Attracting the best people to TTRPG writing.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 12:40 am

TTRPG writing is hell. I mean the respect is low, the pay is poor, and you're expected to write a lot. Which would make it like most clerical jobs, except that the stakes for books are a hell of a lot higher. If someone writes a shoddy memo no one even really cares. If a team writes a shoddy TTRPG book like Exalted: Lunars or Magic of Faerun people will be talking about that shit year later.

TTRPGs 'solve' this problem by promoting the most promising fanboys and discarding them when the well runs dry or they burn out but I think that this is a bad way to do things. For one this prevents a unified design goal and philosophy. For two it discards people right when they get enough experience to become decent. And for three it washes out people who could've actually been really good writers. We cannot understate the effects of these; it seems that every edition without exception keeps heading down the death spiral of writing precisely because of this washout effect.

But another problem is that people who would actually be good at writing rules probably have enough skill to get a better job. It's not enough to just trawl the D&D-fan probability math grad students at Cal Tech and MIT, but it is a starting point at least. The question is how much money would it take to have them work full-time or at least at a part-time rate enough to get a good amount of material out of them? Even if you can't do that you'd have to do something like monitor the CharOP boards or whatever and offer jobs to people who analyze the rules the strongest--and unless you offered them a lot of money there's no reason to believe that they'd drop what they were doing and work for you.

Is the jump from 'underpaid overeager fan' to 'sober professional' too expensive? My greatest fear about asking this question is that people don't do it out of ignorance or penny wise/pound foolishness, but because there really is no better way.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 25, 2011 1:12 am

Novelists have the same word counts and tend to make a lot of money when they sell several million copies of their book (which core books do sell).

So that's the standard.

As far as I can tell, the RPG business is hugely profitable because they don't pay authors any form of royalties and can have online sales for even bigger profits. Now, the royalty rate for small splatbooks is not going to be big with a run of 50K, but core designers should be making some serious cash.

Then you add in things like digital and potentially movie rights, there should be a lot of cash flowing to designers.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 1:34 am

K, that response raises many, many questions.

1.) Do you think that any game designer could resist the urge to kill the golden goose enough to go 'yes, I could lose 2 million dollars of profit paying this talented team enough but then their next book would have just as big of a profit'?

2.) Moreover, do you think that there's enough of a connection between writing quality and book sales to justify giving people a cut of the pie? Unlike, say, Twilight there's actually a few standards that we can use to see whether someone is a good author or not, but I'm not sure of the overall quality in writing between 3.0E and 4.0E is enough to convince execs to give the writers a cut of the pie.

3.) Wouldn't this give people an incentive to release several big books rather than many small books like they do right now? See next comment for why this would be a problem.

4.) Would this encourage too much infighting between staff members in order to get a piece of the profit pie? Splitting the shares equally or giving higher-ranking or higher-word count people more money encourages them to muscle out cowriters.

5.) How would execs determine whether the current designer they had was 'good enough' or if they could do better? Moreover, if a designer has a temporary bad run or is hit by a bad economy or whatever, won't this encourage execs to knock someone talented out and risk promoting someone mediocre in their place?

I don't think your proposal is all bad, it's just that I think that you could dodge all of these problems just by having a highly-paid professional staff. Unlike an actor or writer, no one is going to line up around the block to buy a TTRPG book just because a certain celebrity designer is on it (not even Gary Gygax) so you can't justify someone's high salary like that. And the sad fact of the matter is that while TTRPGs underpay too much, writers are still thirsty for work. Only a minority of celebrity writers would turn down the chance to have a full-time writing job for $65,000 and at that much pay you could start being picky and demanding rather than having to accept the first fanboy with the writing bug through the door.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:54 am

There are no "talented teams of writers" that do anything that a single writer can't do with a couple of interns and a good editor to bounce ideas off of.

This means that the only thing you really can do is write books faster with teams, but not better. Considering that a lot of time is spent arguing over different visions, you might not even want multiple designers on single projects.

Once you have single authors, you can figure out when things are crap. If a book sells poorly because no one cares about the idea or execution, you know to drop them. If you can't find anyone with an interesting proposal for the idea, then you can drop the idea too.

Edging out shitty and marginal writers for rulesets is a goal. Make adventure design where the creative but terrible thinkers willing to make $300 for 20K words end up.

The idea is to not have anyone on salary anymore except the managing editor, the lead art guy, and some grunt editors. Make everyone else write on spec, but pay them bank when they make something awesome (exactly like most novel writers). Literally say "we need ship and sea rules and whoever we pick of the submissions gets $1.00 a copy sold."

The number of people who can give you 150K coherent words on a topic is a self-selecting group that is wicked small. You won't have a lot of submissions to go through.

Heck, if you get two great books on the same subject, you can release both. Alternate rules have a long and profitable history in gaming and print-on-demand is here to stay.

The problem with RPG gaming right now is that the top-end talent don't get paid enough to not excel in some other field. It's time for RPGs to be like professional baseball.... stop running it with volunteers and actually pay people what they are worth and the money will come.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 9:57 am

K wrote:There are no "talented teams of writers" that do anything that a single writer can't do with a couple of interns and a good editor to bounce ideas off of.

This means that the only thing you really can do is write books faster with teams, but not better. Considering that a lot of time is spent arguing over different visions, you might not even want multiple designers on single projects.

Disagree. For fiction pieces, that is true. But for rules systems, it's not.

If you have a system that requires user input from multiple users, you need to get multiple eyes on the project to keep it from falling apart when used. Computer games have development teams and playtesters. Not just to get it out faster, but to create a superior product.

For World of Darkness, fiction books like Ghost Stories and derived books like The Harvesters really can and therefore should be written by one dude with some editors. But for core rule books and stuff like the Vampire book, you need a set of eyes on it.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 25, 2011 10:42 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
K wrote:There are no "talented teams of writers" that do anything that a single writer can't do with a couple of interns and a good editor to bounce ideas off of.

This means that the only thing you really can do is write books faster with teams, but not better. Considering that a lot of time is spent arguing over different visions, you might not even want multiple designers on single projects.
Disagree. For fiction pieces, that is true. But for rules systems, it's not.

If you have a system that requires user input from multiple users, you need to get multiple eyes on the project to keep it from falling apart when used. Computer games have development teams and playtesters. Not just to get it out faster, but to create a superior product.

How many video games are crap? Answer: most.

Obviously, design by committee fails most of the time and it's not worth keeping several people on the payroll to do it. The only thing you need on a "design team" is an art and layout guy, a few editors, some interns, and the managing editor who makes sure projects meet deadline.

The interns are there for destructive playtesting and the managing editor is the extra set of eyes. The managing editor is also the one that basically tosses out entire books of rules that are crap until you find someone who can write good rules.

The current system of RPG design is designed for getting a product out the door with near-volunteers that the company is stuck with because no one else lives within 20 miles of your office and also can't get a better job. The fact that you commission sight-unseen the work means that you are often stuck with whatever comes in if you want to make deadlines because you only trusted one guy to do the job, and that leads to various substandard additions to your ruleset.

Committee design is how you correct your worse mistakes, but bring your product down to the lowest common denominator. Excellence requires cherry-picking.

I mean, the setting contest WotC did had over 150K proposals. That's a lot of potential writers, but if you went and said "write 100K words on your setting in this format," you'd probably get 100 settings that you could pore over. Then you find the two or three you want to buy, send them back with pages of corrections from the editors, and then take the setting from the author who actually takes corrections and tell the rest "better luck next time!"

There are tons of people writing fanfics with a following and a small number of paid authors who making a living at it; the reason is because the number of people who can write something decent is staggeringly large and you can cherry pick for the ones that take almost no money and the number of people who can write excellent work is staggeringly small and they can demand real wages.

How many people have gained and lost careers at WotC for only being decent?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 11:55 am

K wrote:How many video games are crap? Answer: most.

This is not an argument. Sturgeon's Law applies to works by auteurs as well as things produced by committee. Yes, 90% of everything is crap.

The point is that while people rightfully make novels as single authors backed up by a team of editors and artists, no one makes video games as a single individual except the Dwarf Fortress guy. And he's certifiably insane. People don't write Laws that way either, nor should they.

Throwing down core rules systems requires a group. Derivative systems don't. You can have one person write a bunch of 3e Prestige classes or 4e Familiar rules or something, but the basic system is too many pieces and is far too fragile for one person to get it all together.

The only way you'd be able to get a real edition of D&D out the door as the work of individuals on individual books is to have it either be a contradictory mess (like AD&D) or to have it be a very slight iteration on the previous edition (like 2nd edition AD&D revised). By asking the core rules to be written by solitary individuals like they were a novel rather than by a diverse team like they were a legal code, you're basically saying that 4th edition was "good enough" and all we need from here on out is minor variations on the same thing. Like Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed was for 3rd edition.

K wrote:I mean, the setting contest WotC did had over 150K proposals. That's a lot of potential writers, but if you went and said "write 100K words on your setting in this format," you'd probably get 100 settings that you could pore over. Then you find the two or three you want to buy, send them back with pages of corrections from the editors, and then take the setting from the author who actually takes corrections and tell the rest "better luck next time!"

This I actually wholeheartedly agree with. But 100k is probably too much, because that's an entire late period nWoD sourcebook. I would suggest a 50/50 rule. If you can write 50k words that are interesting enough to make them want to read the next 50k of words, they'll pay you to do that.

But again, you can only do that for expansion material. Core material needs a crew of five.

-Username17

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 3:14 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The point is that while people rightfully make novels as single authors backed up by a team of editors and artists, no one makes video games as a single individual except the Dwarf Fortress guy. And he's certifiably insane.

And Notch. Braid had a writer/programmer and an artist. Cave Story was developed by one person. Ska Studios is another developer-artist team, and while I wouldn't call I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 or the Dishwasher series high art, they are fairly successful. Nifflas has a devoted following, although I've never tried any of his games.

This isn't even including any games where all of the conceptual development was done by one person and the grunt work of implementing that was done by a team: all of these people make games, soup to nuts, either by themselves or as a single author backed up by an artist.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 3:35 pm

Double Post Original EDIT: As an addendum to the below, if Mike Mearls for instance was the 'conceptual guy' and had a team of competent underlings to implement his ideas then we'd have little idea of how not-good he actually is. This is what I mean when I say the conceptual guy isn't all that big of a deal; they're pretty much like the producer in terms of movie making.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 3:40 pm

Yeah, and what are the development cycles on those games? Do any of them have graphics more exquisite than 4th Generation Console Sprites?

A Man in Black wrote: This isn't even including any games where all of the conceptual development was done by one person and the grunt work of implementing that was done by a team:

The conceptual development is seriously the easiest and most rewarding part though. It's important to get talent here, don't get me wrong, but they shouldn't get the lion's share or even an equal share of the credit.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 3:50 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Yeah, and what are the development cycles on those games?

Braid was in development for three years. Also, wile Jonathan Blow is the man behind Braid, he also hired people to assist him in things he couldn't do himself. He ponied up $200,000 and three years to do it, and the pool of people who worked on it is very small. But remember: it's actually a lot smaller than the core rules of an RPG. And 3 years is a long time.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:08 pm

And while you have 5 people working on a core ruleset, that doesn't mean it's design by committee. Someone, somewhere along the line, has to say "this doesn't work" or "this works". There has to be a producer/project manager/whatever.

I think it's that person having their shit together more than high-end writers that will result in quality product.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:10 pm

In any endeavor above a certain level, you start to have an issue where the overall quality of your product is capped by the weakest link in your chain. In other words, if you have sub-par writers, but a great project manager, you'll still produce a sub-par product. Likewise, with great writers, but only a mediocre PM, the best your product can be is mediocre.

echo

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:16 pm

Finding good PMs is easier than finding good writers however.

LR · Post by LR » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:20 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The point is that while people rightfully make novels as single authors backed up by a team of editors and artists, no one makes video games as a single individual except the Dwarf Fortress guy. And he's certifiably insane.

Toady just does all the coding by himself. For the actual design work, he bounces ideas off his brother.

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:30 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Braid was in development for three years. Also, wile Jonathan Blow is the man behind Braid, he also hired people to assist him in things he couldn't do himself. He ponied up $200,000 and three years to do it, and the pool of people who worked on it is very small. But remember: it's actually a lot smaller than the core rules of an RPG. And 3 years is a long time.

Braid spent eight months in XBLA's playtesting/internationalization/approval process, and was a working game well before that. Most of the cash and time went toward art, since there was no particular rush to get his pet project out the door. All of the credits besides Blow's are artist/musician/sound design credits, playtesting/QA credits, or dedications.

I'm also unsure what measure you're using to describe time-manipulation puzzle design as smaller than designing a P&P RPG, but then there's Marc Ten Bosch's weird 4D game, which took him about a month to develop from concept to IGF-finalist prototype.

There's also Bit.Trip Runner developed by a designer/engineer/artist team, World of Goo developed by a two-man team, Crayon Physics (a solo project from a really prolific developer), Everyday Shooter (one guy, top to bottom), and Audiosurf (single developer with outside art/UI design).

Video games are a fair bit more interdisciplinary than P&P RPGs, so they're usually made by people who specialize in each discipline, working together on the whole. Despite this, people totally do make games using the novelist model you mentioned, all the time. I don't have any vested interest in the debate about teams of developers versus auteur developers. I'm just pointing out that you've got working models of both in the video game world.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:53 pm

We need to look at this differently; we need to step back and realize what we have. Most TTRPG designs assume a single person is responsible for everything. Oh they will give him second eyes, like editors, but from the rules, to the setting to the writing it’s the writer’s job. Bullshit.

You need someone who is good with rules; that can design them and explain them. He probably writes like shit, but that’s not his job; that’s the writer’s job.

You need a good idea man; one who comes up with the ideas behind the classes (like orcs and dragons and fireballs) and then who can work with the rule writer to make sure they work together.

And you need someone who can listen to the two and come up with the ability to explain it to others.

Each needs their “editor” – the rule guy needs the play testers, the idea man the study group, and the writer needs the editors.

No one can do all three things well. We all know examples of the famous TTRPG writers and how they fail someone what in one of the three areas. The good ones can do two of the three, but this isn’t baseball (actually one out of three is good in baseball) and it’s not good enough.

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:55 pm

Well, videogames have the same issue of using-and-tossing college guys, but since is fairly obvious when someone writes shitty code, and videogame companies are a lot more visible, it just goes to the level of most cleric works.

I think that the issue is that writing a TTRPG is a little more complicated than it seems.

*First you either design or take an engine/core system. D20, TOON, HERO, FATE, etc.
*Then you design character classes/skills around it.
*Then you design equipment (if any), and NPC templates.
*Then is all the fuzzy world-building and stuff.

Fidning people who are good at all of the above is an impossible task. Someone can be talented in math, but can't create compelling worlds, someone can be an excellent writer, but suck at the rules bit. Someone can even not be good at scratch-building engines, but can work around an engine already designed.

I'm mostly extrapolating from the videogame industry, that creates games from a graphic engine (the Unreal engine, for example), but given the above, you simply can't leave a core rulebook to a simple person, in fact, even supplements have playtesters and editors behind them.

EDIT: Basically, what tzor said. Though the goddamn Internet connection didn't let me post it first.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 25, 2011 10:41 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
The point is that while people rightfully make novels as single authors backed up by a team of editors and artists, no one makes video games as a single individual except the Dwarf Fortress guy. And he's certifiably insane. People don't write Laws that way either, nor should they.

Lots of laws are written by single people. If fact, most are written by non-lawyers.

But that's not the point because designing a game is not as hard as designing a law or a video game. There are not a million lines of code that need to be debugged or 1400 pages of highly technical rules subject to hundreds of years of precedent to be playtested.

I don't see any successes for design by committee either. Shadowrun still has entire sections that are unworkable, DnD was never even looked at past 10th level and was obviously built with two visions or even three, and WW games were never good from a rules standpoint. The other games in the market are even worse.

I'll agree that the base game is the most fragile, but that's the point why you need a single author. Any game too complicated for one person to grok is going to be an unbalanced game.

Certainly, you can farm out the fluff sections to people better at writing fluff. Lots of other things can be crowdsourced like holding contests for monster and sample characters. You can even crowdsource playtesting and market research like Paizo does, but at the end of the day there is no room for conflicting visions.

The most important thing is to simply get the decent or bad designers out, and you can't do that if nothing is allowed to stand on its own. The very idea of getting decent designers out is the revolutionary idea here; the RPG hobby has been shackled with "the best game me and my friends could make" syndrome for decades and has not been made by "the best designers money can buy."

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Tue Jul 26, 2011 1:13 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Double Post Original EDIT: As an addendum to the below, if Mike Mearls for instance was the 'conceptual guy' and had a team of competent underlings to implement his ideas then we'd have little idea of how not-good he actually is. This is what I mean when I say the conceptual guy isn't all that big of a deal; they're pretty much like the producer in terms of movie making.

So, he'll be the Peter Molyneux of Dungeons and Dragons? Seems to fit- cool sounding pitches and ideas, but only half-finished at best and full of lies.

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Tue Jul 26, 2011 3:40 pm

Ok, instead of a long rant, here's the short version:

All teams need a leader, but the leader can't do everything by himself. Neither "Design by Comitee" or "one man shows" actually work.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Tue Jul 26, 2011 7:41 pm

A Man In Black wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The point is that while people rightfully make novels as single authors backed up by a team of editors and artists, no one makes video games as a single individual except the Dwarf Fortress guy. And he's certifiably insane.
And Notch. Braid had a writer/programmer and an artist. Cave Story was developed by one person. Ska Studios is another developer-artist team, and while I wouldn't call I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 or the Dishwasher series high art, they are fairly successful. Nifflas has a devoted following, although I've never tried any of his games.

This isn't even including any games where all of the conceptual development was done by one person and the grunt work of implementing that was done by a team: all of these people make games, soup to nuts, either by themselves or as a single author backed up by an artist.

I also make computer games basically as a solo enterprise.

Semi-un-related: so does every IF author.

TTRPGs 'solve' this problem by promoting the most promising fanboys and discarding them when the well runs dry or they burn out but I think that this is a bad way to do things. For one this prevents a unified design goal and philosophy. For two it discards people right when they get enough experience to become decent. And for three it washes out people who could've actually been really good writers. We cannot understate the effects of these; it seems that every edition without exception keeps heading down the death spiral of writing precisely because of this washout effect.

The solution to this seems simple: stop discarding writers just as they are getting enough experience to be good at it.

Novelists have the same word counts and tend to make a lot of money when they sell several million copies of their book (which core books do sell).

Which it goes without saying the vast majority of relatively SUCCESSFUL novelists don't manage to do. 'Novelist' is not really a full time career worth considering for the money. Every successful novelist has told me that, basically, even if you're good and lucky, it's not worth quitting your dayjob.

Maybe 1 in a million people who wants to be a published writer succeeds at it, and then maybe 1 in a million of those published writers actually gets to the level you're talking about where they're making real money.

K · Post by K » Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:24 am

Schwarzkopf wrote:
TTRPGs 'solve' this problem by promoting the most promising fanboys and discarding them when the well runs dry or they burn out but I think that this is a bad way to do things. For one this prevents a unified design goal and philosophy. For two it discards people right when they get enough experience to become decent. And for three it washes out people who could've actually been really good writers. We cannot understate the effects of these; it seems that every edition without exception keeps heading down the death spiral of writing precisely because of this washout effect.
The solution to this seems simple: stop discarding writers just as they are getting enough experience to be good at it.

Novelists have the same word counts and tend to make a lot of money when they sell several million copies of their book (which core books do sell).
Which it goes without saying the vast majority of relatively SUCCESSFUL novelists don't manage to do. 'Novelist' is not really a full time career worth considering for the money. Every successful novelist has told me that, basically, even if you're good and lucky, it's not worth quitting your dayjob.

Maybe 1 in a million people who wants to be a published writer succeeds at it, and then maybe 1 in a million of those published writers actually gets to the level you're talking about where they're making real money.

I'm pretty sure that more than 1 in a trillion people become successful novelists.

At the end of the day, the number of people who can finish a manuscript of any length is vanishingly small. That cuts out 95% or more of the aspiring novelists out of the pool right at the beginning.

Then the question becomes "why don't novelists make a lot of money?" Mostly that's because they are willing to take very small amounts of money. It's not even the only industry that employs artists and bones them (in the recording industry, it's possible to sell a million albums and still owe the recording company $400K even if you didn't get an advance).

That being said, finding the great designers of games is not an issue of training up the decent designers who can make deadlines with product that doesn't suck too bad. That's a bad investment in the hope of finding the 1 in 100 designers who can actually sell your IP.

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."

I mean, would WotC ever be willing to pay someone like Steve Jackson the amount of money he makes with his own company?

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 4:39 am

K wrote:I mean, would WotC ever be willing to pay someone like Steve Jackson the amount of money he makes with his own company?

If you mean the American Steve Jackson, SJ Games has never been a hugely profitable enterprise. I don't think that there's an amount of money WOTC could pay him to leave it, but I'm pretty sure WOTC could afford to pay him what he takes home at the end of the day.

K · Post by K » Wed Jul 27, 2011 5:36 am

A Man In Black wrote:
K wrote:I mean, would WotC ever be willing to pay someone like Steve Jackson the amount of money he makes with his own company?
If you mean the American Steve Jackson, SJ Games has never been a hugely profitable enterprise. I don't think that there's an amount of money WOTC could pay him to leave it, but I'm pretty sure WOTC could afford to pay him what he takes home at the end of the day.

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.