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Warthur posted:(The other opinion I regularly find myself coming around to when this topic comes up is that building an "industry" around a hobby with such a strong DIY ethos baked into it was, in the long run, a mistake, and claiming to people in need of money that you can earn a living out of freelance RPG writing is irresponsible unless you add so many caveats that anyone seeking to do freelance writing for survival rather than for fun would move to any other market, literally any other market at all, that they had the skills to coherently produce words in, and that "TG as an Industry" is synonymous with "TG as exploitation mechanism".) Full time RPG writer Robin D Laws is definitely one of the only ones I have ever heard of, and he is pretty upfront that it is only possible because he is Canadian. Just having to purchase health insurance like an American would knock him out of the industry.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:57
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Song of Swords was initially built on people who loved the weird overly complex system. The kickstarter was to help it go from a pdf using nothing but public domain images to a real book.
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Sep 27, 2019 19:04
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I picked up the Song of Swords RPG blind a while back and it is one of the best looking books I have seen in a long time. The whole setting is original and interesting, and the incredible production values made me definitely think it was worth my 20 bucks for the pdf. One video from a popular troupe - provided that they give the game a good showing rather than razzing on it - is all that it takes to make your sales go from "respectable" to "so good it's actually disruptive and causing us logistical problems" - even for a game which is as long-available and well-known as CoC, which is one of those games where if you aren't into RPGs at all you'll likely not have heard of it, but if you do get into RPGs and spend even a brief amount of time looking around at what's available in the field beyond D&D and Pathfinder, CoC will be one of the first games you spot. That being the case, why would you ever design a game these days with a complex, fiddly system unless you've found some genius way to make rolling on chart 3.21: Critical Hits From Cooking Implements look super-photogenic and really exciting in a YouTube video or on podcast audio?
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Sep 27, 2019 19:12
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Warthur posted:(The other opinion I regularly find myself coming around to when this topic comes up is that building an "industry" around a hobby with such a strong DIY ethos baked into it was, in the long run, a mistake, and claiming to people in need of money that you can earn a living out of freelance RPG writing is irresponsible unless you add so many caveats that anyone seeking to do freelance writing for survival rather than for fun would move to any other market, literally any other market at all, that they had the skills to coherently produce words in, and that "TG as an Industry" is synonymous with "TG as exploitation mechanism" outside of self-publication.) Yeah. "If you can make it here, you can do a lot better for yourself using those skills in several different career paths" It's not just other games that RPGs are competing with. It's all entertainment products, including movies, tv, comic books, video games, huffing gasoline, or music. Those categories all have a LOT of content, and a lot of that content is free or nearly free (paying the price of a movie ticket to watch an entire month of Netflix counts as nearly free to me). Despite that, people are willing to pay for quality stuff in each of those categories.
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Sep 27, 2019 19:14
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https://twitter.com/DungeonCommandr/status/1177624732952231941 I'd like to see these projects paying 20 cents a word. Can anyone remember seeing these on KS?
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Sep 27, 2019 19:46
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One thing I wonder is what is the average word count of a substantial rpg book like let's say a World of Darkness corebook? They are pretty hefty and well established enough that they should pay better than average, as it should have sales enough to pay decently if any company can. Really, I would like to know what would be the cost to produce the writing for something of that scale. Obviously art, layout, and so on increase the production costs more but I just want to know what 10 cents a word really means.
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Sep 27, 2019 19:54
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clockworkjoe posted:https://twitter.com/DungeonCommandr/status/1177624732952231941 Probably one of the indie Kickstarters that have no stretch goals except for "we'll pay the writers more."
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Sep 27, 2019 19:55
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Lord_Hambrose posted:One thing I wonder is what is the average word count of a substantial rpg book like let's say a World of Darkness corebook? They are pretty hefty and well established enough that they should pay better than average, as it should have sales enough to pay decently if any company can. As a rough guide, typical 8.5x11 pages are about 800-1000 words. Stuff like Evil Hat's books are about 500 per page. So at 21 cents a 100-page thinsplat supplement for a game would cost about $20,000 just for writers. Stuff like a CoD core are in the realm of 250k words. So you're looking at ~$50,000 for a core book. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 19:58
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Leperflesh posted:"Give writers 21 cents a word" has to be tied to a movement in which the market also decides "pay $80 for game books and don't pay anything less even if the author(s) are trying to charge less" and let's see how that works out Is there anywhere that tracks book MSRP over time?
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Sep 27, 2019 20:03
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That Old Tree posted:Stuff like a CoD core are in the realm of 250k words. So you're looking at ~$50,000 for a core book. As a point of reference, Dave Brookshaw mentioned getting less than 7 cents per word on past OP projects last time this came up, too, so you can estimate the difference in price there.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:11
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If it's any consolation, the artists are being paid garbage too. Wait, that doesn't make anyone feel better
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Sep 27, 2019 20:13
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Lemon-Lime posted:Probably one of the indie Kickstarters that have no stretch goals except for "we'll pay the writers more." Such as? My theory is these indie games have low word counts. A traditional RPG with 100k+ words is a different ballgame.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:30
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canyoneer posted:If it's any consolation, the artists are being paid garbage too. Yeah. As I mentioned elsewhere, paying everybody something significantly closer to what they're actually worth means small books easily cost over $30,000 just to develop, and stuff like a CoD core would start getting respectably close to $100k.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:31
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Yeah, I kind of feel like requesting royalties might be more realistic.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:36
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It's also kind of wrong-headed to begin with because they're not writing stories, they're creating game mechanics. It's equivalent to paying musicians by the yard of tape recorded, or closer to paying programmers by the line.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:46
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Lord_Hambrose posted:One thing I wonder is what is the average word count of a substantial rpg book like let's say a World of Darkness corebook? They are pretty hefty and well established enough that they should pay better than average, as it should have sales enough to pay decently if any company can. So that 250k word main rpg book is now spending 25k on writing. If it hasn't jumped to the 'not there yet but is coming' $60, then it's still at $50 for the book. 3k sales is pretty good for an indie rpg book in the first year, so at the 40% margin for publishers, out of the $60k income, you've spent $25k on writing. Without going into all the details on art, editing, layout, shipping, printing etc. You've just lost money. Maybe, maybe you broke even or made a tiny profit if you lucked out with pdf sales, or it was pdf only and you somehow did huge numbers without an upfront kickstarter. But more likely you lost money.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:55
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moths posted:It's also kind of wrong-headed to begin with because they're not writing stories, they're creating game mechanics. Yup. People working real jobs get paid either hourly or salaried. Here in silicon valley some companies are obsessed with metrics, and I've heard a few, perhaps apocryphally, made the extreme error of tying performance metrics to job reviews and then measuring programmer performance in terms of lines of code produced. One of the core aspects of my writing job is to take my first draft and then brutally slash down the length, cutting absolutely as much as I possibly can while still retaining the essential parts. Because wordiness wastes the customer's time and deters the reader from engaging at all. Obviously this isn't the key metric when writing a novel, although I'm sure there is some relationship between how fat that hardback novel is and how much you can get away with charging for it. But RPG books are a marriage of entertainment fiction and rules documentation, and at least with the latter part, brevity is to be encouraged. Paying someone more money to write bloated rules is stupid. Tying your rules-writers' compensation to how many words it takes them to explain how a mechanic works is stupid. Of course what actually happens is the content owner decides in advance how many pages of content will be there for X part of the rules, and then the writer is told to write exactly that many words, so they're not actually being given the opportunity to double their pay by padding the rules out... but they are disincentivizing those writers from finding ways to come in under budget wordwise. And that's maybe not a super smart way to go. If you can't or won't trust writers to work hourly and still produce what you want, then royalties may be a way to go, because then at least you're not actively disincentivizing efficiency, although you're still not really incentivizing it either.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:01
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My experience with the contracts is that it's not actually paid by the word. Like if you turn in slightly more words or slightly less words your payout doesn't change. It's 'this is your planned wordcount, and this is the amount we would like to pay you' and the 'by the word' thing is the relationship between the two.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:14
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Mors Rattus posted:My experience with the contracts is that it's not actually paid by the word. Like if you turn in slightly more words or slightly less words your payout doesn't change. It's 'this is your planned wordcount, and this is the amount we would like to pay you' and the 'by the word' thing is the relationship between the two. The problem is, that the 'roughly 600 words per page' metric breaks down when you do something different. So all those books of tables, have dramatically lower word counts. Likewise bump up the amount of art from the 90s 3.X period '1 1/4 page piece every 3.5 pages, plus inline art' and the wordcount changes. Back in the OSR 3.x days, companies had their standard expectations. A new class meant Y pages and Z art (mostly one piece of art, a bunch of text and a chart), same with a prestige class, and so on. It was standardised. So yes, the 'we're paying you X amount for 8k words on Z' is the case, but that 8k words on Z can widely differ on the effort, and pages in a book, depending on the system.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:22
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That Old Tree posted:Yeah. As I mentioned elsewhere, paying everybody something significantly closer to what they're actually worth means small books easily cost over $30,000 just to develop, and stuff like a CoD core would start getting respectably close to $100k. Stuff like a CoD core routinely triples this on kickstarter alone. Small press is one thing. The bigger players pretending they're small press to keep rates low is quite another.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:49
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canyoneer posted:It's a race to the bottom in pricing the product. It's unsurprising that they pay the writers like crap too. There are a ton of people who want to be in the industry, and honestly the bar to entry quality of work wise is really, really low. I mean look at Jason Hardy. He got handed a decade as Line Developer on Shadowrun with zero prior credits in a similar role, zero game design experience, and zero management experience of any kind. With predictable results, but he'll keep the job forever because nobody competent would do it for what they pay him (and put up with CGL keeping the guy that embezzled a year's worth of their income on staff after they tried to not pay writers and artists to make up the difference). Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 02:40
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Justin Achilli with a short thread on working at White Wolf. https://twitter.com/jachilli/status/1177740832251756545?s=19
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Sep 28, 2019 02:56
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Pope Guilty posted:Justin Achilli with a short thread on working at White Wolf. The thread ends on this as an offhand comment, however, which seems the far more relevant and interesting detail to expand on. https://twitter.com/jachilli/status/1177744220871942145
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Sep 28, 2019 03:24
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And this last bit is just funny thinking of how Martin let a whole clan name get away from them. https://twitter.com/jachilli/status/1177770706928619520
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Sep 28, 2019 03:29
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Nuns with Guns posted:As a point of reference, Dave Brookshaw mentioned getting less than 7 cents per word on past OP projects last time this came up, too, so you can estimate the difference in price there. When I started with White Wolf/CCP, I was making 3 cents per word. Nine years and 2 million words later, I was making 4.5 cents.
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Sep 28, 2019 04:28
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doesn't paying people by the word create a perverse incentive to write excessively volubly?
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Sep 28, 2019 04:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:doesn't paying people by the word create a perverse incentive to write excessively volubly? But also choppily, since you're dealing with physical space limitations. Why put down a "humongous" when you'll be paid twice as much for "real big"?
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Sep 28, 2019 04:37
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MachineIV posted:When I started with White Wolf/CCP, I was making 3 cents per word. Nine years and 2 million words later, I was making 4.5 cents.  Burn this dumb hobby to the groundgradenko_2000 posted:doesn't paying people by the word create a perverse incentive to write excessively volubly? Well I mean if there's one thing tabletop RPGs rulebooks are known for, it's concise, efficient writing styles
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Sep 28, 2019 04:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:doesn't paying people by the word create a perverse incentive to write excessively volubly? In fiction publishing this isn't really a problem. Generally you also say how long a work you're buying. Alternatively, hire an editor, cut the cruft out, and then knock a penny a word off of their rate because it needed so much work. Mostly it's only a big deal in situations where many writers are working on one project largely independently of one another--say, in an anthology. Any core rulebook is either going to have the writers working together too much to clearly break it up it by page, or is going to be super poo poo (Shadowrun 6e) and then the way people get paid isn't going to be any better than the rest of the project. In the few situations where you're paying by the word in a larger work, you also select the length of the material purchased based on the writers. The Year's Best Science Fiction, for example, paid each writer a percentage of the royalties based on the percentage of the words in the book their story made up. Yes, this meant that George R. R. Martin's giant pile of words meant he was getting paid five times as much as nearly anyone else, but honestly, him being in the anthology probably sold more copies than anyone else did. As long as the editor in charge of the project is putting in more thought than just, "Grab twenty random stories from the slush pile and let's go to print," no one's going to have an opportunity to fluff their payouts by writing badly.
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Sep 28, 2019 04:44
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In my experience RPGs usually set a word count too (e.g. "we'd like a couple pages on X, our book has 750 words per page, give us 1500 words".) Don't know many folks in this industry who'd change your pay post-editing though.
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Sep 28, 2019 05:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:doesn't paying people by the word create a perverse incentive to write excessively volubly? Correct. It also disincentivizes playtesting and iterative design.
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Sep 28, 2019 05:31
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MachineIV posted:Correct. It also disincentivizes playtesting and iterative design. Yes, but also not really. You shouldn't be farming out freelance work until you have a working mechanical skeleton tested and ready to flesh out. Otherwise you get Shadowrun again, where both of the last two editions skipped this and got entire subsections written by freelancers with different rules conceptions. The person who should have caught that, the line developer, did not.
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Sep 28, 2019 06:41
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Liquid Communism posted:Yes, but also not really. Should. But, should isn't really the standard in my experience. Shadowrun was an egregious example. Beast is another great example. But the industry's got a ton of them, some better than others. And in a lot of cases, there's a sort of unofficial expectation that freelancers participate in that work even before it gets to writing assignments. I know for Vampire the Requiem 2nd Edition, there were hundreds of emails across numerous threads which ultimately turned into the final product's direction and design. While I ended up writing about 30% of the book, there were people who contributed tons to those email discussions but maybe ended up writing (and getting paid for) like 5,000 words of the final product.
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Sep 28, 2019 06:56
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Another bit of chiming in: I've just worked with one super tiny company and only on fluff, but how things went was they gave me a brief description of what they wanted and a word count range and then paid the same regardless of the final count. And it usually worked out to between 8 and 10 centers per word. The fact that established publishers are paying less than what I made when I first started at a content mill is kind of wild. 
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Sep 28, 2019 07:29
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I think I've shared this story before but years and years ago someone on RPGnet (absolutely nobody famous that I'm aware) messaged me to see if I'd be interested in writing for some gaming website/blog of theirs, and when I asked how much I could expect to be compensated they told me they could afford to pay $0.01 a word. Even as a younger and in many ways much dumber version of myself, I knew a raw deal when I saw it.
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Sep 28, 2019 07:43
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MachineIV posted:Should. But, should isn't really the standard in my experience. Shadowrun was an egregious example. Beast is another great example. But the industry's got a ton of them, some better than others. Which led to some of us asking for such pre-work to be paid, getting told no, and then things like Deviant taking much longer because all those direction and design decisions had to be made by one person before anyone else was hired. Having a proper mechanical skeleton is *important*. The bible is the most vital stage of a new game - if you’re on a big trad corebook and your writing assignment doesn’t come with several pages outlining what will be your mechanics in bulletpoints, the game is being rushed and you should be wary.
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Sep 28, 2019 08:21
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Dave Brookshaw posted:...all those direction and design decisions had to be made by one person before anyone else was hired. Have they started compensating for that workload? Because gently caress if I didn't see the work you did on Mage 2E. Utterly ridiculous amount of work. It was better for it, but you were paid identically (actually less maybe?) to Requiem 2E's development.
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Sep 28, 2019 08:24
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Nuns with Guns posted:As a point of reference, Dave Brookshaw mentioned getting less than 7 cents per word on past OP projects last time this came up, too, so you can estimate the difference in price there. I get paid around 1c / word when Developing, 6c / word when writing, so I typically try to write things like introductions (which are often repurposed and reedited from design bibles - fun factoid, there. It's not plagarism if you wrote it your drat self for that same book, but it *would* be if a freelancer spat my own bible back at me) and the inevitable core Storytelling system myself. The biggest pay-bump, which has had a tangible effect on my finances, has been the pound crashing due to Brexit. A thousand dollars for a book is worth nearly £250 more now.
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Sep 28, 2019 08:54
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MachineIV posted:Have they started compensating for that workload? Because gently caress if I didn't see the work you did on Mage 2E. Utterly ridiculous amount of work. It was better for it, but you were paid identically (actually less maybe?) to Requiem 2E's development. No. It's just part of the developer's job - I did *more* for Deviant, because my growing awareness of the industry (and things like Exalted collaborators being strung along then never actually being given contracts) made me unwilling to ask anyone to help spitball it without compensation. So no big email list like we had on Mage. I tell ya, the next game I design, I'm going to drat well own myself and not do for hire.
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Sep 28, 2019 09:07
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Ettin posted:In my experience RPGs usually set a word count too (e.g. "we'd like a couple pages on X, our book has 750 words per page, give us 1500 words".) Don't know many folks in this industry who'd change your pay post-editing though. Siembieda?
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Sep 28, 2019 09:34
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