Quote from: Luca;1043413A certain Kevin Crawford could probably correct your ideas on the whole "no money in RPG" subject matter.

Granted, he's an exception on almost every level.

Yeah.  Mr. Crawford is talented, hard-working, and very careful.  Where other people have managed to succeed their way to failure with Kickstarter, he's very careful about making sure that he's getting paid for all that work.  But on the other hand, by using Kickstarter carefully, he's also careful to make sure he doesn't sink too much work into something that doesn't sell.

Quote from: jhkim;1041669This is the sort of language I associate with anti-free-speech arguments.  The opposition's words are "poison" that will "infest" others if they're allowed to talk. The implied conclusion is that they have to be silenced to prevent this infestation.

I disagree. And in particular, I don't think one can deploy this kind of argument - and simultaneously have a problem with opponents who do the same.

Well, as you said, it would have been good if we could get some conservative gamers speaking there as well. The way it is (seeing how people talk about previous years as well) it does seem very one-sided, and yes that DOES affect people in a bad way.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1041869What is becoming increasingly apparent to me is that sexuality and the politics of sexuality is of far greater interest to certain people than playing tabletop RPGs.

My prediction is in five years the hobby will split into two groups. One group will prefer to tell stories about social justice. The act of roleplaying a character will be secondary to that goal; a good session will be one where the -Ists are shamed and the group applauds itself on displaying Correct virtue.  They will proclaim they have "evolved" the hobby from mere entertainment to an educational experience. But when this fails to have any real transformative power, they will retreat to their safe spaces and bemoan the Not Ok state of the world.

The second group will be called Old School, not because they necessarily have anything to do with the OSR (although they might) but rather because they represent old modes of thinking, both in terms of the games they play and their politics. And at this point, their politics will be a mix of the Left-behind Left and the Right. This group participates in the hobby for entertainment alone-- to imagine they are a character in a fictional world. They have no illusion that their hobby has anything to do with the real world, outside of making friends and having fun.

Five years after that, the first group will vanish, simply because misery requires too energy, and they aren't having fun. They will leave the hobby much like the goths of the 90's, who entered like gangbusters and exited just as abruptly. The difference is that the goths had fun with it, and were smart enough to use it to get laid.

My prediction is that in five years, people on boards will still be yelling at each other about the right way to discuss roleplaying games, while the people who are not on discussion boards will just play the damn game and continue to happily ignore everyone on the discussion boards.

Quote from: jhkimThis is the sort of language I associate with anti-free-speech arguments. The opposition's words are "poison" that will "infest" others if they're allowed to talk. The implied conclusion is that they have to be silenced to prevent this infestation.

I disagree. And in particular, I don't think one can deploy this kind of argument - and simultaneously have a problem with opponents who do the same.

Quote from: Trond;1043445Well, as you said, it would have been good if we could get some conservative gamers speaking there as well. The way it is (seeing how people talk about previous years as well) it does seem very one-sided, and yes that DOES affect people in a bad way.

It feels to me anal-retentive to call for every convention to have an even balance of political views in their guests, or worse, that the guests have to match one's own politics. It's game convention, not a political debate.

There are people on different places in the political spectrum who do care a lot about the politics of guests of honor - and will raise a stink for having the wrong guest, because they feel it affects them in a bad way.

You are all entitled to your opinion, but I would encourage people to be more open-minded and willing to go to a convention even if it doesn't match their own politics. People can attend a convention and have fun gaming together, despite political differences.

How about an even more radical idea?

Invites guests to only talk about gaming! If the guest has non-gaming interests, they can STFU about their non-gaming stuff for the weekend and just focus on gaming.

Kinda like how adults attend professional conventions for their jobs and only focus on their job aspect of the professional convention.

Quote from: jhkim;1043465It feels to me anal-retentive to call for every convention to have an even balance of political views in their guests, or worse, that the guests have to match one's own politics. It's game convention, not a political debate.

Well, it's clearly not a political debate in any sense right now, because there are ZERO conventions where right-wing panelists are invited to attend. There's an awful lot that are full of feminist bloggers who despise gaming telling us how toxic we are, while people who fail the Social-justice test are forcibly ejected from the convention floor.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1043493Well, it's clearly not a political debate in any sense right now, because there are ZERO conventions where right-wing panelists are invited to attend. There's an awful lot that are full of feminist bloggers who despise gaming telling us how toxic we are, while people who fail the Social-justice test are forcibly ejected from the convention floor.

Then make right-wing conventions. I know I would attend. I can't wait for the panel discussion on "Orthodox Aestheticism and the Polyhedral Die".

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;1043496Then make right-wing conventions.

You know they didn't make left wing conventions. They just took over existing ones.

I do wish some convention organisers would stand up to the SJW mob. What they did to NTRPGcon was shameful - harassment in the name of anti-harassment. But I understand why people think it's not worth fighting.

Quote from: S'mon;1043502You know they didn't make left wing conventions. They just took over existing ones.

I do wish some convention organisers would stand up to the SJW mob. What they did to NTRPGcon was shameful - harassment in the name of anti-harassment. But I understand why people think it's not worth fighting.

ConCarolinas reversed course and went anti-SJW. DragonCon just punted a SJW from its lit track. It's happening.

Quote from: jcfiala;1043385Indeed.  I was listening to an interview with C.J. Carella, who started out writing RPG books but these days writes novels.  Although he's interested in someone making a game based off of his settings, he's not willing to do it himself because it's too big of a pay cut.

There's a reason Matt Forbeck spends more of his time writing novels for the HALO and Star Wars universes, and not writing games for his Shotguns & Sorcery universe.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1043389There is no money in gaming.  Other than WoTC and maybe Pazio, the rest of the "industry" survives on scraps.

Compared to what?  There's a decent number of folks working for RPG companies as a sole income.
It doesn't take 3 hands to count the total number of people working the wargame publishing world as a full-time primary income, and most of them come from just 2 companies.

You won't get rich, sure. But make good products and you can live off of it.

Not from PWYW d100 Random Tavern Name Generators on drivethru, tho.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;1043503ConCarolinas reversed course and went anti-SJW. DragonCon just punted a SJW from its lit track. It's happening.

They're also not primarily a gaming con, either.
The main gaming cons in NC are MACE and Playthrough

Quote from: bayonetbrant;1043506Compared to what?  There's a decent number of folks working for RPG companies as a sole income.
It doesn't take 3 hands to count the total number of people working the wargame publishing world as a full-time primary income, and most of them come from just 2 companies.

I think the general point Gronan is working on is that there is no fortune to be made in TTRPG products. He was responding to jcfiala's point of "He hasn't written any games himself, but he may not be that masochistic." Being an RPG writer does seem to be a relatively thankless job (or 'low-thank job' maybe). The pay is suboptimal, you have to spend a bunch of time and travel (or now online work) promoting your product and personal brand, and you subject yourself to the critiques of a loud and unpleasable fan base. If Larry Correia hasn't written any games himself, it's perhaps because it isn't worth his billable rate.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;1043507You won't get rich, sure. But make good products and you can live off of it.
Not from PWYW d100 Random Tavern Name Generators on drivethru, tho.

Sure. You can also live off, and maybe even employ a few people who also live off, a straight up FLGS (so not even writing or publishing a gaming product, just selling it). I don't think anyone is suggesting that there everyone involved in the TT RPG product pipeline are all working on spec or doing it as a part time second career or the like.