The Economics of RPGs as a Hobby
This has been a long-time coming, but a while back I started thinking about one of my fundamental problems with the RPG from the perspective of a consumer and a hobbyist, one that is not only exasperated by business practices but also game design.
Of all my hobbies, role-playing is definitely the most time-consuming. There’s learning the rules after I purchase the game. There’s prep. There’s the emotional labor of arranging games (this is probably not a big deal for most of you out there, but for an anxiety disorderer like me it’s kind of a deal?), setting up schedules for play, commuting to where ever the game is supposed to take place this weekend, and all that for, like, maybe four hours of play on a biweekly (if I’m lucky) schedule, after which I’ll be emotionally and physically drained.
In addition to this, most RPGs on the market are set up so that they provide hundreds or more hours of play: D&D and its derivatives usually have a 1-20 level range, which means that to get the most bang for your buck out of D&D and similar games, you basically have to run one of those grand campaigns of old that we constantly hear about. The reality, at least for me, has been different with my IRL groups. There’s a good momentum for the first couple of sessions, then it peters out as scheduling becomes more difficult, and after a couple of weeks of not being able to schedule a game the excitement just isn’t there any more.
The problem is that at least for me most big RPGs on the market have completely different assumptions as to what a “complete” campaign looks like than I’m actually physically and emotionally capable of running in the real world. Added to that the often high price of entry (the price of entry for D&D 5e is 165€, unless you’re okay with going with just the Basic rules freely available online) and you know… it’s a lot.
But the supplement mill exasperates this problem at least for me. I’m going to call it the Crusader Kings effect for now: back when I made more money I loved playing Crusader Kings 2 obsessively. I basically bought all the DLCs when they first came out. Having been struggling economically for a couple of years now, there’s a huge backlog of DLCs I don’t have. Oddly enough, the psychological effect of knowing that there’s a huge backlog of missing content whenever I try to revisit Crusader Kings 2 keeps me from being sucked in. There’s a constant nagging feeling at the back of my head that I’m playing an incomplete game.
The same with RPGs whose economic models are based around the supplement mill, like D&D: it’s not quite as pronounced as with Crusader Kings 2, but running D&D without access to all the supplements, like Mordenkainen’s or what have you, kind of makes me feel like I’m not getting the same amount of enjoyment out of the game as people who have all the supplements.
But you know, I’ve learned to live with it: I’ve learned to accept that the version of D&D 5e that I’m playing and running, incomplete as it may be, is fine for my needs. And that acceptance has actually affected my behavior as a consumer: these days when I see a game that has a huge supplement mill, I usually go “no thanks,” because the supplement mill itself is indicative of the fact that the game is going to be an all-consuming time sink, which I don’t want. Most of my RPG purchases in the past year or so have been smaller indie RPGs, which don’t try to lure me in with the promise of a grand 100+ hour campaign, but with just enough material that when I’m feeling up to running it and me and my friends have a couple of weekends off, we can get a nice satisfying arc in a half a dozen sessions or so.
And finally, one more thing: rules heavy RPGs which promise hundreds of hours of play are also in competition with each other with each other for my free time: it’s basically inconceivable that I’d be able to maintain a, say, D&D and Mutants & Masterminds campaign at the same time, because of the huge time investment inherent to those games. Conversely, if I want to run Scum & Villainy or Blades in the Dark, I know we can wrap up that campaign in a month or two, so even while I’m running one I can still prep for or maybe even run the other one on the side.
Also, I don’t expect big RPG developers to instantly stop pushing out huge games with indefinite supplement mills, because I understand that’s where the money is. Furthermore, don’t take this as any kind of authoritative critique of your favorite game, whatever it may be: this is a highly subjective rant (but also the fact that I have to spell that out feels dumb but it’s just indicative of a what a fucking garbage fire online discourse surrounding games is with some people getting angry when a take about a game isn’t “objective”) and just me sharing my thoughts.
