(cross-posted from my substack)

Indie TTRPGs can't live beyond their means

Reacting to the AI art discourse

(image from Pixabay)

The twitter discourse about AI art in TTRPGs has been annoying me, especially since one of my hobbyhorses is thinking that an overemphasis on art and graphic design is a millstone around the neck of indie TTRPG game design. However, reading this tweet by JenKatWrites helped me to crystallize what I’ve wanted to say:

[A]s TTRPG designers, we devalue our own art when we pair it with a system that devalues the art of others

So that’s fine as far as it goes, but in my opinion TTRPG game design has been getting devalued relative to visual art for a long time. Part of this may have been unavoidable.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that art is indeed a valuable and beneficial part of a TTRPG. In an ideal world, the creators of an indie TTRPG (mechanical designers, artists, etc.) would share in the success, so they’d be paid out of profits based on some fair sense of their contribution. But the problem is that indie TTRPG revenues tend to be so small, and profits even smaller, that as a purely logistical matter it’s tough to do sharing.¹ Even in conventional book publishing getting the royalties to authors can be a pain for everyone involved, and indie TTRPGs are operating on a much smaller scale, so the headaches go up and the quantities of money go down. As a consequence of this problem the indie RPGs with flashier production values tend to follow the pattern of big and mid-tier RPG publishers: they pay freelance artists a flat fee up front rather than trying to do complicated revenue or profit sharing. That solves the practical problem of not needing high levels of trust or solid accounting systems, but it also means that artists are always first in line to get paid, ahead of indie game designers. That implicitly puts game design at the bottom of the heap, which kind of sucks since this is the only place that TTRPG designers can hope to have their art seem valued.

The sense that artists matter more than game designers is exacerbated by the norm, transmitted more by behavior than by explicitly stated preferences, that RPGs need to look like the kind of things that WotC or mid-tier publishers put out in order to be taken seriously. Most people won’t say to your face that they won’t pay attention to your game if it doesn’t look the part, but we humans do have a tendency to judge books by their cover (otherwise we wouldn’t need an aphorism to tell us not to do that).

So at the end of the day I do not begrudge visual artists wanting to be able to earn money from their art, but the wallets of indie TTRPG game designers seem like a pretty dubious place to be hunting for it. The typical indie TTRPG does not bring in enough money to cover the cost of elaborately hand-crafted art. Unless and until indie TTRPG creators start getting rich off these things I don’t think it makes a ton of sense for them to be spending on rich-people-stuff like expensive art. Designers making games that use no art, public domain art, or AI art will often make a lot more sense.

Artists can be indie, too
The beauty of the indie approach, of course, is that you don’t have to follow other people’s conventions. The arrangement of artists getting paid up-front and game designers getting money on the back end is not carved in stone. Artists can be publishers too, if they want! Nobody is stopping an artist from hiring a freelance game designer to build a game around their art. It will probably be a while before AIs are sophisticated enough to put together that kind of deal, so you might as well take advantage of the opportunity now.

We can also change the norms
If there was an audience that was willing to look at bare-bones games then the indie TTRPG-o-sphere might be in a healthier place. That wouldn’t be a trivial change: it’s human nature to want the shortcut of relying on the halo effect of secondary characteristics rather than to making independent assessments of the core (that must be a good game to look that nice, that corporation must be managed well if the CEO drives such an expensive car, that movie must have a good story to justify paying the stars so much to be in it). After all, we have more external reference points to judge the secondary characteristics than we do the core (most of us are on the same page about how appealing various movie stars are, whether something is a good script is a much trickier questions), so it’s riskier to take a stand on something that puts its core front and center. Saying that a game’s writing or mechanics are good or bad risks that you’re wrong, whereas liking a big bundle of art and writing and tone and reputation and marketing is safer.

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¹ As maligned of cryptocurrency is, automatically divvying up shares is one of the problems that something like “smart contracts” is intended to address. Current crypto implementations may not do it well, and there may be other problems with crypto, but it’s not like there’s no room for innovation relative to the way existing payment processors do things.