So, this one is going to be short. I pinkie promise! I was exploring a framework for a Pokemon campaign and thought it would be fun to make use of percentile dice (i.e. d% or d100) for most everything. So, how about percentile dice exploration checks? My first thought was to keep it simple and say there's a 20% chance of an encounter per turn, since that's a nice round number. It's slightly more frequent than the typical 1-in-6 chance, by about 25%, but that's not the worst. The nice thing was, I realized, you can combine the roll to check if an encounter is about to happen with the roll to see which encounter takes place. Imagine before that you made your encounter roll at a 20% chance per turn, and then you roll d20 on an encounter table to see what it is. Instead, you can roll at your 20% chance, but then you can use the same roll on that same d20 table. This means when you make your roll, you also know immediately what encounter it is. Isn't that handy! So, I w...
First way to destroy an industry outright; stop selling products.
ReplyDeleteI gotta say, the observation that everyone is just selling pdfs to each other is really spot on. thanks for the thoughtful analysis!
ReplyDeleteThis is a much needed critique. I've seen a lot of people hurt themselves because they buy in to the toxic positivity of the scene. I love the esoteric art this scene can produce, but the idea that a person can support themselves or their family with that art just isn't borne out by reality.
ReplyDeletei've been thinking about this post ever since i read it last night and i feel like a large part of why i stopped publishing writing for a year plus is because it did honestly feel kind of pointless to me to all be passing around the same $5 for pdfs and desperately scrambling to market yourself in the indie rpg space. i recently got back into writing in a niche where i basically can't take money for it and it's been so refreshing that i'm strongly considering just making most or all my stuff on itch free.
ReplyDeletei feel like it also bears talking about that like... i want to say 2-3 years ago, there was a lot of conversation about how if you were publishing rpgs on itch, you not only owed it to yourself but owed it to *the community* to price it up, so that people trying to make a living off of it would have their price points taken seriously. which is logic taken from the artist commission space that i think makes sense there, but i think when applied to the indie rpg community got kind of... weird?
This is like such a breath of fresh air--im always surrounded by people online who insist on monetizing *everything* and ive always found it so suffocating.
ReplyDeleteFor my part, ive found that when i put a price tag on my games, no one touches them (which is actually useful for when i make something i want to put out in the world but i want to limit how many people see it lol)--and i'd rather make something that connects with people than make $$$ off my passion projects that i wouldve worked on either way.