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sexpig by night posted:If your neighbor was making money off his nicely mowed lawn wouldn't you think 'hey taking my trash out is nice but he should probably just break me off some of that'? No. It’s the same effort for me, and the same expression of reciprocity. If he gets a better offer on his house because there’s a showing the next day, good for him. (To make the analogy work, though, I’d also have to retain the right to make money off the lawn, like the authors did here.)
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May 31, 2018 21:39
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The truly Lawful thing to do is to invade my neighbor's lawn, and then divide the newly taken land amongst my heirs.
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May 31, 2018 21:52
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For the "but you need exposure to into this industry", seems to be as if we're living in about 10 years in the past and places like DriveThruRPG doesn't exist. I see a ton of little indy projects ranging from Gm supplements to adventures and systems. I guess I don't know how much they sell, bujt I have a feeling there wouldn't be so much there if it wasn't selling at all. At the least it seems a way of getting exposure (via word of mouth, for a video game analogy look at how games like Undrertale and Night in the Woods caught on) (E: and get paid something) , without this "we must pray to and get the blessing the established Gods of RPGs" nonsense. Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jun 1, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 22:48
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Subjunctive posted:Would it have been better if they’d each paid the other $2000 so that there was tax deducted? Technically, you're still legally required to pay tax on barter arrangements based on the fair market value of the products or services you're exchanging. I mean, nobody does, but you're supposed to, and if you ever get audited it'll look bad that you didn't.
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Jun 1, 2018 01:36
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Serf posted:It's almost as if tabletop RPGs are a hobbyist industry where getting people to pay you is hard for like a million reasons. I personally blame the willingness to work for free on foolish hope of "making it" and having more passion and creativity than business sense. There is, of course, a big jump from taking the notes and reminders you need to run an adventure you designed yourself and turning it into something other people can run, but some prep work is easier to sell than others. (Once you have a town map and some location and NPC writeups, for instance, it doesn't take that much more work to turn that into a town supplement someone else can drop into their campaign.) Add to that the fact that for some people designing games and putting them out there is a hobby in its own right which they do for pleasure. On the one hand, this is clearly not great for professionals trying to make a living out of the industry for the reasons you outline. On the other hand, would the RPG scene be enriched if 9/10ths of the indie RPGs out there never got released? Would it be enriched if fanzines and hobbyist products were wiped out? I don't think it would, and I don't think it is a moral failing of hobbyists to publish their homebrewed material. Yes, it makes it harder for the professionals, but if a significant component of your job involves something which people like to do by themselves and/or would pay for the privilege for doing, it's inevitably going to be difficult. That's why you don't see many people making a living by eating other people's desserts. Like I keep saying - the industry needs the hobby, the hobby doesn't need the industry.
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Jun 1, 2018 10:44
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Between this and Serf's points I am coming to the conclusion that the real moral failing isn't people devaluing each others' labour by working for free so much as it's the industry pretending it's a place where more than a very few, extremely lucky individuals are able to make a full-time living designing RPGs. Structurally, it's impossible to avoid people producing work either for free or on a hobbyist "beer money" basis - to do that you'd need to remove the DIY aspect from the RPG hobby in the first place, which is not really possible now that the cat is out of the bag and even if it were possible, you'd be taking away one of the things people enjoy most about the hobby. (It'd be like Games Workshop shutting down miniatures production and having Warhammer exclusively use abstract cardboard chits to represent units.) It is sad when people dream of making a living in the field of their choosing but it turns out to be impossible - but I think the moral imperative is to allow people to make a living at all, not to make whatever dream job they want viable even if practically speaking that's not actually viable. (My heart breaks every day knowing that I'm not going to be paid to eat other people's desserts, to continue the example from my previous post.) If the industry levelled with incomers and said "Look, you don't want to get into this as your full-time job, treat it as a hobby you can get beer money out of and maybe, possibly more than that if your product happens to be the one in a thousand which actually radically takes off and does superbly well", then it would be vastly less exploitative if only because people would go into it with open eyes and not impoverish themselves and their dependents because they passed up the boring job which paid alright for the cool gamer job that doesn't actually pay the bills.
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Jun 1, 2018 10:59
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I assume it is a lot like the comic book industry. Most people are doing it for nothing as a person just starting out or hoping to make it big at some nebulous point in the future . And once you get established either you are one of the top 0.1% of people who are talented enough to make it a worthwhile job or your talent gets you noticed for a job that pays way more in a similar industry and you go do that. If you want to draw comic books you have to be either a superstar or someone who loves drawing pictures more than material gain. A lot of guys vanish when they find they can make multiple times more money doing graphic design or story board work.
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Jun 1, 2018 12:22
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Warthur posted:Between this and Serf's points I am coming to the conclusion that the real moral failing isn't people devaluing each others' labour by working for free so much as it's the industry pretending it's a place where more than a very few, extremely lucky individuals are able to make a full-time living designing RPGs. This is how it works in nearly every creative occupation and entertainment industry in the world. See the stereotypical story about the young kid moving to LA with dreams of making it big as an actor and ending up waiting tables for the rest of their life or until they give up. Look at how many writers send out work and get rejections or musicians who never get recognized. And those industries are far older, bigger, and more profitable than elfgames, and some of them have things like unions and protections (as inadequate and poo poo as they are, they're better than literally nothing but they generally only kick in once you've started to "make it"). This is of course because creative work is seen as having negligible value, and the devaluation of labor across the board throughout the last century has only made it worse. Since the money is tightly controlled and the people holding the pursestrings are skittish about risks you drive wages down and people who want to do this for a living become more and more accepting of poo poo pay because they have bought into the lie that you can be anything you want to be under capitalism. All of this produces a sort of brutal hierarchy where you have to "put in the time" to become worthy of having some money handed to you, and that sort of cycle is perpetuated in tabletop RPGs but far smaller and more vicious. You have to prove yourself, get name recognition, and also be very lucky to get to the point where your work could possibly scrape out a peasant-like existence in the modern world. Even moreso than the average worker you have to accept that you will live on a razor's edge and you could fall off at any time. It's a loving precarious way to live, and that's why so much work is made by people who do it as a hobby. It can't sustain you, and asking to be paid for your work will get you ignored or replaced by someone who will do it for free (which is, again, just a worsened version of how most people won't challenge their boss at work because they know that they are ultimately replaceable and unimportant under the dehumanizing system of capitalism). And the people who are in a position to change this system (but I'll get to that in a moment), went through it themselves and see it as a rite of passage because we're conditioned to think that suffering is good and necessary in order to prove that you deserve what you want. But in the end, there is no "reasonable" solution to the problem of why it sucks to work in any sort of creative or entertainment industry. To the capitalist, unpaid labor loving rules because that means more profit, and in an industry where profits are as skinny as a loving flatworm that becomes even more important. On the less malicious end, this is how you get Harper and friends trading favors for labor. The only solution to this problem, in the sense that there is a solution, is political. Foolster41 posted:For the "but you need exposure to into this industry", seems to be as if we're living in about 10 years in the past and places like DriveThruRPG doesn't exist. Most of those designers I've talked with have described their profits as "beer money."
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Jun 1, 2018 13:54
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Serf posted:Most of those designers I've talked with have described their profits as "beer money." While the odds of striking it modest as a self-published RPG author aren't any better than they used to be, I'll at least point out that the current state of affairs is substantially better than the days where doing so meant having to order $10,000+ worth of vanity-published copies of your RPG in advance only to have 95% of them lie around your garage moldering until you finally had to throw them away. That the barrier to self-publishing no longer requires a chunk of cash in addition to your time, and can even be made to pay for more elaborate methods of publication with the right crowdfunding pitch, may still not be ideal from the perspective of allowing creators to actually do what they love as a day job, but it's still a significant improvement over the way things used to be.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:55
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The indie comics analogy works well here. A lot of smaller creators feel fortunate to break even on table fees and gas after a two-day convention.
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Jun 1, 2018 16:11
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Serf posted:This is how it works in nearly every creative occupation and entertainment industry in the world. See the stereotypical story about the young kid moving to LA with dreams of making it big as an actor and ending up waiting tables for the rest of their life or until they give up. Moreover, you don't produce bits of movie as a by-product of watching movies, and you don't produce bits of novels as a by-product of reading novels, but you do produce RPG material as a by-product of running RPGs. The DIY factor is there in the hobby (and, I note, fairly consistently ignored by you in your posts) and intrinsic to it in a way which it isn't in the creative industries you are comparing it to.
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Jun 1, 2018 18:13
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Has anyone put out any estimates of the relative risk/reward of freelancing in this industry versus spending the same amount of time trying to self-publish and kickstart your own work? I mean yeah, there'd be a lot of assumptions so it'd be mostly back of the napkin, but I wonder if that sort of thought exercise might be illustrative. It was less than 2 decades ago that almost everything had to go through a publishing house and self-publishing was impossible or likely to cost you your life savings. A lot of freelancers today were at least involved as hobbyists in those days, and I wonder how much of the willingness of people to put up with the exploitative poo poo is inherited assumptions that freelancing is still the "safe" way to try to work in RPGs. Basically, I'm just wondering if, as time goes on, the freelance pool may shrink as people figure that if they're going to get paid poo poo in this industry either way, they should at least get poo poo pay and ownership of the property instead of work for hire. EDIT: Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I wonder how companies setting up these "for pay user content portals" will impact that shakeout as well. I'm sure you couldn't make a living trying to sell your fan supplements on, say, White Wolf's official portal on drivethru. But if your main impetus is to be able to (misleadingly) call yourself a "published RPG author who has worked on supplements for popular games such as Vampire the Masquerade and Dungeons and Dragons", so you have "cred" for your kickstarter, why bother with the freelancer bullshit? Desiden fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jun 3, 2018 |
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Jun 3, 2018 00:26
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Bedlamdan posted:The truly Lawful thing to do is to invade my neighbor's lawn, and then divide the newly taken land amongst my heirs. Lawnful Evil
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Jun 3, 2018 09:35
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Christ, the GenCon website is loving awful. Its presentation and the event search tool is crushingly awful.
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Jun 3, 2018 13:30
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I think Hollywood is a really weird analogy here, especially as someone who made an RPG about Hollywood. In entertainment, if someone wants to use your idea, they’ll buy an option to maybe make it. That usually means they have the right to do whatever the gently caress they want with it, keep it, change it, with you making more money if/when it goes into production^ and if/ when the box office hits. If they bring on more writers on the project, everyone who does a round of revisions gets paid, and at the end there’s an arbitration process to see who was the main author(s)*. There’s no favorite trading for labor built into the system. Also, the barrier to entry for film and TV is so high because, unlike RPG’s, you’re gambling with house money. Production cost millions, distribution can cost similar (especially if you advertise/get overseas rights; think of how many times you’ve seen niche TV shows with fans demanding “When can we see this in Australia?”). None of this is really analogous to KS. ^Especially if they hire you to be on set and do daily rewrites. *The only real exception here is sometimes, between when your representation or a producer sees a script and when it goes to a buyer, they will demand you revise and revise, off the record. This isn’t an official part of the process and if you guilty of trying to tamp down on on this.
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Jun 3, 2018 16:56
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Who's the Harvey Weinstein of tabletop gaming?
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Jun 3, 2018 17:08
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Kevin Crawford actually did a pretty good interview with Adam Koebel recently about how he was able to succeed at making RPGs into a career. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziteyWHAzCs The highlights appear to be: -put out freebies so you get people on your DTRPG mailing list, but have actually products behind that so that people can give you money -know what you can deliver through KS and don't overextend yourself -mechanics are more important than setting -find the niche your game appeals to and market it to them -actually do the work of writing the game and putting it up for sale. Don't give away everything just for name recognition -as a newbie, stay away from PWYW because it just doesn't work
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Jun 3, 2018 17:44
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Serf posted:Kevin Crawford actually did a pretty good interview with Adam Koebel recently about how he was able to succeed at making RPGs into a career. This interview is great, not least because Kevin Crawford's voice is magnificent  "I worked at the Yale Divinity School's library, down in special collections. And it turned out that the way you represent an item that doesn't have a known publisher is, you write 'Sine Nomine' in the entry. So out of a general spirit of malice toward future librarians, I decided to name my publishing company Sine Nomine."
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Jun 3, 2018 17:53
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In a lot of entertainment industries, any correspondence including ideas or concepts is trashed unread. The potential fallout from using someone else's idea is just not worth the risk. Meanwhile, RPGs are squeezing content out of fans for the pleasure and prestige of seeing your work made semi official. Plutonis posted:Who's the Harvey Weinstein of tabletop gaming? Ed Greenwood
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Jun 3, 2018 18:56
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moths posted:Ed Greenwood I don't wanna defend the dude but all the behavior I've heard of is very sexual-harassment-but-we-used-to-accept-it and not exactly Weinstein-level, unless there's new stuff I haven't heard of?
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Jun 3, 2018 19:25
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You need to downscale to RPG industry levels of power. Nobody in the industry is as influential as Weinstein, but Greenwood's con predations and harassment make him the closest available analogue. E: That's to say, Greenwood would have been RPG Weinstein if he ever figured out how to. moths fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jun 3, 2018 |
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Jun 3, 2018 19:36
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Kestral posted:"I worked at the Yale Divinity School's library, down in special collections. And it turned out that the way you represent an item that doesn't have a known publisher is, you write 'Sine Nomine' in the entry. So out of a general spirit of malice toward future librarians, I decided to name my publishing company Sine Nomine." I didn't think I could like Kevin Crawford more than I already did, and yet
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Jun 4, 2018 03:08
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Jun 20, 2018 06:40
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Not doing us wizards any favours, that one. A pox on his house, etc.
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Jun 20, 2018 06:42
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ah yes, the classic "gently caress you, got mine" ethos
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Jun 20, 2018 06:48
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Why did Pundit turn so hard against Mearls and Crawford? I don't remember either of them having the guts to publicly regret throwing Pundit some pity relevancy. Did they just not genuflect enough for his tastes? Also, I guess Venger Satanis, who I used to think was just a low-key edgelord but mostly harmless, is in on some ~FREE SPEECH~ project with Pundit and Desborough, so good for him getting all those fleas. The most recent of which Pundit sells as explaining how people were probably taught to play D&D wrong deliberately to undermine the hobby, because his story arc has a strong throughline from the beginning I guess.
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Jun 20, 2018 06:54
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That Old Tree posted:Why did Pundit turn so hard against Mearls and Crawford? I don't remember either of them having the guts to publicly regret throwing Pundit some pity relevancy. Did they just not genuflect enough for his tastes? There is no reasoning with these people. Pundit's politics (as are most reactionaries) is based on resentment, and there was never going to be a situation where WOTC hires him and he "backs down" and throws his support behind the product - the fact that they did allow him to attach his name to D&D only gives him more reason to push all the harder, because why stop at an inch if they already gave you the inch?
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Jun 20, 2018 06:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:There is no reasoning with these people. Pundit's politics (as are most reactionaries) is based on resentment, and there was never going to be a situation where WOTC hires him and he "backs down" and throws his support behind the product - the fact that they did allow him to attach his name to D&D only gives him more reason to push all the harder, because why stop at an inch if they already gave you the inch? Yeah, sure, but this looks more like a vendetta than just being aggrieved that the trumpets didn't sound as he ascended on a shaft of light after D&D5 came out and the minority were disgusted while the majority didn't give one poo poo. I guess perhaps it's because Mearls had BIG TALKS with, uh, I think maybe Kreider and Hurly? Even if I think that was a futile and unnecessarily legitimizing endeavor on their parts, it's probably inexcusable to Pundit to give those ladies the time of day. EDIT:  Also Dan Davenport is "finally done with RPGnet" after they made it policy they wouldn't mod "gently caress ICE/CBP" as a general attack. I literally have no idea where else he posts about his IRC interviews for upcoming products, but I'm sure the industry will feel the sting of his principled stand.
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 07:17
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That Old Tree posted:EDIT: It really tells you how hosed-up something is when even the RPGnet mods can't manage to be mealy-mouthed about it anymore.
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Jun 20, 2018 07:28
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That Old Tree posted:EDIT: Wait this was something they needed to specify? Is there someone posting on RPGnet who works for ICE and they've been complaining about being unfairly attacked?
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Jun 20, 2018 07:31
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Kai Tave posted:Wait this was something they needed to specify? Is there someone posting on RPGnet who works for ICE and they've been complaining about being unfairly attacked? I don't know, I almost never even glance through Tangency, but I get a lot of drama aftermath reading Trouble Tickets and Infractions, and there was a big policy update thread so I guess the subject came up.
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Jun 20, 2018 07:34
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Kai Tave posted:Wait this was something they needed to specify? Is there someone posting on RPGnet who works for ICE and they've been complaining about being unfairly attacked? RPGnet posted:I would remod to do this, but in the interests of getting this out while the iron is hot: I feel that it's a byzantine rule that you can't conduct a "group attack" in your posting, and I also feel like it's a byzantine rule that they had to clarify that they're no longer prohibiting people from poo poo-talking ICE, but ... baby steps?
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Jun 20, 2018 07:40
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Isn't this kevin crawford? Calling trans people delusional kevin crawford? Made a literal 'you can become an attack helicopter' meme in his loving game kevin crawford? Posted a bunch of psuedointellectual crap on reddit about how he's not a transphobe (he is).
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Jun 20, 2018 08:01
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AMooseDoesStuff posted:Isn't this kevin crawford? Yes, that's his reddit account. Goddamnit!
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Jun 20, 2018 08:05
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I can't find the original quote. But he outright says in literally the very next sentence "Except it's not a joke and not a delusion". He writes a rhetorical question, follows it with another sentence ("is delusional") as the argument, and then immediately says the argument is inaccurate. It seems clear to me that it's a framing device, unless you think he's arguing that trans people are delusional but people who want to be a helicopter are not, which is a bizarre argument to make.
Xotl fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 08:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:I feel that it's a byzantine rule that you can't conduct a "group attack" in your posting, and I also feel like it's a byzantine rule that they had to clarify that they're no longer prohibiting people from poo poo-talking ICE, but ... baby steps? Or the border patrol, now.
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Jun 20, 2018 08:57
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Kai Tave posted:Wait this was something they needed to specify? Is there someone posting on RPGnet who works for ICE and they've been complaining about being unfairly attacked? I don’t know that he’s been complaining but, literally yes an ICE employee has been posting in the thread.
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Jun 20, 2018 08:58
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Comparisons of trans and GNC folks to some hypothetical future where people become gravtanks as a form of radical self expression is *at best* super tone deaf regardless of context.
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Jun 20, 2018 08:59
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Xotl posted:I can't find the original quote. But he outright says in literally the very next sentence "Except it's not a joke and not a delusion". He writes a rhetorical question, follows it with another sentence ("is delusional") as the argument, and then immediately says the argument is inaccurate. It seems clear to me that it's a framing device, unless you think he's arguing that trans people are delusional but people who want to be a helicopter are not, which is a bizarre argument to make. His argument seems to be transhumanist, not transphobic - expression of gender is one aspect of expression of identity. His argument appears to be that the attempt to imply that trans people are delusional by claiming an identity of an attack helicopter, which is assumed to be delusional, is flawed because there's nothing intrinsically delusional about identifying as an attack helicopter, and there's reason to believe that at some point in the future it'll be as legitimate to alter your appearance and physicality to reflect that as it is considered legitimate to alter your biology to reflect your gender identity now. He's not calling trans people delusional - quite the opposite, he's trying to point out how flawed and constrained the transphobic messaging is, and how it doesn't make any sense.
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Jun 20, 2018 09:00
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Lupercalcalcal posted:His argument seems to be transhumanist, not transphobic - expression of gender is one aspect of expression of identity. His argument appears to be that the attempt to imply that trans people are delusional by claiming an identity of an attack helicopter, which is assumed to be delusional, is flawed because there's nothing intrinsically delusional about identifying as an attack helicopter, and there's reason to believe that at some point in the future it'll be as legitimate to alter your appearance and physicality to reflect that as it is considered legitimate to alter your biology to reflect your gender identity now. He's not calling trans people delusional - quite the opposite, he's trying to point out how flawed and constrained the transphobic messaging is, and how it doesn't make any sense. The attack helicopter meme is basically a way of saying "lol trans people are delusional" and attempting to somehow, I dunno, "reclaim" it by going "no no, this time it's meant in deadly earnest, you can ACTUALLY be [thing which is associated with implying that you're a delusional brokebrain]" is, as Saguaro PI says, exceptionally tone deaf. There's been a great deal of medical and psychological research that's gone into gender identity and dysphoria related to that which is why it's not on the same level as somebody going "lol I'm an attack helicopter" so it isn't actually a great comparison to make even in the context of some made-up transhuman sci-fi setting. Is there a link to the reddit thread in question? I can't seem to turn up anything.
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Jun 20, 2018 09:07
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