|
Gray Ghost posted:I’m super interested to see what usability improvements they make; would love them to start with the god-awful jukebox implementation. I want the ability to fix objects in place in some layer, like the ability to not accidentally gently caress with the background while trying to place a different map object as gm. There's scripts that can do it, but it's still not baseline.
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 12:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 02:48 |
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:I want the ability to fix objects in place in some layer, like the ability to not accidentally gently caress with the background while trying to place a different map object as gm. There's scripts that can do it, but it's still not baseline. YES, PLEASE. I gently caress this up so much it's a running joke with my players.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 14:53
|
|
|
UrbanLabyrinth posted:https://twitter.com/doctorcomics/status/1496277768493215747 Yeesh, yeah. What that says to me is "by moving from one of the industry leaders to the main industry leader, I now have a living wage"
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 15:36
|
|
|
It took me a bit to remember that not everyone lives where buying a house is a tremendous piece of economic luck.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 15:50
|
|
|
There are hundreds of millions in gamer dollars going into the industry, and it's trickled down to one man being able to start a family at 54. Who is grateful for this unexpected blessing.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 15:54
|
|
|
It's a bit harrowing, but I think the only thing surprising to me is that Paizo apparently doesn't pay a living wage. I never really suspected the majority of ttrpgs supplied reliable income but I guess I figured Paizo specifically did. Not out of any good will, just because I know Pathfinder is the only name most people would recognize other than DnD.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 16:23
|
|
|
Countblanc posted:It's a bit harrowing, but I think the only thing surprising to me is that Paizo apparently doesn't pay a living wage. I never really suspected the majority of ttrpgs supplied reliable income but I guess I figured Paizo specifically did. Not out of any good will, just because I know Pathfinder is the only name most people would recognize other than DnD. They just recently started professionally cleaning their offices, didn't they?
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 16:48
|
|
|
Who actually benefits from this being a multi-million dollar industry? There's a lot of money getting thrown into this hobby and Hollywood math'd into a loss where creators get to take home peanuts and exposure.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Shareholders As the system is designed.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 17:00
|
|
|
I have no idea how it works for Paizo, who are... I have no idea how Paizo works. Apparently they're big enough to funnel large amounts of money into an open pit labelled "MMO" and still be in business, but I don't quite see how. If I had to answer the question of "why can't people make money in this industry", it kind of comes down to two things. 1) Everything is ludicrously underpriced. People expect huge books that combine creative work with expert technical writing, and they want them to have insanely-high production values. $25 PDFs, at the volume you can expect to sell, don't translate into living wages for all of the writers, editors, illustrators, graphic designers, layout designers, and producers involved in making a new corebook. 2) Most of the businesses in the industry are... not real businesses. They're either hobbies that somebody runs in their spare time without expecting or desiring to support themselves on, or they're "businesses" that are able to support the person who runs them, but are only able to survive because they exploit the labor of people who are willing to create for less than minimum wage in exchange for getting to live the dream of being a "real" RPG writer. It would be nice if there was more pushback against either of these things, but I'm not sure how to get either started, especially since "put your money where your mouth is" would involve ceasing to buy most of the RPGs being produced.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 17:25
|
|
|
I thought that Stevens carefully arranged things so that little or none of Paizo's money was on the line when Goblinworks inevitably flamed out.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 17:33
|
|
|
Last I saw Paizo paid well for the tabletop industry (7 cents a word, thereabouts?) but that's absolutely damning with faint praise.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 17:59
|
|
|
At then end of the day, if most books got more expensive or noticeably lower quality I wouldn't buy nearly as many. As a person decades into the hobby, who is also willing to buy a steady stream of new content, that is just what would happen. I can't imagine anyone getting into TRPGs from scratch if books were twice the price. At the end of the day, most career RPG producers should just get other jobs. It sucks.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 18:18
|
|
|
Also yeah buying a house in Washington near Seattle or near any metro city is probably going to be impossible without a job that pays a shitton.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 18:21
|
|
|
Dexo posted:Also yeah buying a house in Washington near Seattle or near any metro city is probably going to be impossible without a job that pays a shitton. yeah, i wonder if the difference isn't living wage versus below poverty levels, but can buy a house versus living wage.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
I think the question of "does Paizo pay a living wage" isn't the right one. It's "how many living wages does Paizo pay." Even huge tech companies like mine, that have over a hundred thousand employees, most being paid well above the median national wage, still has thousands of part-time and contract workers. I don't know who Jason Tondro is, but was he one of Paizo's full-time employees, or was he doing spec work, contract work, etc? That question is not in any way intended to endorse Paizo, or claim that actually they're paying people well or properly or what they deserve, mind you. I don't know that, and I assume they're mostly paying people pretty crap. Just, it's an oversimplification to take a single worker's case and presume it means that company isn't paying anyone. On a second note: the statement that the RPG industry makes "hundreds of millions of dollars" is also a bit incomplete, yeah? The bulk of the profit generated by the industry is concentrated into a handful of companies (WotC and Paizo being probably the two biggest). There's a long, long, long tail of the industry, comprising dozens of companies and hundreds, I guess probably thousands, of individual content producers very few of whom make or sell enough product at a high enough price to make a significant profit or pay anyone a living wage. I think it's fair to say that "the large majority" of people writing and producing RPG content work solo or for a small press that have anywhere from negative, to barely-scraping-by levels of profit to distribute to their workers. And this answers the actual question. Why don't even people at Paizo get paid well (if that's the case, let's assume now that it is)? The answer is because in a free market, you don't have to pay workers much if they have no better options. In fact, in America all you have to pay them is at least minimum wage, if they're actually employees; and if they're contract workers, you can pay by the word or by the piece or whatever you want, even if that works out to less than minimum wage. The supply of good RPG development jobs is tiny compared to the demand for them, and that supply/demand curve puts employees in no position to negotiate for better wages. That's the reality we live in, and the exceptions are essentially cases where someone running a company chooses to "do the right thing" because of their own moral compass or because their employees are also their friends or perhaps occasionally as a response to social pressure, despite not actually being pushed to do that by the market forces. I'm skeptical that social pressure by customers is prevalent or sustainable enough to actually significantly hurt the handful of big RPG companies that could afford to pay good wages to their workers. Until we have some kind of regulation that forces companies to pay "minimum wages" that are actually livable, middle-class wages; or, until people stop volunteering to put out RPG content for at a loss, for free, or for tiny profits that can't support a living wage; I don't think this is going to change. If you want to earn a living wage, seek employment in an industry that has millions of good paying jobs, not merely dozens. I'm very sympathetic to those who are struggling to make ends meet while trying to do what they love for a living, I really am... but my advice is, don't do that, unless doing what you love is more important to you than food, shelter, clothes, etc.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 19:47
|
|
|
Yeah the publishing industry is metaphorically a ship with a gaping hole in the side, and in tabletop RPGs is too often powered by the Love of the Game alone.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 19:55
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Last I saw Paizo paid well for the tabletop industry (7 cents a word, thereabouts?) but that's absolutely damning with faint praise. This is not a good rate for the industry. A large chunk of indie publishers pay a minimum of $0.10 a word, many pay more, with a few paying even $0.20-25 a word. A lot of freelancers were sharing their rates in discord servers last year as part of short-lived attempts to form a TTRPG freelancers union. The main takeaway was that the big, monied publishers in the scene are by far the biggest offenders when it comes to drastically underpaying. Indie folks are paying so, so much more.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:I think the question of "does Paizo pay a living wage" isn't the right one. It's "how many living wages does Paizo pay." Even huge tech companies like mine, that have over a hundred thousand employees, most being paid well above the median national wage, still has thousands of part-time and contract workers. I don't know who Jason Tondro is, but was he one of Paizo's full-time employees, or was he doing spec work, contract work, etc? Yeah, I think this really gets to the heart of it. Even WotC, the single biggest company in the industry, has a full time staff of maybe 1-2 dozen people for D&D with the rest all being contractors or freelancers that are brought in on a product-to-product basis. This is on top of the fact that, while Paizo might be the second biggest name in the game, that still only equates to a fraction of WotC's market share in the industry as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 20:05
|
|
|
Freelancing for a big publisher seems not unlike a lovely record deal (and they're all lovely). You're giving up an overwhelming share of the revenue in hopes that, because the publisher can reach way more people than you can, your very small share will still be bigger than what you could have made on your own. What I'm saying is, WotC and Paizo need to figure out how to charge their employees for printing costs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 20:10
|
|
|
At the end of the day, Paizo puts out at least one book a month. Most indie publishers do one book once and that pretty much it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 20:11
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:On a second note: the statement that the RPG industry makes "hundreds of millions of dollars" is also a bit incomplete, yeah? To clarify what I mean, let's consider Pathfinder. When controversy split roleplaying games, nearly every gamer in the hobby picked up a copy of either Pathfinder or 4e because Culture War had come to gaming. That's a preposterous amount of sales. Gamers reached into their pockets and found $11.4M for Critical Role's kickstarter. The money's there and gamers are enthusiastic to pay it, but it's not making it anywhere near the designers. Or editors, or artists. You see this in a lot of entertainment industries, AAA baseball and pro wrestlers only make a fraction of what you'd expect. The money just ends up "lost" somewhere between the consumers collectively offering buckets of cash and the creators recieving only a faint whiff of it. Which is a misconception - the money isn't hemorrhaging into the void, it's going into other pockets. Which I guess isn't really a question so much as a disappointed musing over the state of things.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 22:42
|
|
|
I wouldn't say that a large majority of Critical Role fans are necessarily fans of anything other than Critical Role, they don't necessarily play any tabletop games they just like the story the cast creates. That seems a bit more like directly personality based than anything to do specifically with tabletop game writing. Like WotC doesn't see a penny from that Cartoon/Kickstarter, outside of like the indirect path of someone watching it getting into CR and deciding to buy it and play it, or general brand awareness. The Avatar PBTA Kickstarter also raised a poo poo ton of money, which also seems driven by outside pressure of just how big the Avatar fandom is. It honestly just feels like, just like in other forms of media there is a squeezing out of anything that isn't a loving mega property. Pathfinder feels right on that edge with successful video games alongside the ttrpg, but the "brand" doesn't seem like it has near the ability to scale to like where WotC, because of the capital requirements, or have a fanbase that is drawn into the more like fandom personality stuff like Avatar and Critical Role can pull on. This stuff is going on everywhere, it seems like the only chance you have to make it is like direct patronage and "leveraging" your(or some other properties) fandom and getting them to like throw you money directly. Like musicians don't see poo poo from streams generally, but constantly tell people to buy a shirt or go to Bandcamp to support them directly if you like them. It just seems like you are a big fish, or a medium fish surviving on the kindness and desire of a dedicated group of people who like your poo poo and want to see you succeed, or a small fish where you treat it as a hobby and don't expect to make any money. It's just such a niche market unless you have something like another cultivated and entrenched fandom to pull from.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 23:21
|
|
|
Would Critical Role have been as popular if they had stayed with Pathfinder instead of moving to 5E?
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 23:26
|
|
|
Shitshow posted:Would Critical Role have been as popular if they had stayed with Pathfinder instead of moving to 5E? It's kind of impossible to guess since one of the big reasons 5E is as popular as it is is because of Critical Role, but I do feel like if they had stuck with Pathfinder they would've hit the point where even managing their very normally built characters and enemies would be way too complex to make a good show. Even with 5E I'm surprised by how much viewers engage with combat-focused sessions, but 5E combat (with players that are active and know their rules) is speedy compared to Pathfinder.
|
|
#
?
Feb 23, 2022 23:39
|
|
|
JMBosch posted:This is not a good rate for the industry. A large chunk of indie publishers pay a minimum of $0.10 a word, many pay more, with a few paying even $0.20-25 a word. I never said it was good! But yeah, I was thinking largely of "mainstream" pubs when I said that. Indie publishers have definitely been working to bend that needle, and I've earned 10¢ and 15¢ a word writing for indies. Hell, my own indie work has effectively priced me out of the range of most big publishers; if I can earn at least 10¢ a word on my own projects, the only reason to accept anything less is for resume-building. Halloween Jack posted:Freelancing for a big publisher seems not unlike a lovely record deal (and they're all lovely). You're giving up an overwhelming share of the revenue in hopes that, because the publisher can reach way more people than you can, your very small share will still be bigger than what you could have made on your own. The key difference here is that TTRPG writers and designers very rarely get royalties of any sort, whether it's a pittance or otherwise.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 01:20
|
|
|
moths posted:To clarify what I mean, let's consider Pathfinder. When controversy split roleplaying games, nearly every gamer in the hobby picked up a copy of either Pathfinder or 4e because Culture War had come to gaming. That's a preposterous amount of sales. Right, and that's fair, but what I'm getting at is two things: First, revenue isn't profit. A million-dollar kickstarter that spends 1.2M on print and shipping costs made negative money. So millions in revenue is kind of meaningless, what we want to look at is how much revenue actually is available for wages. Second, there's little market force incentive to pay higher wages in an industry where labor is plentiful and jobs are scarce. Third, and this is the part I'm shakier on, I believe most of the profits in the RPG industry are in the hands of a small number of companies. Wizards, owned by Hasbro, is a public company: we know where its profit goes, and that's into the hands of shareholders and executives (and executive compensation is mostly shares). The other five or ten biggest RPG companies are all smaller (Wizards is as big as it is due to Magic more than D&D, so we shouldn't consider that a pure RPG company anyway, but I would guess that even just isolating D&D its profits are probably in the millions to tens of millions quarterly). Those top five or ten companies employ how many writers, editors, artists, designers, total? Maybe... a hundred? Two? Then there's thousands of writers, editors, designers, artists, etc. working for free, hundreds more working on contract or spec or part time for by-the-word or by-the-illustration payments, and perhaps... a few dozen? running their own RPG companies and making enough revenue to cover a living wage, maybe, for a year or a few years, if they're lucky? Half of the responsibility for this you can lay at the feet of the dominance of D&D and its mutated offspring in the marketplace, and the other half you can just apply to the fact that this is an industry run by hobbyists who love their hobby, there's far more hobbyists available than jobs, and the ones who don't have jobs publish their hobby work anyway. That's too much downward force on wages.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 01:40
|
|
|
You're for-sure right on all three points. It's just sad to see it all play out.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:08
|
|
|
The core economic issue with RPGs is that by design it's hard to make a living off of them. All you need is a core book, a set of funny dice, some graph paper, and a couple of pencils and you and all your friends can play forever. Most groups in my experience barely have one corebook for every two players. It's just really hard to turn that into something that you can make into a durable revenue stream that can pay a living wage. As much as I like to make fun of things like the supplement treadmill, terrible tie-in novels, and metaplot, those things all arose as ways to get around that basic limitation and try to sell more stuff to people who might otherwise buy just a single book. Paizo's Adventure Paths, D&D 4E's character tools (with monthly subscription) - same thing. I might not care for Critical Role, but drat if they didn't find a way to monetize their particular corner of the RPG hobby.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:24
|
|
|
FMguru posted:The core economic issue with RPGs is that by design it's hard to make a living off of them. All you need is a core book, a set of funny dice, some graph paper, and a couple of pencils and you and all your friends can play forever. Most groups in my experience barely have one corebook for every two players. It's just really hard to turn that into something that you can make into a durable revenue stream that can pay a living wage. Hell, you can just play pretend based on half-remembered rules from your childhood for free.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:33
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Hell, you can just play pretend based on half-remembered rules from your childhood for free. let's be honest wotc did an excellent job of monetizing that group with 5e anyway
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:44
|
|
|
Arivia posted:let's be honest wotc did an excellent job of monetizing that group with 5e anyway Yeah..... yeah..... 
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:45
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:1) Everything is ludicrously underpriced. People expect huge books that combine creative work with expert technical writing, and they want them to have insanely-high production values. $25 PDFs, at the volume you can expect to sell, don't translate into living wages for all of the writers, editors, illustrators, graphic designers, layout designers, and producers involved in making a new corebook. Yeah, I paid $50 for Wildsea and I’m not sure how to go back and pay more, but I really feel like I should. This stuff is at least as thoughtful and involved as a textbook.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 02:49
|
|
|
RPGaaS, coming soon to a browser near you.Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I paid $50 for Wildsea and I’m not sure how to go back and pay more, but I really feel like I should. This stuff is at least as thoughtful and involved as a textbook. Isaacs' Patreon?
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 03:15
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:Isaacs' Patreon? Good idea!
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 03:17
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:RPGaaS, coming soon to a browser near you. Soon? that's literally the business model of Paizo and WotC Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I paid $50 for Wildsea and I’m not sure how to go back and pay more, but I really feel like I should. This stuff is at least as thoughtful and involved as a textbook. Yeah, I'd pay more for Lancer or Comp/Con
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 03:21
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:The key difference here is that TTRPG writers and designers very rarely get royalties of any sort, whether it's a pittance or otherwise. What I've heard is that bands have to cover the whole advance out of their tiny sliver of the proceeds first, which almost none ever do. As such, they never see a dime from record sales. I'll give you TTRPG folks don't get the advance, but, afaik, they don't wind up in multi-record (book?) contracts that will never have an upside for them either.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 03:30
|
|
|
FMguru posted:The core economic issue with RPGs is that by design it's hard to make a living off of them. All you need is a core book, a set of funny dice, some graph paper, and a couple of pencils and you and all your friends can play forever. Most groups in my experience barely have one corebook for every two players. It's just really hard to turn that into something that you can make into a durable revenue stream that can pay a living wage. At the same time, the market increasingly demands hardcover rulebooks, full colour artwork, and all sorts of other trimmings. The OSR and Zinequest and small indie pamphlets do a brave job of carving out material with a more humble aesthetic, but such products don't get to sit at the top table. It's a weird industry where the audience simultaneously demands a DIY-friendly ethos and AAA production values, which seems contradictory.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 04:19
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:I thought that Stevens carefully arranged things so that little or none of Paizo's money was on the line when Goblinworks inevitably flamed out. This was, as far as I know, the initial plan, but it's worth noting that the big PFO kickstarter only raised two million dollars, which seems like a lot of money but when you're trying to make an MMO it's nothing, and Stevens, for some reason I can only assume had to be out of loyalty to the handful of programmers Dancey roped into his dumbass venture, only recently killed it off. PFO was ostensibly being worked on for years after Dancey abandoned the project to go back to Alderac Games, and I can't imagine it was doing anything but bleeding money even before that point, so while I have nothing but speculation to go off of it doesn't seem unreasonable that Paizo ended up losing money on the venture. Now whether Lisa Stevens should have put a stake in it as soon as it was clear it was a failure is another question, like I said if she did so then it probably would have meant whoever was still being paid to try and salvage something out of it (whatever they were being paid) would have been cut off as well, so it would have ultimately been a lovely situation for someone.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 05:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 02:48 |
|
|
Oh did PFO finally get the plug pulled? Every time I've checked on it, I've been stunned to see that it was apparently still going.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2022 14:57
|
|
