Thread by @MarkSeifter

Hi everyone! I don't know how many of you are still checking in after my mega-thread, but if you're still with me, it may have been long, but that thread was about an *easy* way you can support creators and ground level staff at Paizo. Ready for hard mode?

In the RPG industry in general, pay is incredibly low for a job that requires significant skill, with the notable exception of Wizards of the Coast who have the money and pay double what anyone else can pay (and they don't have to do that, so hats off to them for paying more).

I see many of you calling for us to have more pay and it means a lot to me. I'm going to be candid, Paizo pay is low enough that if you want to own a home, to start a family, or to retire, you pretty much can't do it in this area.

If you want a future, step 1 has to be "Leave Paizo." On a week where like, the world hasn't caught on fire around Paizo, this is often the most stressful thought in the back of my head.

Because I think it's probably clear from my other thread that I love my coworkers and am deeply passionate about what I write. I do not want to leave. But some day I probably have to. And my fears won't be the worst at Paizo because I have privilege.

My father is the child of Holocaust survivors who had *nothing,* but through skill and determination, he became a doctor on scholarships, made a life for our family and built up enough that I will some day inherit money that might allow me to do one of the three things I listed.

Many of my coworkers aren't so fortunate.

But I want to be clear here: I love that you are calling for more pay, and we actually need a *lot* more pay to live in this area. And before I go further, I always want you to know when I go from the realm of pure fact and data I know for sure

and into speculation based on collecting supporting evidence. And I'm about to go to speculation: You might be imagining a team of evil executives swimming in Scrooge McDuck piles of money while the rest of us are Cratchiting through the holidays

While I did actually work on PF2 release through Linda's family's Christmas, I had managers who supported me and told me I didn't have to, that I shouldn't (but a schedule that said I must).

But back to the Scrooge money piles. The only people at Paizo who actually have Scrooge money piles had an even bigger Scrooge money pile to start off until they shrunk the pile to change Paizo from a dream to reality, when they could have easily retired comfortably.

This is not to defend specific actions of anyone in upper management, I'm not interested in litigating those with you right now. But they aren't, to my knowledge, running a pyramid scheme where they get rich and we get left out.

As far as I know, Erik Mona, one of the highest people at the company, when he saw that a former coworker was hired by WotC at double Paizo's salary, was like "Wow, that is more than my salary." I wasn't in the room and maybe it isn't, but I believe it.

@JasonBulmahn, my boss, had a car until last year that was so old and dangerous that I literally feared for his life on a regular basis, and when we woul drive somewhere together, I rushed to be in whatever car was not Jason's. Only his twitch stream let him replace it.

He clearly is not making *that* much more than I am.

So my preamble was too long, what ridiculously hard thing do I want you to do about it? I need you to convince yourself that you want to pay *more* for your RPG products. The job requires huge expertise. I work with brilliant people who are worldwide experts in their field.

I came from academia. This job requires as much exclusive expertise to produce to Paizo's standard as textbooks do. And textbooks, I know, are sometimes ratcheted up even a bit too high. But RPG books are in the opposite direction.

Did you know that Paizo's beautiful high quality hardcover rulebooks with tons of color art and so much love and quality in the content costs less per page than the original D&D pamphlets from 1974 did? I don't mean with inflation. I mean less period.

The razor sharp margins in the industry, the low amount people are willing to pay for these books, is a huge factor in the poor pay. And this is not to say that there aren't ways out of this prophecy of doom other than just increased salaries.

Some are things upper management *can* do even if they don't have the cash to raise pay enough. And I'm not saying we should stop pushing to find those solutions.

But what I am saying is that a movement to make RPG books cost closer to what they are worth will make a big difference, only if it's supported by the public at large

(we can't have like 1% of the fanbase support this, and the price goes up, and the other 99% stop buying or it just makes things worse).

And I know how hard it is to push to pay *more* for a thing. I know how strapped we all are for money in the world as it is right now. Other games have done it somehow and avoided the sticker shock. Board games, for instance, have managed.

I suspect it's because they have more "stuff" in the box so our mind can justify the price because you get so much stuff versus "Well it's just a book, right, it's words."

And to bring another element up in the pay talk, let me tell you about the one person I know of for sure in the TTRPG sphere who is both dedicated and able to pay Paizo staff what they are worth on freelance (and then talk about the issues with *why* he's the only one who can).

@rollfforcombat is one of the biggest fans of the Paizo staff and our expertise that I know. He wants to make the best books, with the best folks, so much that he is willing to pay much more than Paizo's top rates to make things right. And the only reason he actually *can*?

He's a millionaire who uses owns a company that makes websites for Fortune 500 companies, having gotten in on the internet closer to the ground floor and built a fortune. And he doesn't really care if he makes a profit.

I have watched him spend hundreds of hours working on the books himself, in addition to paying Paizo staff to do our thing, and then sink in enough money that I think he would have 5 or 6 figures if the kickstarter didn't pick up.

He wants to make a great book and support talented folks, but *it's a problem* that it takes the fact that he is massively independently wealthy to give him the ability to do that.

And to think from another direction, how is someone trying to live as a 3rd party author going to compete with a product with that budget for top quality art?

Like literally, I am writing a book about playable dragons for @rollforcombat that I dreamed up publishing myself and designed a lot of the work at home a few months after PF2 came out.

But I knew I couldn't afford the risk of ordering art for it and having it bust, and it needed art which was expensive, so I shelved it forever. I mentioned it to him while working on my Monster Parts system for him and he's like "Done. We're adding this to the kickstarter."

He can take that risk but only because he doesn't need it to profit or pay for his hours, so he can focus only on a desire to make amazing books and to pay folks right.

The industry shouldn't require someone to be that rich an that passionate about Paizo staff in order to be able to pay folks right.

I was sure what to do about making sure you learned who folks at Paizo were. And that was to name ALL staff below the director level (plus two directors I thought were especially invisible). But I am honestly at a loss for what to do about this and I welcome your ideas.

Because paying more for books has to be something that *everyone* agrees to do, not just the most invested or the ones with enough spoons. So that makes it triply harder than my last challenge to you, that could just be personal, to learn us.

One thing you can do if you want to personally "pay more" for Paizo books is to create your own price bump in your own mind, whatever it is, and then go find patreons of Paizo staff and similar places and donate the difference.

That actually helps those staffers more because more hits our pocket, but it also is inherently biased towards those with patreons and I don't really have a good way to fix that.

Maybe start a monthly fund among people who want to pay a phantom extra "tip" for Paizo staff where you collect donations and then split them up and send them to everyone at Paizo? That sounds really hard.

You might have a better idea. Post it here! In fact, just opening up a conversation with real ideas of what to do would be a win for me. Meanwhile, I will continue to be an advocate internally of creative changes that can be made to help mitigate this problem.

And I feel hopeful that between us, some day we will find a way!