🤑🤑 Money and Collaboration - A Pep Talk🤑🤑
Project Managing for TTRPGs
TL;DR: I give a pep talk about money.
This is part of a series on Project Managing for TTRPGs. Stay up to date by subscribing:
Money. The taboo topic that makes the world go round.
I sat down to write a post about money and it turned into three:
A pep talk about why charging for work and frank discussions of money are helpful.
A short overview of my experience picking a TTRPG marketplace and pricing my work.
A guide to splitting money amongst collaborators, plus a Google Sheets template for Royalty Split Projection & Freelancing Fee calculation
This is not a definitive guide for how to grow an audience or maximize profits. My goal here is to share my experience as a new creator and link out to the resources I’ve found the most helpful. Let’s go!
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Charge for Your Work
Writing and designing for TTRPGs is fun. It’s incredibly rewarding to see folks run an amazing game with the module you wrote. A lot of us are also Dungeon Masters used to spending hours prepping for campaigns where the “payment” is simply providing a memorable experience for friends. I was implicitly taught that when I do something creative, I’m getting compensated by folks simply appreciating my work.
But designing, writing, and laying out TTRPG work is work – work that requires time and skill. When I was writing my first TTRPG, Jukebox, an insightful and savvy mentor – one who was making a living off of creative work – urged me to charge money for my early work. I’m grateful for the push and the pep talk they gave me at a point in time when I’d never sold a piece of creative writing before. Regardless of your eventual goals with TTRPG writing, it’s okay to charge money for your work (and, in fact, if you’re organizing a collaboration, I really think you should).
A Money Pep Talk
If you’re new and thinking about creating TTRPG content, here are some thoughts about charging money for your early work:
More Collaborators: If your goal is to collaborate with other people, money allows you to compensate folks for their time and work. Offering compensation will expand the number of people willing to work with you. While you might be able to collaborate with friends, if you want to work with acquaintances or strangers who are TTRPG professionals, money must be an upfront part of the conversation.
Project Tone: Even if it’s not a lot of money, there’s symbolic importance to compensating collaborators: it sets a more serious tone for your project and you as a project lead. It speaks to the quality of the work, the commitment to completing it (and completing it on time), the success of the project, and the nature of the work relationship. Paying someone moves you away from “hey, would you do me this favor” to “let’s collaborate on this business venture”.
Worth: Speaking of symbolism, charging money for a product is you saying “I believe this product is worth $4.95”. Simply confidently stating a product is worth X amount of dollars changes folks' perception of the product and its’ quality. Much smarter marketing folk have written and thought about the psychology around worth and it’s not always sensical - for exhibit A, I present this $1000 brick.
Conversely, when you charge no money or extremely little money for a product, that also symbolizes to customers something about the product.
Is My Work Good Enough to Charge Money? Yes. It is. Your ideas are good and your work is worth it. It will require hard work and growth as a creator, but you can do this! (And if you have a friend or relative who can give you a pep talk, go get one from them!)
…. But also, yes, maybe the first draft of the first thing you write is not perfect and could be a lot better. So, set the goal of making your work good enough to charge money, then do the work to get it there: by asking for feedback, by playtesting your adventure, by trading editing passes with another writer. Being afraid that your work is “not good enough” is normal, and it can be tempting to throw up your hands and say, “well, guess I won’t publish” or “well, I’m just going to put this up for free”. Instead, I’d like to empower you to do the work to produce writing you’re proud of, which involves having the courage to get feedback. (I’ll write lots more on editing, playtesting, etc. when I get to that part of the series).
Let’s Set the Norm of Getting Paid: There are many reasons why it’s hard to make money as a TTRPG writer. One of them is the norm that you don’t necessarily need to pay much or at all for community-produced TTRPG content. But this doesn’t need to be the case! For the longest time, DMing was not a skill people were accustomed to paying for, but recently there’s been the rise of professional DMing on sites like StartPlaying. To me, this represents a value shift, one that recognizes DMing as a skill that takes labor and is something folks are willing to pay for (platforms like this also add other dynamics, like helping folks find players and making sure folks show up). Anyway, capitalism is rough, and I don’t want to make the case that you should be charging your friends for your weekly D&D game. But I do think that there are some not-always-ethical-or-sensical norms around what labor is assumed to be “free.”
Finally, requiring folks to essentially do unpaid creative work to create a portfolio of work or “make it” in the TTRPG industry means that it’s inherently harder for those who don’t have extra time and extra income to create.
What About Reach? Won’t More People Read It if It’s Free? Someone spending money on your work demonstrates their actual interest in or intent to play your game or use your work. It’s a way to communicate that folks actually find value in your work. If you charge money for your product and nobody buys it, I don’t think the answer is “it should have been free,” but rather, “I need to figure out why nobody seems to want this thing.” Make a product worth buying.
On the other hand, if you’re worried that some people won’t be able to afford what you think the product is worth, you can add a sliding scale or free community copies.
My next newsletter post will have a whole section on Pay What You Want and Community Copies.
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Money is tough to talk about and it’s definitely something I’m constantly figuring out my relationship to. At the same time, I have witnessed folks routinely undervaluing their creative work. But writing, editing, and design are all skills for which folks deserve to be paid, and paid fair wages!
In other news, I’m feeling a bunch of emotions (happy, lucky, humbled) over the fact that I was selected as a Storytelling Collective 2023 Creative Laureate!
The Storytelling Collective features heavily in my own path to TTRPG writing and I’m truly honored to have been selected. I plan to put the honorarium towards doing a print run of Jukebox version 2.0 later in the year.
I am in a trio alongside the talented Basil Wright (who has less than a day left on their crowdfunding for the TTRPG Pelogos) and Leon Barillaro (who is crowdfunding for O Captain: The Solo Journaling Game of Stories, Stars and the Sea). They are both making awesome games, so give them a follow and buy their work!
In one week, we’ll continue the discussion of money in a post on 💵 pricing 💵.
Over and Out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️
congrats for being selected as a Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate!!!!!! so exciting!!!!!