The RPG Industry : Wages of Sin

John Scalzi has uncovered the fact that Dragon Magazine is open for fiction submissions.  He also points out that while the pay for the writing isn't that good, it's overshadowed by the fact that unlike most other paying markets for short fiction (including free online publications), Dragon Magazine demands ownership of all of the rights to a story before they print it.  That means that you write a story, you get a cheque and those words are no longer yours... Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could build an entire campaign setting on your words and ideas and you'd never see a single solitary cent of it.  They'd own it lock, stock and barrel.

As Scalzi points out, in the SFF scene such demands are completely unheard of.  Most paying SFF markets demand first publication rights, possibly the right to reprint in an official anthology but in the long term the stories belong to you.

The worse thing is that Dragon's policies are absolutely standard procedure.  Games get new editions or sold on without the original creators ever seeing a cent, games become movies and TV shows and the original authors never see a penny and the worse thing is that nobody complains.  Why complain?  if you won't work at that rate then there are ten guys behind you who'll do it just for the glory of being in Dragon or Knights of the Dinner table magazine or for appearing on a list of 15 writers in some cobbled together supplement for a game.

The RPG industry's naked contempt for its creatives is almost as shocking as its contempt for its customers.  Almost but not quite.

In truth though, the contempt isn't entirely undeserved.  If you look at the quality of the writing and the ideas in most RPG books you'll see that RPG audiences are a lot less picky when it comes to their trope wranglers than the SFF audiences are.  Fiction of a kind that would struggle to find its way into even the most down-at-heel semiprozine is regularly published in game books and novels, all of which are happily bought up by the aging gamer population who frequently read RPG books for fun rather than as a means of playing a game.  To borrow John's idea, I think it's not just people who submit to Dragon who are good candidates for paint drinking, it's anyone who writes for the RPG industry and who doesn't self-publish.

Indeed, the plus side of such terrible practices is that more and more creative gamers are taking the plunge, making the most of the internet and are selling their own games online.  The more this trend catches on and the sooner we'll see the end of the kind of exploitative practices that dominate the mainstream RPG industry. 

Comments

[Serdar]

"Paint drinkers", by the way, is a gloriously savage epithet. It's almost too nice a word to describe some of the people I've seen who function as the self-appointed gatekeepers in this business.

[Jason M. Robertson]

I have a couple of game writing credits in supplements for Jovian Chronicles. I was fond of the experience. That said, original setting work probably would be best done in a self-publishing mode, especially now with electronic distribution being easy enough...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Jason :-)

Sure. I mean, imagine all the people who wrote for White Wolf before the company got taken over. The reason why WW interested the Eve Online people is because of the huge IP bank.

Now the Eve Online peeps can turn those ideas into games and the original creators of those ideas won't see a further dime.

RPG writers need a union :-)

Having said that, if you're the kind who enjoys messing around with rules and writing stuff for games yourself anyway then, as someone pointed out in the comments over at Scalzi's, getting paid and published might seem like a pleasant experience.

[Jacob Martin]

I was thinking about making an RPG for the d20 system, but it will probably be an independent press thing, as I don't trust the mainstream guys. I plan to write novels for traditional press, but for RPG stuff I would have to be careful to retain copyright. Which is why I think companies and magazines like Dragon demanding full ownership of creative material is terrible. For example, my Lulu.com published short story collection may have been a collection of dreck from my early career, however I don't think a company has the right to copy the good stuff from what I write to make money off it as an RPG material supplement. Retaining copyright is something I hold to, since I know that with a good editor and some good education from the Australian School System (I know I say bad things about it, but I learned more from the teachers discussions than what they were supposed to be teaching), I might actually pick up some skills that may well improve my work significantly, and could earn me some money in the future.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Jacob :-)

The unfortunate truth is that the are probably aware of how much the writing fraternity look down their noses at all of this. They don't have any hopes of pulling in the Ted Chiangs or the Kelly Links of this world, they're wanting junior writers who have low self-esteem and enough quality to fill a few pages between ads and in so doing they're showing contempt not just for writers but for their audience too.