A worry about free rpgs

[The Traveller]

[John Michael Crovis]

[John Michael Crovis]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

To get in the obligatory first (cheap) shot, the B-52 didn't enter service until 1955. B-25s were in the second world war.

Transposed numbers aside, I'll play devil's advocate and point out, that for most people, free games are one offs. Mr. Kim's index doesn't have a sort by author feature, but I'd wager that only a handful of people appear more than two or three times. At the very least, we're talking something closer to restoring classic cars than building plastic model ones.

Thing is, we seem to be together more because "Games are really awesome" than free-ness is awesome. People like Linux, open office, and wikipedia for what they can do, and the fact that its done cheaply is icing on the cake.

Not that I wouldn't love to be proven wrong about this of course. I don't mean to be so pessimistic about this, but there do seem to be reasons why we don't have the extensive reach of webcomic communities and the like yet. Hopefully I'll be more cheerful in the morning and better able to asst this great endeavor.

Returning to the question of "does offering stuff for free hurt my business", I'd point out that there is a very successful set of economic principles based on giving something good away for free. It is the loss leader concept of economics, often called the King Gillette Principle - "Give the razor away for free, and then sell the blades". Strange Fact - since the Mr. King's safety razor was introduced, no US president has had a beard. Not so strange fact - a lot of game companies take advantage of this. Quite a few model producers give away the rules for their war games, then just charge for the figures.

Even if you're not charging for supplements, a free game can be your resume, your practice, or your advertising. It can build up some good will and as always, let you be proud of being a philanthropist.

[Onix]

[The Traveller]

How about some sort of contributory license - you can download the game for free but you must contribute a new monster, character, scenario, or whatever, at some point. It would be pretty much the honour system, but those who are willing to pay for RPGs anyway will probably participate. You remove the cash payment and replace it with an effort payment, and for bonus points you give people an incentive to get stuck into your game.

[Onix]

That's a really interesting idea. Weird, but it could work. In principle, any alternate payment system that was reasonable would work. Even under the honor system, I wonder what would happen if you make someone click a box that said something to the effect of "By downloading this file you agree to play the game at least once."

I like the contributory license, I'm just trying to think of alternatives.

[John Michael Crovis]

[The Traveller]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

The truth about repeat writers probably lies somewhere in the middle. Most authors probably do have more than one good game within them. What were seeing is actually the outliers on a much bigger graph. First the person must be dissatisfied with their current rules, unwilling to just go to another published system, put in the effort to create one, and then decide its good enough to share with the world.

We do see a lot of repeat entrants in contests like the ones on 1km1kt and game chef, because those attract a certain type of person. Contests also tend to help focus the content and style of the game.

For your consideration: To assist my writing, I use some pre-made templates for the word processor. I've set it up to automatically give me the margins, varying font styles, and so forth in the same way most such programs let you do letters or pamphlets. Would it help the community to make a series of pre-generated game templates available? Or would such conformity prove more detrimental to creation? Ideally each would just block out chapters, headings, example styles, and maybe include a short page long treatise on dice mechanics, but still we don't need every game to look like my idea of a nicely laid page.

The Contributory license is a nice idea, but it brings up questions of how obligated is the author to use the concepts, and how do they maintain creative control and express their vision of the setting when everyone chimes in. Rewarding with contributions is one thing, requirement is another. It also depends on the scope of the work - there is a lot more room for player added continents and planets in a space opera than a modern magic game.

I've seen on Kickstarter and similar sites people making offers of "$1 gets you mentioned on the thanks page, $25 gets a character named after you" and so forth. So perhaps there should be a qualifier to what can be contributed, or how much. Admittedly, that is kind of hard for something as intangible as ideas. As I said before, inclusion might be better though of as a way to pay your community for their patronage than a way for them to pay you.