Just starting

[Ethawyn]

Hiya. First of all thanks for these boards.

Ok. Down to business. My friends and I are starting up an RPG company. Right now all we have are a bunch of ideas rattling around in our heads and a bunch of lint in our pockets. We're all students, we're all nerds and we're all excited about this. Why am I posting with so little of any commercial value? I want advice on where to start at the beginning because I want to do things right, right from the beginning.

Thanks again all.
Kevin, aka Ethawyn signing out.

God Bless.

[timfire]

If you look down the Publishing forum page at the thread [The game is finished, now what?], you can get some advice on publishing on the cheap.

Is that the type of thing you were looking for, or were you looking for designing advice?

[MatrixGamer]

Kevin, welcome to the great community of small time game makers. You'll never get rich but you'll have a lot of fun. Since you are new I'll give some basic business advice.

1. The less you know about business, the less you should spend getting started. Right now you don't know what requires money - you can waste a lot for little return. Spend little money and buy your experience cheap.

2. Keep all your reciepts. Write them down in a book so that at the end of the year you can add up your expenses to take off on your taxes. There is a lot more to accounting than that but this is the first step to learn.

3. Take your game out to conventions and run it for people. This gives you valuable feedback that you couldn't buy. Each run is an experiment. Look, listen, learn and make changes based on what happens. You're also learning basic salesmenship skills that will help in the future when you run a booth.

4. At conventions go around an meet people. Be friendly, tell them what you're doing but don't try to sell them anything at first. Your peers in the industry are great contacts who can introduce you to other people. If you are lucky you might find one that will be a mentor to you. Either way though this is networking. Don't expect it to pay off immediately but in the long run it helps. I've made good friends doing this.

5. Keep a note book on hand at all times. You will get great ideas all the time. If you write them down you will remember them. I always write up a contact discription after I talk to someone. Ideas will pop up again and again over the years, writing them down helps them develop.

6. Once you have a manuscript, proof read it do death. Then have someone else proof read it to death. Then pay a professional to proofread it (I was once told that $5 per 250 word page was the going rate in Indiana - where I'm at). Save yourself the embarrassment that I've put myself through publishing without adequate proofing!

7. Start learning about business. If you're in school, try taking accounting. It is a lot easier to do it there than to teach it to yourself later (like I had to do!) As you learn more, you will be able to spend more money on your project. Ask people questions and learn from their answers. There is no one right way to do business.

8. Make a decision to be in this for the long haul. Give your business five years at least. Don't quite just because one or two partners leave. This will happen. Don't take it personally. Things are never really person in business.

9. Read and post on various web forums: The Forge, RPG.net, Gencon forum, Board Game Geek, and the many Yahoo groups that might pertain to your subject.

I could go on but that is enough for now. You're at the start of a great journey. It will be a lot of work but can you think of a better task to dedicate yourself to?

If you like, stop by my booth at Origins and/or GenCon and I'll give you more words of encouragement. I got some great support when I started working on Engle Matrix Games and I'm happy to be able to pay it forward.

Sincerely Chris Engle
Hamster Press
http://www.io.com/~hamster

PS: There are lots of gamers on this list who are much more successful at this than I am so always take what I say with a grain of salt. If they say my advice is wrong it may be. I've made penty of mistakes.

[Ethawyn]

Thanks Matrix. That's the exact kind of advice I'm looking for. Anybody else?

[Valamir]

I'm going to crib from myself from another thread where I recently wrote:


1)When partnering with someone on your game design, make sure you have very a clear cut and agreed upon place where the buck stops. That is, know going in who gets final say on important decisions. It may not be the same person for each decision (e.g. one person may have final say on creative content, another on business and financial matters, another on art direction, whatever). But make sure you know who's word is law for those times when such decisiveness is needed.

The gaming hobby is littered with the battered and bruised bodies of people who thought that they could always "just find a way to agree on what to do".

If you have any commercial aspirations for the project at all...figure out that relationship now (if you haven't already)...long before it becomes an issue. It will save much heartache and bad feelings later.


2) there has NEVER been a better time to self publish an RPG.

The hobby started at a grass roots level before being largely taken over by corporate style game companies. Now advances in technology have made it easier than ever for a indie game designer to publish their own game without going the freelancer route of selling your idea to an existing publisher. There is a sizeable market of gamers ready and eager to try new games, in fact, far from driving other game systems out of the hobby I'd say d20 has been largely responsible for generating a big back lash that's opened the door wider to new game systems.


3) Have a unique offering. The game doesn't have to be bleeding edge revolutionary...but it also shouldn't be something I could do myself with GURPs or FUDGE and a couple of house rules. My recommendation is to think of all of the many things characters in your game COULD be or COULD do. Then pick what, to you, seems the coolest, most amazing, most exciting characters to play and the coolest, most amazing, most exciting things those characters could do. THEN make your game JUST about those characters doing those things. Design your game so that no other game ever written is better at portraying THOSE characters doing THOSE things and take the approach that any player not interested in those characters and those things can go play something else. That approach will help ensure that your game is unique among the universe of game offerings.


4) Recognize that your game is not going to be the great new fantastic game that will cause everyone to stop playing D&D and White Wolf...and then recognize that this is a GOOD thing and capitalize on it. Since there is no way that you (or any indie publisher really) has a chance of capturing a huge chunk of the gaming market...specialize. Where a game like D&D appeals a little bit to alot of people you have the freedom to appeal alot to a few people. This is VERY liberating. Consider...this is something Wizards and White Wolf CAN'T do. They can NEVER design a game focused and specialized on being unbelievably perfect for a small number of people...because their business model requires sales to a large number of people. They HAVE to cater to a larger market and that means the whole "least common denominator" and "dilution of vision" thing. You, on the other hand, can be quite nicely profitable selling to a very small niche group of players. You can define that niche as exclusively as you want and you can give those players a mind blowing game experience. Even if the "majority" of gamers would turn their noses up and walk away from your game...you can have quite an active little community and thriving business around a very small niche. This ties into the idea of having a unique offering above and I don't have any stronger advice to any aspiring game designer than to approach the business with the idea that being small and low volume is a GOOD thing and seek to take advantage of it.


5) Decide early what would constitute success for you. If you do decide to take the plunge, what will have to happen before you feel happy that you did it? Is just knowing that there are a couple of play groups out there in the world who regularly play your game sufficient to constitue success? Do you need to see your game on game store shelves before you'd consider it to be a success? Are you thinking that you need to be able to make a passable living doing it full time before it would be worthwhile? Would you be satisfied if you just broke even on the expenses? Define what would constitute success first. Then use that to evaluate what your chances are of meeting that criteria and make your future decisions based on achieving those.


6) Avail yourself of all of the many resources available to small press publishers. This site being one of them, but there are many others. You'll soon realize that it doesn't take that much starting capital to commercially publish an attractive, professional quality game these days. And if it doesn't require that much capital, there's little risk to trying.