Attracting the best people to TTRPG writing.

[cthulhu]

I suspect part of the problem is that you cannot release a new major edition every 6 months - whereas Terry prattchet turns out a new discworld novel to roughly that schedule.

Additionally the IP/brand of 'Dungeons and Dragons' is an asset not owned by the author.

Managing these issues may be a bit harder - I can think of few series that use regular ghost writers that don't have a rolling release schedule.

[A Man In Black]

Considering that's he's had a job at his own company for 30 years, I don't really think they could pay him quite that much. They'd pay him for three years and toss him out unemployed with no transferable skills on his resume.

That is a damn sight different from "would WotC ever be willing to pay someone like Steve Jackson the amount of money he makes with his own company?" The answer to that is "Probably yes, if they thought he could make D&D successful, because I don't think he's taking home a great deal of money at the end of the day."

Excepting Games Workshop, I'd be surprised if anyone was any better off than comfortable from owning any sort of share in a hobbyist games business.

[Chamomile]

And Games Workshop isn't going to last much longer now that 3D printers are creeping closer to becoming a common sight in middle class homes. There's rumors buzzing about the internet that some of their recent design decisions have been made with the intent of squeezing as much money as possible out of the next year or two with absolutely no eye for maintaining the brand and audience until tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow.

Regardless, if self-publishers are going to dominate whatever market there is in the future, it's going to be about which ones can nail down a good marketing strategy as much as which ones can actually make a decent game.

Also, if interactive fiction counts, does that mean I can call myself an actual, for-real game designer for having made one?

[K]

Considering that's he's had a job at his own company for 30 years, I don't really think they could pay him quite that much. They'd pay him for three years and toss him out unemployed with no transferable skills on his resume.

That is a damn sight different from "would WotC ever be willing to pay someone like Steve Jackson the amount of money he makes with his own company?" The answer to that is "Probably yes, if they thought he could make D&D successful, because I don't think he's taking home a great deal of money at the end of the day."

Excepting Games Workshop, I'd be surprised if anyone was any better off than comfortable from owning any sort of share in a hobbyist games business.

I don't know. The guy running Shadowrun supposedly stole $2 million from their accounts before checks started bouncing and people even noticed that something might be wrong and Hasbro bought WotC for $335 million. That sure seems like there is money in it.

I mean, if Penny Arcade can employ a staff of 10 with merch and writing three dick jokes a week, I think a stronger IP can probably be exploited for some real money in the right hands.

Shit, just stop running a single IP into the ground with endless supplements and just release an entirely new game every six months. Paizo has made a whole business model of feeding on DnD 3e's corpse and that tells us that a new core game every six months is not even necessary (just look at all the extra crap they sell if you want to figure out how they pay people).

Hasbro has been skull-fucking the corpse of it's IP for like 80 years. You'd think they'd have a better idea of how to do it in the digital age.

Basically, some elementary business sense needs to be applied and RPG gaming needs to not be run by insular little cliques of otherwise unemployable people.

[Username17]

Your idea of people writing whole supplements is vaguely OK. It would be better if people were writing halves or thirds of supplements, but whatever. Your idea of people writing entire core rules by themselves is fucking insane. That cannot happen. It took Gary Gygax three years to complete the AD&D core rules, and they were incredibly incomplete.

The core rules of a game like Dungeons and Dragons are really fucking long. 4th edition D&D is too wordy I'll admit, but the core rules are 525,000 words. Compiled, that would be the 9th longest novel ever written in the English language (displacing James Clavell's Gai-Jin at only 487,700 words). Asking a lone individual to write a life defining work that has been successfully attempted a literal handful of times in human history before you can start farming out secondary projects is fucking retarded. Shit doesn't work that way and it never ever will.

Your core rules should have five authors on it. More than that and it's herding cats. Less than that and you're asking too fucking much from your design staff.

-Username17

[K]

Your idea of people writing whole supplements is vaguely OK. It would be better if people were writing halves or thirds of supplements, but whatever. Your idea of people writing entire core rules by themselves is fucking insane. That cannot happen. It took Gary Gygax three years to complete the AD&D core rules, and they were incredibly incomplete.

The core rules of a game like Dungeons and Dragons are really fucking long. 4th edition D&D is too wordy I'll admit, but the core rules are 525,000 words. Compiled, that would be the 9th longest novel ever written in the English language (displacing James Clavell's Gai-Jin at only 487,700 words). Asking a lone individual to write a life defining work that has been successfully attempted a literal handful of times in human history before you can start farming out secondary projects is fucking retarded. Shit doesn't work that way and it never ever will.

Your core rules should have five authors on it. More than that and it's herding cats. Less than that and you're asking too fucking much from your design staff.

-Username17

Listen, DnD 4e is not 525K words because it needs five writers, it's 525K because it has five writers. All five of those guys are boosting word-count because they are getting paid $0.10 a word and trying to justify their existences.

Look at the DnD Red and Blue box. Physically look at them. Together, they make a simple and somewhat boring but functional game with a focus on teaching RPG skills and they could fit together into an issue of Vanity Fair (hell, toss in Black and Gold and they fit in there too with room for the island adventure from the Blue Box).

Strip out the unnecessary bits about teaching RPGs and you have the page count space needed for the variety and complexity of a full-on game.

RPGs have been filled with page-count bloat for years. Shadowun's core system could probably fit into 30K words if you just glossed over the boring setting bits that go on for 100K words. WW games could be dropped to 10K words with all the powers included. The Monster Manual in the last three editions of DnD uses 1000 words to describe a monster that could be done with a 100 if you weren't re-inventing the wheel on abilities with every monster.

Unnecessary complexity has been the rule, and that could be cut easily. Shadowrun monsters are a stat line and a call function to a unified power list and you could fit five on one side of a 3x5 card if you didn't need the fluff and that works just fine.

Fluff for your core game can just be farmed out if you really think you can sell it. Find five guys to write compelling monster fluff or wax poetic on your setting, but keep the mechanics lean. Things like DnD 3e's reinvention of the wheel with every spell effect and monster power is wildly wasteful of designer time and doesn't produce a better game.

It produces the opposite in fact.

You don't even need to reduce powers down like 4e does. You can just write up mechanics like you were writing Magic cards and then figure out in playtesting which of the unique powers created has confusing wording (the issue when you try to fit overly complex powers into card format, and a sign to ditch the power). Look at a power like Magic Jar and tell me you couldn't get that down to 1-2 simple sentences and be better for it.

Heck, I'd rather put five artists on staff than five designers. At least then I'd know I was getting value-added.

[Username17]

RPGs have been filled with page-count bloat for years. Shadowun's core system could probably fit into 30K words if you just glossed over the boring setting bits that go on for 100K words.

Having actually written parts of the Shadowrun rules, no. That's just not true.

Don't get me wrong, games are too long. 4e D&D is an egregious offender as far as word count bloat goes. But After Sundown is too telegraphic and is overly short in many places. It is 160,000 words long. Moby Dick is 187,000 words long. After Sundown should be about half again as long to have more examples, more sample characters, more rules for things like starvation and fatigue, and more people making grouper face at the camera. And then it would be longer than Moby fucking Dick. And not by a small amount either.

After Sundown would be a better book if I had been able to write only about 120,000 words and could farm an equal amount to one or more additional writers.

-Username17

[hogarth]

K is at least consistent in his opinion that game material should be ultra-terse and that it's up to the GM to fill in the blanks. That sounds like too much work for me, though; I'd rather read a novel in my spare time than write a novel.

[Chamomile]

After Sundown would be a better book if I had been able to write only about 120,000 words and could farm an equal amount to one or more additional writers.

This implies that you can't. What makes you think that you can't?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Writing rules are also significantly harder than writing prose. I'm sure that a substantial amount of time building the rules entails (or at least should) testing subsystems before committing them to paper and even having to scrap some of them. If you're doing something like trawling for playtester feedback it'll take even longer.

Also, Shadowrun at 30K words, are you fucking crazy? If you stripped things in the 4E rulebook down to bare bones I think you might have gotten the core rulebooks down to 80K at the cost of rules ambiguity. I don't even think that this is a good idea in the first place; you do need to spend some time on prose. No one likes reading dry technical manuals no matter how much you pretty it up with pictures.

[talozin]

After Sundown would be a better book if I had been able to write only about 120,000 words and could farm an equal amount to one or more additional writers.

This implies that you can't. What makes you think that you can't?

Finding people willing and able to write 120,000 words on what is fundamentally someone else's idea is not the easiest thing in the world. Even more so when you aren't giving them any money in exchange. And even more so when the other guy is probably going to get the lion's share of any name recognition there is to be had (and I'm not imputing any selfishness to Frank here, it's just that it is fundamentally his project).

And even more even more so if you want the words to be good, to have game mechanics that mesh with the existing game mechanics, world ideas that mesh with the existing world ideas, and so forth. No matter how conscientious the co-author(s) are, it's going to need major editing oversight to make it come together into a coherent whole.

"Can't" is probably putting it too strongly. I'm sure Frank could find someone to do it if he felt like looking hard enough and long enough and working hard enough on blending the material together. But it's actually a lot of extra work to do it that way, enough so that it is probably impractical for someone for whom it's a hobby rather than a job.

[Chamomile]

I wasn't really thinking of 120k pieces with new sub-systems or rules. I was more thinking along the lines of a 10k piece with new stat blocks.

[Neurosis]

Many recording artists who want to make decent money simply start their own label. I expect that in the age of on-demand printing, the question is going to be "which great designers are starting up their own game-publishing projects," and not "how can WotC get great designers."

Oh wait, you guys hate them too. : P (Not actually white-knighting the forge, just pointing out that it and its associated movement is the largest, most visible form of the phenomenon you're discussing.)

Also, if interactive fiction counts, does that mean I can call myself an actual, for-real game designer for having made one?

Well that depends entirely on you, really, and on whether or not you feel you've attained that status. Is the game you made any good? Is it complete? Does anyone know about it? I think Andrew Plotkin is an actual, for-real game designer (not an RPG designer obviously), and for that matter, also a complete genius. So in my opinion it's not like IF as a format is discounted or anything.

But I mean there's game designers (Richard Garfield) and game designers (Frank Trollman) and game designers (Hideo Kojima) so unless we specify what kind of game we're talking about...yeah.

[tzor]

Your idea of people writing whole supplements is vaguely OK. It would be better if people were writing halves or thirds of supplements, but whatever. Your idea of people writing entire core rules by themselves is fucking insane. That cannot happen. It took Gary Gygax three years to complete the AD&D core rules, and they were incredibly incomplete.

The Gygax example is probably a bad one for a number of conflicting reasons. He never did really complete anything. It took him three years to compile a number of completely separate rule ideas (combat, non weapon combat and psionics, for example are three completely incompatible rule systems crammed into the edition) and then to pretty print and edit the books. This was never a top down, botom up, waterfall, or any other properly designed system. Not only that, but this wasn't a full time job for him. (This also explains the number of years; he literally had a number of occasions where the interval between working periods was so great he had to back up and try to figure out what he was doing at the time he put the project down.)

Personally, I think anyone who wants to do game design has to take at least the basic computer programming courses, as well as fundamental project management courses. In effect you are trying to create and document a rule set, and I've seen cases of such sloppy rule design that it's obvious to anyone who known structured computer programming (or even object oriented programming).

[K]

After Sundown would be a better book if I had been able to write only about 120,000 words and could farm an equal amount to one or more additional writers.

I could cut 50K words out of After Sundown without affecting a single thing. I mean, the history of the word "Baali" is interesting, but it doesn't tell me a thing about how to play or run a sorcerer without a soul in the setting. That level of detail is better left to a splatbook.

I could probably create an SRD version of After Sundown that loses another 20-30K words without even touching the powers sections.

Still, I'm sure if you proposed After Sundown to White Wolf they'd look at you like you were crazy because they'd need 1.5 million words or more to cover the same amount of material.

[wotmaniac]

Your idea of people writing whole supplements is vaguely OK. It would be better if people were writing halves or thirds of supplements, but whatever. Your idea of people writing entire core rules by themselves is fucking insane. That cannot happen. It took Gary Gygax three years to complete the AD&D core rules, and they were incredibly incomplete.

The Gygax example is probably a bad one for a number of conflicting reasons. He never did really complete anything. It took him three years to compile a number of completely separate rule ideas (combat, non weapon combat and psionics, for example are three completely incompatible rule systems crammed into the edition) and then to pretty print and edit the books. This was never a top down, botom up, waterfall, or any other properly designed system. Not only that, but this wasn't a full time job for him. (This also explains the number of years; he literally had a number of occasions where the interval between working periods was so great he had to back up and try to figure out what he was doing at the time he put the project down.)

I'll even take this a step further:
he was creating something new from whole cloth.
if you're reinventing the wheel, then that means that other wheels have come before, and at least you have those other wheels from which to model and gain insight.

With 30 years of TTPRGs in the stack, almost anything you do will be a rehash of what has already been explored. Most games are nothing more than a different spin on an existing product.
Yes, you still need the word count (to a degree) -- but at this point, unless you're creating a revolutionary resolution engine, then it's not nearly as arduous as it was 20 years ago.

[A Man In Black]

I don't know. The guy running Shadowrun supposedly stole $2 million from their accounts before checks started bouncing and people even noticed that something might be wrong and Hasbro bought WotC for $335 million. That sure seems like there is money in it.

Sure, there are past examples of people making a ton of money off of the hobbyist business, too, even when you set aside people who just rob their company blind. I'm not arguing that a novelist-style royalty payment model isn't possible, just that there's currently nobody making that kind of money for writing RPG books, and relatively few people making that kind of money period.

It seem like you're arguing that bringing in people who aren't unemployables/fanboys will mean they'll make games that bring in the kind of money to pay that kind of talent. I can't really comment on whether that's true or not, I just don't know.

And Games Workshop isn't going to last much longer now that 3D printers are creeping closer to becoming a common sight in middle class homes. There's rumors buzzing about the internet that some of their recent design decisions have been made with the intent of squeezing as much money as possible out of the next year or two with absolutely no eye for maintaining the brand and audience until tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow.

3D printers are years away from being feasible for mass-market, let alone pervasive. As for the "rumors buzzing around the internet", for a long time now GW's model has been to squeeze as much money out of the next year or two with absolutely no eye for maintaining etc. etc. because they operate on the assumption that nobody actually plays their game for more than a year or two anyway. This means there a lot of bitter ex-fans to start stupid rumors.

[K]

K is at least consistent in his opinion that game material should be ultra-terse and that it's up to the GM to fill in the blanks. That sounds like too much work for me, though; I'd rather read a novel in my spare time than write a novel.

I'm not saying that games need to be super small. I'm saying that we should stop pretending that dead words count as game material.

Take Shadowrun. It goes on for 53 pages before we even hit anything resembling a rule. It has piles of little "here is an an example of how to play the game because we think you are a moron" sections. The techo-babble everywhere is certainly flavorful, but I don't need long descriptions for each of the five Light Pistols or what the theoretical underpinnings of a Synaptic Booster actually are; I just need to know the stats and some pictures of the guns and a short description of a fletchette gun and a booster because that's new and doesn't exist in the real world.

Hell, half the time the actual rules themselves say the exact same thing in three slightly different ways right after another.

It's fine for Augmentation to be 80% long-winded techno-babble and in-character conversations to get people to get into an aspect of the setting, but your base system just needs to get people playing and introduce them to the setting.

[hogarth]

K is at least consistent in his opinion that game material should be ultra-terse and that it's up to the GM to fill in the blanks. That sounds like too much work for me, though; I'd rather read a novel in my spare time than write a novel.

I'm not saying that games need to be super small. I'm saying that we should stop pretending that dead words count as game material.

Take Shadowrun. It goes on for 53 pages before we even hit anything resembling a rule. It has piles of little "here is an an example of how to play the game because we think you are a moron" sections. The techo-babble everywhere is certainly flavorful, but I don't need long descriptions for each of the five Light Pistols or what the theoretical underpinnings of a Synaptic Booster actually are; I just need to know the stats and some pictures of the guns and a short description of a fletchette gun and a booster because that's new and doesn't exist in the real world.

...in which case the GM would fill in the blanks as to how the light pistols, synaptic boosters and flechette guns work, as I noted above.

[fectin]

...but only if it became important. Which is unlikely.

[hogarth]

...but only if it became important. Which is unlikely.

Define "important". Personally, I think a certain amount of fluff in a game is "important" so that I can get a feeling for the setting.

[fectin]

Fluff in statblocks is like grease in a gearbox: you want exactly enough of it that the machinery runs smoothely.

It's important only when it interacts with gameplay. Generally that means a single sentence is enough description.

[hogarth]

Fluff in statblocks is like grease in a gearbox: you want exactly enough of it that the machinery runs smoothely.

Ah, I misread that K was complaining about long descriptions. I agree, you don't need too much.

[Username17]

Fluff in statblocks is like grease in a gearbox: you want exactly enough of it that the machinery runs smoothely.

Ah, I misread that K was complaining about long descriptions. I agree, you don't need too much.

Here are some examples that K is calling out as "long descriptions":

Colt America L36: An old-timer with a very good reputation, this sleek automatic pistol is easy to conceal and commonly available.

Synaptic Booster: With this bioware, the nerve cells making up the spinal cord are encouraged to replicate and lengthen, providing a wider “datapath” for the transmission of impulses and decreasing the amount of time required for the signal to traverse the distance.

Yes, by removing that description of the theoretical underpinnings of the synaptic booster you could save... almost four lines of text. On a page that fits 118 lines of text. But at what cost?

-Username17

[Neurosis]

That...is not very verbose.