Deadly Fredly

So, this question came into my inbox today, and it’s a question I’ve been asked before to varying degrees:

Can you really make a living in the gaming industry without working for a company like Wizards of the Coast or any other large established company?

Standing on its own, the question’s frustratingly vague. (This time it did not stand alone in the message, which is good, but more often it’s asked as if it’s a specific enough question. It isn’t really.) What kind of a living? Living where in the country? Supporting a family or just yourself? With or without insurance? Retirement savings? Doing what kind of work in the industry?

For all but the cheapest versions of the answers to those questions (just yourself, no insurance, no retirement, no family, living somewhere with a low cost of living), I come pretty close to answering the question with an unqualified “no”. If I’m more charitable about it, I’d say “if you’re lucky, yes.” But lucky, here, should be taken to mean:

• By working really hard at it for several years at below the pay scale you need.
• By having a spouse who has a day-job that can provide magical things like insurance and savings and mortgage payments.
• By continuing to work really hard at it once you’ve “made it”.
• By continually seeking out new opportunities to work on more projects.
• etc

Luck, as my friend Rob Donoghue likes to say, is largely a matter of paying attention.

Keep in mind, though, that I do not have magic goggles that let me peer into the financial particulars of everyone who does manage to make a living in this hobby. I can only speak to my own direct experience. Which goes a little something like this:

When I came right out of college, I went into work in the internet industry. I got myself into a website customer support job back when that was a pretty new idea. I made somewhere between $20,000-$25,000 at the time. I grew my skills, moved on into doing perl programming and internal website design for a while, went in other directions from there, and so on, and so forth. Eventually I found myself in California, and eventually I found myself in one of those great, time-sucking internet jobs that paid just under or just over six figures, and I did that for a while. Moved back to Maryland. Kept doing it, with a worse commute. Found myself dead-sick of it, just terribly unhappy about the job all the time, and feeling unable to leave it. Until my wife found some job security of her own, and then told me to frickin’ quit already, because it’s making you miserable, and no, you don’t have to have another job to go to right away.

We have ever since been relying massively on her salary to keep the household running. That’s not to say I don’t make my own financial contribution. Through a combination of:

• Running Evil Hat (I made $0/month for several years; then we got a little success, enough to justify $450/month for a while; I’ve gotten to increase that since, but I am pretty sure I’m still not quite rating McDonald’s wages, and unless Evil Hat can improve its product output over the next few years, I’m not sure the increase can be sustained; behold part of my motive to grow the company! I should note I don’t charge the company anything else for any writing, development, or layout work I do beyond this monthly draw.)
• Running Jim Butcher’s online presence (the site has amazon referrals, other referral programs, the occasional ad revenue, cafe press gear, all of which funnels to me to pay the website costs and then pay myself the remainder for doing the work of creating & running all that over the past ten-plus years)
• Freelance layout work (which is bursty, unpredictable, and can sometimes wind up with late or very late or never-happened payment if you’re not careful)

… I am just in the last year or two finally at the point where I’m making about what I made when I started in the internet industry back in 1996. Only without any benefits (save those that I get as a spouse), which is a lot like saying that I am making 30+% less than what I was making in 1996.

Some of this depends on the kind of work you’re expecting to be doing in the industry. When I do layout work on a full sized book I can pull in between $1500-$2500 these days depending on things like size, complexity, template development, color or black and white work, etc. When I was “making my name”, my project fee ran more like $500, but I’ve gotten better since and my time’s gotten more valuable. Writers may get to see entry level rates around 3 cents/word. Editors may get to see entry level rates around 1 cent/word. Artists may get to see entry level rates around $100/full page.

And all of this with the proviso that a) many someones out there would be eager to take less than the entry level in order to get their foot in the door (though those who accept such offers may be getting the quality they’re paying for), and b) very few companies can afford to pay above entry level, ever. Supply is abundant, and demand and budgets are relatively low in comparison. In that environment, how many books or words or images would you have to create in a year in order to get what you need to make, and do you think that environment will readily hire you to do that work over others?

This is what many freelancers are referencing when they talk about “the wolf at the door”. Something out there is hungry to ruin your security. It’ll come huffing and puffing the moment you slow down and don’t get your minimum of work.

Mind you, I’m paid in spades in terms of happiness capital, of course, and so long as my family’s mortgage and meals don’t depend solely on the income I bring in, how I am living now is sustainable.

But really, it’s sustainable only because my wife is awesome.

If you can’t engineer a similar situation and you’ve got mouths to feed and bills to pay, you should likely consider a day job, and be glad of getting a few hours here and there each week to put effort into sustaining your hobby.

But as I said, I can only speak to my own experience. I know that Ryan Macklin fought the wolf and the wolf won, at least a little — he’s back in a day job. So’s Chris Pramas, despite having a company like Green Ronin to build an industry career around. But there are other folks out there who seem to be making it without the day job. My guess is that they’re “lucky” by the definition given above.

So what’s your experience, readers who are trying to make a living at this crazy thing? Where do I have it wrong? What’s your story?

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

Some FATE games have PC skills form a perfect pyramid (i.e., one skill at the apex, two at the nest level down, etc.), some don’t. Is there any advantage to one way or the other? Mostly, I love the pyramid (focus!), and wonder why a designer would choose not to use it.

– buzz

Buzz, for me, the pyramid is ultimately all about serving up a heaping helping niche protection with a modest side of making sure the character has a good distribution of other skills. It’s both about the focus (what’s at the apex of the pyramid), which defines the niche, and about the base of the pyramid, which supports the apex but also makes sure you’ve got a spread of other stuff you can pitch in with if needed.

Not every implementation is going to need or want that kind of protection. Ultimately the “skill shape” you can achieve is a story effect, describing broadly the template for what makes a capable hero in your world. I’ll talk about a few examples.

The first is the Dresden Files RPG, where we keep to the spirit of the pyramid, but loosen up the structure a bit. There, we went for a column instead of a pyramid (equal quantities all the way down). In all the various shapes that can result from that, you still get a good sense of what the character’s niche is (top three skills), even if it’s not a perfect pyramidal peak. It also allows for the “generalist”, the guy who just doesn’t have any skills at the max, but has a very wide stack of them, and ends up being generally competent in a very wide set of circumstances. The motive there was to support the variety of characters found in the series. Harry D always struck me as a minmaxer, so his skills tend to be a narrow column focused on boosting his spell power as high as possible. Others are well-rounded, intentionally designed for a support role in a team. It felt right, whereas we could get away with the “everyone is some kind of hero chiseled out of the pyramid mold” philosophy of Spirit of the Century.

Then there’s something like Rob Donoghue’s Fate (Psychic) Spies game that he’s running for us locally. There, there’s no reason to use the pyramid because he’s using  a very short list of very wide skills, eight in all I believe. Similar goals pursued here, though: we each have one skill we suck at, one skill we’re world class in, two more we’re badass with, and the rest live in the middle.  That “one skill we suck at” is important; it’s just as hero-defining as the world-class choice.

Last, I’ll point you at an adaptation I did of Sorcerer for Fate by way of the Dictionary of Mu. There, I was pursuing a sort of larger, “What are your areas of focus?” question, hinging on the stats from Sorcerer. Points got allocated amongst the four, and skills hung off of each of those. It’s a little bit like Five Point Fudge, in that regard. Here, you can get a high level sense of what a character’s about simply by looking at those high-level point allocations, which is a useful shorthanding for the GM, while letting the players dig in with some differentiating details further on down in the individual skill allocations. It also drives at the themes from Sorcerer that hook into that system’s attributes, making sure each character touches on each of those themes, at least a little.

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

When trying to design things into a game that fit the important rule, “I’d like to be able to do THIS AMAZINGLY COOL THING IN A GAME,” under what circumstances (if any) do you discard the AMAZINGLY COOL technique or gimmick or whatnot?

When should you (or have you) decide(d) that an entire game can be written around a gimmick?

– Mace Feriere

Mace, I’m not sure I’d ever discard the goal, even if I’d discard the implementation (we’ve nuked entire implementations from orbit before because they just didn’t work). That said, it’s important to recognize when a goal you have for the system isn’t actually the right fit for the game you’re making. This one’s hard to give an example of, unfortunately, but a lot of it comes down to whether or not the goal creates system/setting shear — a collision between the effects and world that rises out of the mechanics, and the intention and message of the conceit of the story. It’s like trying to play a grim and gritty and low-magic experience with the current edition of D&D, which mechanically favors lots of magic, special effects, heroism, all that. Or what happens when a plucky small band of adventurers decides they can fight a dozen thugs because gosh darn it, they’re pure of heart — but they’re playing Rolemaster. But if there’s unity, true unity, between your design goals and your setting goals, they absolutely should be riding in tandem.

As far as your second question goes, I suppose you could say that Don’t Rest Your Head is the only “one gimmick” game I’ve actually designed & published for money. I’ve done several free ones, usually through design contests or similar, built around single gimmicks (see: Pace, Divinity). That said, I don’t think calling DRYH a single-gimmick game is entirely fair, because (at least as I see it), that one gimmick is a pretty fat one, by which I mean the one gimmick is delved into pretty heavily and mined for all of its precious little effects. On top of that, the questionnaire is more important than might appear at first blush, and the real juice of that game comes in the fusion between the answers to the Q’s and the effects of the dice system. Other games in the Evil Hat catalog that might fit this bill are A Penny For My Thoughts and Happy Birthday, Robot!, both of which I did not design, but which I think run deep with their respective gimmicks, both in terms of how they’re implemented and explained, as well as in terms of how the play experience is framed and how it unfolds.

What I’m wary of is “thin” gimmicks, honestly. There are a number of games in the small press sphere that rely on single-trick scaffolding that’s pretty spindly. Whenever I encounter those games, I feel like I’m getting a neat idea that should probably be paired with two or three other neat ideas (or even just standard ideas) to give me something with some real meat. Otherwise it’s a trick for me to bring to another game when I run it — Rob Donoghue and I both love making use of the gimmick of John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors in our non-WoM play — rather than a fully-enabled game in its own right.

So when should you do an entire game around one gimmick? When you can make it fat. When you can hang a lot on it and it doesn’t crumble under the weight. When you have to hold yourself back from doing too much with the gimmick because of all the different ways it could be applied. It’s gotta be something rich and complex to make a full game of it. Otherwise, it’s just one strut out of several you’ll need to support the weight of your game.