about how Cubist art was an objective advancement. Gamers and game designers are afraid of labelling themselves artists, so it really screws up their ability to recognize creative development as anything other than a technology. RPGs aren’t really engines that you can reliably improve until they work best on your chosen road. You’ll always wander, and you should play and design with the understanding that nothing will ever completely satisfy you. If you treat yourself like an artist you’ll get your feet moving, and you can embrace change with a degree of self-awareness.

My D&D game evolved a whole bunch since I originally vowed to play AD&D1e almost entirely as written and see what happened from there. If I was a typical gaming blowhard I’d talk about objectively improving the game to meet a set agenda, but if you’ve been following along, you know I think that’s pretty stupid. Instead, I’ve moved into a kind of symbiosis with the game, where some elements suggest changes, but these hacks aren’t global improvements that would have made the game better before. I finally dropped Weapon vs. AC not because it was a bad system at any level, but because it starts to become too cumbersome to justify its importance by levels 4-5. I still think it’s awesome at low levels, though. A DM or designer obsessed with gaming as a technical thing would probably try to systematize some compromise for all levels of play, but that strikes me as a waste of effort.

Protecting your mind from the illusion of progress is important at in every role in the hobby. Players need to do it to let go of what bores them and embrace temporary, non-doctrinaire solutions. Designers need to do it to get real insight out of their past designs and design heritage. Certainly, nothing marks creative stagnation in a game company than losing touch with the ideas behind past designs. Whenever you read about designers/developers lamenting that their predecessors sucked, you’re reading something that’s either a sales pitch for a new edition, or the musings of creative folks who have lost their way. I know I’ve been guilty of it — it’s part of the culture of working on established intellectual properties that the generation before you just wasn’t as awesome as you are.

Eventually you get over yourself and realize that the other guys took a different journey, and you learn to respect it unless it was genuinely facile or offensive. So nowadays, I try for a twofold perspective, where I not only judge things based on the values I hold, but I try to imagine the story of the creator and work, and assume they were smart people who did what they meant to do. And I think that’s why my tastes as a gamer and designer have steadily diversified, despite a culture where the tendency is to define your agenda, work within its narrow confines, and assume that without these controls, everybody else is a mindblind sociopath. We have come to not only see a pathology in journeys other than our own, but even in the possibility of having our own blue periods.

This pretence of mine is a sign of the times. D&D’s gone through at least one big commercial split and a huge sideshow of retro and custom gaming promoted by small presses and bloggers. I don’t really care which D&D is the most popular, but I don’t want to see the good ones go away, or the ones we love despite their flaws collapse instead of being modded and hot-rodded to fit particular tables. Honestly, the stakes are so low when it comes to the design of a D&D that the only reasons to care about an orthodoxy are driven by marketing or online community building. The basic format of D&D, where character-players collaborate with a Dungeon Master for their mutual entertainment in a broadly understood world, is so resilient that groups turn troublesome rules into cool ones pretty easily, and often find that project more fun than running a better-tuned game out of the box.

WotC’s D&D, the Pathfinder D&D, retro-D&Ds and a bunch of outsider-design D&Ds float around like droplets in a big cloud of ideas about D&D. I run a heavily modified version of the old AD&D, and play in the WotC 4e D&D. I’ve read a bunch of these Clone D&Ds people make and sell. Some of them are pretty good, or at least interesting, and they all tell you something about what makes for a D&D in the author’s mind. People argue that one D&D or another is the best one, or one category of D&D is better than the rest (or somebody talks about how they just happen to prefer one of them for reasons which leave no doubt that they really think the other D&Ds are stupid and their players are wrongheaded). Gamers hate examining themselves as a culture and get into all kinds of stupid theory and agenda taxonomies, but D&Ds really hang together through networks of friendship, hobby mentoring and communities that use classes, levels and other D&Disms as allegiance signs.

Sometimes I think design obsessions substitute for substantial relationships. When you only know people through blogs, forums and convention play dates, you’ll need to find some way to play your parts in the theatre of belonging, and bellow to the rafters that you think Fighter dailies suck, just like another guy you admire. Is there any other reason to have a conversation about whether AC goes up or down? I like a lot of different D&Ds but then again, I play with good friends: people I enjoy dinner with, and whose personal lives and nonverbal cues are share on a daily basis. But I’ve enjoyed most of the D&Ds I’ve played. I can’t wait to get back to my 4e game, and I miss the 3.5 game I used to play.

I’m happy all these D&Ds exist, and I’d love to play more of them — but I don’t want to sign up for any particular D&D design cult. Instead of self-conscious small press movements, hucksters and screeds, I’d like to see good friends talk about the way they do it. Instead of retroclones I want house rule sheets, warts and all. (No, random generation tables and item lists don’t count.) Instead of contrived play reports, I want unstructured anecdotes. In the end, the reason all these D&Ds exist is because of oral traditions, rough notions and field experiments. And although I think D&Ds can look like almost anything, none of them are essays, op eds and advice on the best D&D, best way to play it, or theory of it. All of these can be useful, but they’re not the centre of the experience, and that is what I feel the larger D&D community increasingly places this stuff.

• Halfassed bragging that they’re doing great no matter what anyone else says, in order to use the situation as a marketing opportunity.
• Triumphal, aggressive ignorance courtesy of some jackoff or other who wants their far-from-real conception of the RPG industry to fail so that something stronger, and equally unreal, can take its place.

(I’m thinking of two specific people and even named them in a previous draft, but one of them is a content scraper who doesn’t deserve any publicity, and the other is an utter moonfruit who occasionally stalks me, so no links for either of them. Sorry!)

If there’s anything wrong with Schwalb’s analysis — and I’m only going here for the sake of discussion about something that was pretty much spot-on — it’s that it treats RPGs like something radically different from the rest of the writing and content field. Truth is, the situation is the same everywhere, at least in the realm of comparable work. Want to write fiction? Rates are about the same, problems are about the same. Nonfiction? Yep. General content? Yessir. Where RPGs fall down is that the very top isn’t that high up; there’s no Stephen King up there to give everybody false hope.

Now the assholes in my bullet points will counter with a number of stupid arguments. The first will be to blame some hypothetical RPG business model even though the same problems exist everywhere else. This is a 21st century issue, not an RPG industry issue. In our case, the D20 bubble just disguised it for a while. No, some “indie model,” won’t do it, especially since every notably successful indie-branded game uses practically the same distribution model as the Bad People (I mean, if it’s good for your conscience to pretend IPR isn’t a distributor, I suppose you can pretend in that sad,maybe-the-booth-babe-IS-into-me way).

Next? Bullshit about how such and such a job pays some huge per word rate. Yes, this may even be true, but no, it doesn’t matter, because this factoid is almost always disingenuous garbage. Short form journalism, technical writing and high level marketing writing do in fact pay Big Bucks, yes. They also have tough ancillary duties that get folded into the wage for convenience’s sake, like the costs involved in hauling ass in a car to cover a story. I’ve done some of these things, so I suppose I could demand tender loving from every multiclassed business major/fanboy around. They paid well on paper, less so in terms of effort/reward ratio.

It’s like how models make ludicrous amounts of of money per hour, but we somehow don’t live in a modelocracy. Think of the reasons for that. Christ’s sakes, folks.

Like I said: RPG freelancing — and producing RPGs independently, and running some ancillary business selling them or building communities, or whatever — are pretty normal. If there’s any difference, it’s when prideful dorks and manipulative asses insist on them. That’s why we don’t have any conception of the pro, semipro and amateur tiers in the field, even when they clearly exist (HINT: 2 cents a word ain’t “pro”). If we did that, lots of penny a word freelancers would cry. And it’s why we have trouble admitting that excepting a couple of fads, it has never been a good idea to make RPGs your bread and butter. People have been failing to make careers out of it long before Forge marketing dogma crawled out of the Internet’s asshole. The reason early creators migrated into fiction, electronic games and other fields is not because they were arrogant fucks — it’s because that’s what creators do to make a living. We are rarely monogamous. A guy like Chuck Wendig is positively media-slutty. In fact, I’d say that the main danger we face is that practices from other media might screw with RPG-specific craft that works.

Me? I get around. I have a nice contract right now, in fact. I spent six years making nearly every cent from writing (in other years, it’s been more like 30%-60%). Wasn’t easy or hard, just normal. Maybe I’ll do it again.