Dan Went Outside
An interaction over the weekend with a 14 year old comic artist while working a faire made me think, again. Comics seem more indie from the outside, but there is objectively more money in them, and is easier to get started and sell stuff. You can be truely indie, a little bit punk, in comics because there is so much more money there. You can be sub-optimal as per the rules of living in a society and still eat. RPGs look more commercial because the commercial stuff is all that survives impact with the world at large. Those of us who are surviving (and sometimes thriving) selling to the market as it is are not building exactly, at least not in an efficient or especially impactful way, rather a selfish one. By selfish I mean they are not reproducible in any real sense by some 14 year old with a TTRPG idea, on any time scale.
And I suspect the scale of these big(ger) names does not translate to any trickle down. Yes it makes new TTRPG people, I meet them often, but it generally makes TTRPG people who only play X game. Ideally new players should be a side effect of a broad community of creative work existing in society, not fabricated out of the plastic flesh of the generic comicon nerd hungry for something be a consumer of. It's subcultural fossil fuel, extracted by the people with the money for drills while making us think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
None of this is BAD. We're in a spot like comics in the 60s or 70s. I'm not knowledgeable enough to expand on that confidently or usefully, but I suspect it's a solid comparison. The people right now who are doing the most important work are those with the skillset to infiltrate polite society, universities, arts councils, and other places with more cash to burn. Customers are great, but unless someone builds more you have a hard cap on how sub-optimal (I also wanna be a wicked bohemian) you can be. Once it becomes more common for a corporation or university to go "we need a TTRPG for some team building day, how much is a TTRPG anyway? £20k?" we can relax a little. The most important work being done in TTRPGs right now is being done by the people making these connections, rafting together rpgs and established assemblages and loci of capital. It's certainly not me, to be clear. All my uni/corpo work has happened 100% as a side effect of me being intensely friendly to strangers (as before, not reproducible, not useful for others). There are people working on it though, quietly. Things will probably change sooner rather than later and I'm predicting it will be a nice counterbalance to the very commercial side of things, opening up another path for people to pursue.
AND ANOTHER THING. Returning to that comic kid for a minute, they were making their own thing. Scrappy, dirty, cool as hell and comic shops were quietly buying it. A TTRPG person doing something like that would probably have to make a Troika/Morkborg/Mothership whatever other open license thing for a shop to consider it. Nice, yes, but speaking as the troika guy, it's a honey trap. HONEY TRAPS ARE FINE IF YOU LIKE HONEY. But yea, you're living someone else's dream. Not yucking a yum, I invite everyone to live my dream with me, but I would be happier if everyone was here (or there) by absolute choice and not by necessity.