Thread by @lackingceremony

🎲✏️✨ Making an Income as an Independent Tabletop Roleplaying Game Designer 📚💸📈

I've been designing/self-publishing tabletop roleplaying games for 14 years. I've experimented a lot with design approaches, publishing formats, & funding strategies. I've learned from mistakes.

I started as a teen who was barely covering costs, but now my game design work is the primary income source for my family. I've had a lot of privilege and luck in my corner, which partially accounts for my success, but I've also developed a lot of knowledge I can share with you.

I want to open with a piece of advice, and I encourage aspiring designers to really sit with it for a while, and to re-visit it often: know why you're designing games.

Is it to make cool things to share with friends? To become a career writer? To give back to your community?

That said, the rest of this thread is going to turn toward a very narrow focus: turning your independent tabletop roleplaying game design work into a meaningful (potentially main) source of income.

The most important concept I'll share here is that if you want to make money from independent game design, you need to build passive income. Passive income is money that continues to come in long after the work is done.

Tricky, because indie TTRPG culture is very buzz-driven.

I still primarily pay my bills with passive income from Monsterhearts and The Quiet Year. Those were both designed in 2010-2011 and crowdfunded in 2012.

I wrote those while I was sleeping in the back half of someone's laundry room, off the side of the highway in a rural area.

My cost of living was really low back then. I slept on a lawn chair cushion because it was cheaper than a mattress. Spending less meant I needed to work less, which in turn freed up time for projects that weren't going to pay out for at least a year.

Now, they're still paying.

This is something that I think about when I see people sinking a huge amount of energy into the patreon/itch small-content release cycle.

That model is awesome for certain things: pushing yourself to experiment, practicing, giving and getting something from your community.

That model can help you skill up and test ideas.

But if you are trying to maintain and grow a revenue stream, under that model you need to be creating constantly, indefinitely. There's little room to recharge, explore privately, or take healthy rest.

Passive income is crucial!

Here's what worked for me, and what I've seen work for other TTRPG designers who have been successful in building passive income: a slower release cycle that focuses on putting out a compelling title every 12-24 months, in print and digital, slowly building an evergreen library.

I've done lots of scrappy projects, game jams, & limited runs in the meantime, but here are my major releases:

2006: Perfect
2009: Ribbon Drive
2011: Perfect Unrevised
2012: Monsterhearts
2013: The Quiet Year
2016: Monsterhearts 2
2018: Dream Askew
2019: Variations on Your Body

Ribbon Drive captivated many of its players, and it had a positive (if small) critical reception. But the way I released it, I made very little money and couldn't build on my success.

Monsterhearts was my first game that really paid. Six years in.

It took a while for me to figure out what I was doing. It also took a while to build a small catalogue of products that were well-positioned to generate passive income across a longer term.

So, that's the idea of passive income.

With a release every 12-18 months, you'll be able to re-capture attention in the scene just as it starts to drop, and you'll be able to introduce new customers to your existing back catalogue just as sales dwindle.

The next skill you really need to have a handle on is budgeting.

Game design income fluctuates. If you're working with kickstarters and long release cycles, it fluctuates wildly. You need to learn how to forecast expenses, set aside taxes, and allocate funds across 18+ months.

Let's say you run a $60k kickstarter. Congrats! But how much do you actually have to spend?

10% processing fees leaves $54k. Printing and freight is going to cost min $8-10k at that volume. Art and editing is $1-3k. Mail-outs on initial orders is $2-6k.

Are you paying out stretch goals? Are there additional perks to fulfill beyond the core book? Are you investing any of that money back into your business in the form of new software or other investments? You're probably paying 25-45% in taxes on whatever you make after expenses.

A thing I wish I'd started doing with kickstarters earlier is factoring the cost of a full reprint into my budget. Because I have more than once screwed that up and gone "Oh shit, a core title sold out, now I'm not making money off it any longer, and I need $4-14k to reprint it!"

Budgeting means being able to take a big sum like $60,000 and say "realistically, what I've unlocked in terms of money in my pocket is $475 per month for the next 18 months, after taxes and expenses, some far in the future."

It's essential. Otherwise you fuck yourself over.

If you've never budgeted before, this page has a crash course on basics:

Sign up for a month of YNAB, read their how-to guide, watch a digital workshop or two. Learn their system. Cancel before they charge your card, if you wanna just DIY a spreadsheet.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules…

A major stumbling block for me was that I started to learn how tax stuff worked way too late. If I started over, I would register my business properly asap, register for GST before I was legally required to by threshold, and make sure I was doing my taxes right from the start.

So.

The way I know how to make a livable income from games is to cultivate passive income. One way to do that is to put out a compelling, notable title every 12-18 months, designed to be an evergreen addition to your permanent catalogue. Budgeting is essential to your stability.

In terms of actually making money off your sales, it's important to talk about pricing.

With PDF sales through DriveThruRPG, they take 30-35%. With a direct book sale through Indie Press Revolution, they take 30%. Sales to retailers are at 50%. Through distributors, you get 44%.

Do you plan to sell to retailers? Then make sure that, with all expenses factored in (including art, editing, printing, warehousing, and shipping to their store), you're making a worthwhile profit on sales at 50% of sticker price. Otherwise, you are losing money and time.

I make sure my cost to physically print a unit is no higher than 15% of retail price, and my all-in production cost is no higher than 30%/unit on first run.

That involves finding strategies to drive down costs. But I avoid driving down costs in ways that feel slimy or unethical.

There are a few ways to minimize costs without compromising values.

The first is to ask a lot of questions. Ask other designers who are a rung up in sales volume who they use to print or do fulfillment. Ask for multiple quotes from each printer. Ask yourself about alternatives.

The Quiet Year is sold in a burlap bag because printed boxes are stupid expensive to print and ship. It has skull tokens because I found a source of plastic beads that could do orders of 15,000 at a time.

The form factor is an aesthetic fit. I love it. But it's also strategic.

Be constantly curious about these sorts of things: product formats, release strategies, publishing secrets, all of that.

Experiment on the small scale. Find strategies that work, are appealing, and that scale gracefully. And then implement up.

It's okay to negotiate with manufacturers and service providers. Look for wiggle room. Be bossy about your needs. Compare quotes.

But then don't do that with artists. Ask what their rates are. Assess your budget. Scale your specs accordingly. Pay their full worth. Pay a bonus.

If you can't pay the artists you want the rates they ask, maybe look into stock art. You can download stock photos and illustrations from Shutterstock affordably ($50 for 5 images). Variations on Your Body uses a stock illustration as its cover. Unsplash has free commercial use.

In terms of managing costs, figure out what you are capable of doing yourself.

I do my own layout. It is straightforward and serviceable. I did my own interior art on Monsterhearts, working from stock images. I designed my own website. Teach yourself new skills as you go.

And, in complement to that DIY ethic, be realistic about what you don't want to do, or what would be unfeasible to do yourself.

I outsource warehousing/fulfillment. Nothing gets mailed to or from my house. I send order lists to a trusted company. I don't want that job. It's big.

There's another topic which comes to mind, and it feels a little out of sequence to talk about here, but: design projects you can actually finish.

Be realistic about the time, skill, and resources required to bring a vision to life. Ask early and often whether you have capacity.

For me, a big part of this is actually doing the math.

If you're designing a fantasy game with 12 character classes, each of which has a deck of 30 power cards and 5 signature equipment cards... that's 420 cards.

All in, how much time does it take to design/test/lay out a card?

Beyond this nitty gritty calculation of 420 x 35 x 20 = 294,000 minutes spent on this single aspect of the game in a vacuum, also be assessing the scope of the project and setting up realistic timelines for yourself in terms of going from early prototype to finished product.

It takes at least 4-8 months to go from "this is done" (I have a complete design that is thoroughly tested and ready to show the world) to "this is done" (I have funded, finalized, and printed a book which I now hold in my hands). Be realistic about your timeline. Anticipate.

I keep having really cool ideas for this game Goblin Gardeners, but I haven't sat down and sunk time into it in earnest yet. Because there are parts of the design I haven't wrapped my head around yet, but also because it is going to be a massive undertaking I can't commit to atm.

That actually brings me back to my original point: know why you're designing games.

Are you looking to build a dependable income that can support you? That might dictate/constrain your design priorities. You'll never be totally bullied by circumstance, but it's a factor.

Like, for example, when I was younger I was a weirdo with questionable social boundaries. John Harper was someone in my regional game community. So I collaborated with about a dozen people to create Codex: John Harper, a collection of John Harper statted up in dozens of games.

And then I printed off a stack of Codex: John Harper using the printer at my workplace, and sold them for $3 a piece at Go Play NW, back when it was still a tiny convention.

It was very funny and weird. It covered the gas money to get me home.

I couldn't really make it today.

So! Know what your goals are. If you're serious about wanting to do independent tabletop game design as a meaningful source of income, cool! It'll take a long time. You need to be realistic, budget carefully, find cost-effective delivery models, and slowly build passive income.

And in closing, I just want to reiterate a final time: There is no requirement that everyone be doing this for money, or that everyone doing this for money be trying to build up a full-time income from it.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them. I can't promise I'll respond to them all, but getting the conversation going is great.

If you've made game design into your income, whether through a path similar to my own or something wildly different, feel free to chime in and add!

Oh! One other critical piece of advice, for anyone who has a stable job and is thinking about leaving it behind for a career as an independent creator: don't quit your day job until you've made it redundant.

Believe in yourself! But don't be cavalier about risk exposure.

One of my favourite books of creative life advice is Big Magic, and in it Elizabeth Gilbert talks a lot about writing alongside other work, about sustaining the magic, about nurturing your craft slowly, and about pushing through rejection until you succeed. Worth a read!

@raspilicious Those are the types of goals and desires that will help you clarify the question you are asking.

@DriftDrafs I think itch is great! I often see it used as a hub for jams, early prototypes, and community sharing. That's super exciting and cool to see! It's just not the direct route to building a livable income, as far as I can tell.

One could also use itch in a different way.

@threadreaderapp unroll