The Business: Should You Make Your Own Game?

"I want to make my own tabletop RPG!"

via GIPHY

There is a caveat, which I'll get to below.

I assume that you mean "I will make a living doing this!"

NO. YOU WON'T.

There are far better, easier, and safer--mentally, financially, physically--ways to make a living than making tabletop RPGs. You're going to be fortunate, if you get best case results, to be making the same income as a typical Midwestern office drone. More likely you will be working to earn the same as you would working full time at Walmart or Target as a grunt on the floor stocking shelves and ringing up purchases.

"But why?"

Because (a) tabletop RPGs are a medium that is utterly dependent upon the Network Effect for product value, and (b) tabletop RPGs are a hobbyist commercial niche whereupon a very small number of actual hobbyists support a four-fold or greater number of Normie players who rarely--if ever--buy anything but instead play casually as a pastime. Hobbyists, if they are not good salesmen--and most are not--have to go where the biggest pool of players are, which means they play the biggest game and that slot's been filled since 1974: Dungeons & Dragons.

"But-"

Horror? Call of Cthulhu is still on top. Space Opera/Hard-SF? Traveller, still. Cyberpunk? Still Shadowrun followed by Cyberpunk 2020. Superheroes? Still Champions followed by Mutants & Masterminds. Giant Robots? Still BattleTech. Yes, "still".

And the Number Three or Four slots? Something from Palladium Books is always there, except for Post-Apocalypse where its flagship title RIFTS remains supreme to this day (followed by Gamma World).

Get it yet? Every commercially-viable genre in the medium is already taken, and held, by a title no younger than 1990. Every other game out there is an also-ran, a product the vast majority of hobbyists have never heard of and never will, whose presence could be wiped clean utterly tomorrow.

This means that what you have to do to make it work writing tabletop RPGs for a living is far more severe now--and that includes most of the last decade--than the first 30 years of the medium's existence.

I keep pointing out The RPG Pundit being a Canadian expatriate in Uruguay for this reason: he makes First World money but lives in a Third World country, and he lives decently on his income writing tabletop RPG products in this manner. Others making it work have made a similar arrangement, in that they live in low cost-of-living areas where their income goes a lot further.

This is not new either. Palladium Books benefited greatly from being based in areas near or in Detroit, Michigan where the cost of doing business is significantly lower than Seattle, Washington. Palladium's been in that area since its founding in the late 1970s, when layout was done entirely by hand and printing was done via a printing company in big print runs (and, for Palladium, still is).

Is this what you want? Because if you want to make a solid living doing this, then you're going to have to accept that making wholesale changes to where and how you live is necessary to make that equivalent of a manager's paycheck at Burger King go far enough to work for you. You will have to know how to drive your costs down as far and as hard as you can, at both ends, and stay on top of that for years on end. That's a lot of work, and for most people that's too much work for too little reward.

Or do you just want to write some stuff and put it up for sale as a side hustle? Or a hobby that pays for itself?

Because that's where tabletop RPGs, for the vast majority of makers, is going: Cottage Industry Territory.

For every competent guy that makes it work like Alexander Macris and the Pundit, there's guys like Jim Desbourough who struggle hard and don't always make it work.

Your odds of discovery are low. Your odds of adoption are even lower. There is nothing you can publish that stands a chance of displacing the titles on top of your genre because you have no user network. You literally have to wait for the big dogs to shit the bed and kill themselves to have any chance at success, a process than can last a lifetime or more depending on factors you have no control over whatsoever.

I advise you, if you're that hard on to do this, to keep it as a hobby or a side-hustle until your product category has such a long tail that your ongoing sales start paying the bills entirely month-to-month. That process, by the way, will take no less than five years and probably ten or more; you're doing this while keeping up a day job, dealing with other interests, coping with shit beyond your control, etc.

There is one situation where I say "Go for it", however: you're making it for private consumption for yourself and your clique.

A curmudgeonly man by the name of Brian Glechman wrote his game for such a reason. You can find it here: Age of Heroes. It's a Tolkien-inspired fantasy game, but it's tailor-made for his circle of players that like this sort of thing. If that's your motivation, or if you're doing it simply to practice game design as a discipline (as you would in a formal college programe for videogame design), you're good to go. Just earn your living elsewhere, so long as you're able.

Remember this: most folks that got started in tabletop RPGs that could move to other media, including OldPub novel writing, did it in a heartbeat. That's how bad it is outside a handful of titles. You are not going to do any better.