Writing For Dollars Part 2: RPG Design

Writing For Dollars Part 2: RPG Design

Last time I wrote about the top selling fiction writers and whether it's good to strive to join them. This time, I thought I'd talk about game writing. There is no such list of top-earning game designers. Of course, you'd have to define "game designer" before you could even start such a list. This is difficult because being a board game designer is wholly different from being a computer game designer which in turn is wholly different from being an rpg designer.

I've only ever dabbled in the first two. I've done the third, however, for more than 20 years. If you're just going to look at that category, I can tell you that the highest paid rpg designers are probably almost all sitting in the Wizards of the Coast offices (not the freelancers, but the full time guys). They're small in number, but WotC pays its designers a decent wage. Enough to buy a house (in the Seattle area, an expensive place) and live pretty comfortably. 

It gets a bit more complex than that, however. When I left Wizards to start Malhavoc Press, I figured I was going to take a pay cut. I didn't. By running the company as well as writing the vast majority of material, I made far more than I ever did at Wizards. That was likely the Golden Age of rpg design, however, and I was in a perfect position for Malhavoc to do really, really well, having helped to design the game I was supporting, a well-known Internet presence in a time when that was just becoming an important thing (Book of Eldritch Might arguably started the gaming pdf movement), and the generous and excellent OGL at my side. Hopefully putting out high quality products helped too.

But if you're not going to start your own company or get a job at Wizards, can you make a go of it in rpg design? It's tough. For a number of reasons.

The first is that there just isn't a lot of money out there to earn. The really successful non-D&D RPG products published today sell at a rate that, 20 years ago, would have been considered pretty good. I'm talking in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 copies. For example, when I started at ICE back in the late 80s, a Rolemaster Companion product would have sold in that range. So would most Champions sourcebooks. The Rolemaster core books would have sold far beyond that--probably 5,000 or more each year, for years. The MERP game, for example, sold more than 100,000 copies over its life. The 4th Edition Champions hardcover rulebook sold 50,000 copies in its first year.

ICE was a second tier company then, but those numbers are virtually unknown in that tier today, with the notable exception of Pathfinder, which arguably is not a non-D&D product. Worse, the price of printing and shipping is far higher than it was then. Art costs are higher because artists' rates have gone up but more because standards for good art--and the expectation of color art--has risen dramatically. The rise in the price of the books does not make up for these increases, believe me. The long and the short of it is that today, game publishers just don't have a lot of money to pay writers.

Just as telling, however, is the second reason it's tough out there for rpg writers, and that's that there are too many writers willing to work just for the fun of it, getting low or sometimes no pay. There's only a small number of rpg designers working today whose names on books are a selling point. The problem with that is that its hard for a publisher to justify using a competent professional designer and paying him or her a decent wage when they could get an inexperienced game fan who will do the same work for far less (or nothing). The problem gets worse when you have big companies not promoting their good writers so that they never reach that point where they can actually command a higher rate.

The facts are these. Many companies are going to try to offer the rpg designer 1 cent a word to write a product. Some would go as high as 3 cents a word. An experienced freelancer who's really made a name for themselves (despite mechanisms in place to make this difficult) working for a larger company might get 5 cents a word. If you want to dream big as a freelance game designer, you can shoot for the stars and get 7 to 10 cents a word after you've worked in the industry for a very long time doing nothing but high profile, high quality work. Even at that highest rate, however, if you write a 32-page adventure that's probably about $2,000. If you could line up two such projects a month (you can't), you're looking at earning about $48K a year. With that in mind, I think it becomes easier to understand why I stopped doing most freelance rpg design long ago, or at the very least, never counted on it for my living.

So what if you self-publish? The opportunities to produce rpg ebooks and now print on demand (actual paper) books have never been more plentiful for the rpg designer to-be. In fact, they're likely too good. It's so easy that the field is incredibly crowded. Take a look at the new products that come out each day from RPGNow or DriveThruRPG and you'll see that to be true. How do you stand out in that crowd? Making things worse, if you're an unknown quantity, why should I plunk down my hard-earned dollars when I can probably do a Google search and find some GM's website where he's posted something similar for free? (And don't get me started on piracy.) It's very, very difficult.

A bleak picture? Absolutely. But there are success stories out there still. I'm not trying to discourage anyone interested in giving it a try. I just think that people should have some facts at hand before they leap into things. You get an unrealistic picture sometimes hearing people talk about rpg design. Although the earnings scale isn't as broad as it is for fiction writing ($0 to $70 million per year), it's also inaccurate to lump in the whole field and make pronouncements about how much rpg designers earn.