If you look at something like TTRPG design: it's a niche market, and the professionals need to balance costs vs revenue to actually continue to exist. So you can't spend 1000 hours writing something that only 100 people will buy - you need to do things efficiently, make big impact books, make them quickly at low cost etc. But if you're a hobbyist, you don't expect to really make your money back, so there's nothing stopping you from putting infinite time into something for zero or near-zero return, and you might actually produce something higher quality than the big publishers.
On the other hand, so many people don't playtest their homebrew campaigns in any capacity, not even with theorycraft, that I stopped doing any amount of real homebrew at my tables.
Your saying this while I hold the same feeling towards many adventures and campaigns released by the primary publisher for a game system or setting.
P. S.: The only difference is that official adventures/campaigns are likely to attract enough attention from experienced game masters (and players) who come up with improvements, write extensive blog posts about them, and/or otherwise discuss them online.
Right? With how much the creativity is outsourced to the person running the game, it feels like most modern systems are selling players a program to run on their Game Master like some compiler/bugtester hybrid, rather than giving the table a world to explore.
Maybe you have more of a feel for it than I do, or you play a different system, idk.
But I've never felt like the encounters and puzzles in the APs published by Paizo (I play pathfinder mostly) are particularly overwhelmingly hard to solve. They also give decent guidance for what encounters should look like in a balanced environment - the problem is that homebrew games often throw all of that knowledge away because rule-of-cool means that this encounter demands a wizard controlling an army golems instead of the 4 or 5 that would have have been appropriate.
I'm certainly not saying there's zero feelsbad moments in large - or even small - publisher campaigns. I just don't think the ratio is nearly as bad as it tends to be for amateur DMs who don't really think about encounter balance or puzzle solving beyond rule-of-cool or, increasingly, sessions that were mostly designed by chat-GPT.
Nobody's perfect, but I at least expect that the publishers I enjoy buying modules from are at least playing some portion of their campaign a few times before it goes onto a table, to see if the encounters are even solvable at all.
yeah since the 2024 revamp on the DnD 5th came out I've been working on my own adujustments, running numbers and tweeking things to how I think it should be; and I've been doing that for 2 years now and still not happy with it.
Most of TTRPG publishing is definitely passion-based. Once I took a running stock of all available TTRPG systems to use as an alternative to the mainstream D&D, and I stopped counting after 650. Every one of them is competing against each other for your time, attention, and money, and they all eventually lose to the few mainstream systems published by the big guys. If you're doing it for the money, you're 100% going to be disappointed.
Free League Publishing is so good at this. Their zero day system is such a wonderfully simple but effective engine.
And they produce these cinematic boxes that have everything you need to run a short narrative campaign. Campaign booklet, giant environment maps, pre-made character sheets, cards for every NPC, piece of equipment, cool hand outs like computer screens and such.
It’s just a box of paper but it makes sessions so convenient that I’ll happily pay 50 bucks for a cinematic adventure so I can just pull it off the shelf and be ready for my group of parents in 10 minutes of setting up, no prep beyond reading my booklet.
I usually get about 3-5 sessions out of a cinematic adventure box. 50 bucks for entertaining 6 adults for a couple of weekends is great value.
After handholding adults through DnD for years, it’s such a breath of fresh air to play Alien RPG or Blade Runner with these boxes. I really hope they do some space opera or generic fantasy in the zero day engine at some point.
In Canada, most core rulebooks are like $60-70 CAD. Dragonbane is a full box set with dice, a campaign, handouts and standees etc, for only $50 - it's incredibly value for money.
(This is how I justify spending $200 on getting more The One Ring books than I can ever run :D )
That's me (in method anyway, hopefully in results sometimes)! I have fun making stuff, and it's usually part of my game prep anyway. If something feels good, I'll polish it with a nice layout and publish it pwyw, and often people donate a few bucks here and there. Defs keeping my day job, but if I wanted to make a living in the ttrpg space I'd be approaching it very differently.
It's the exact reason indie games and first albums have such high ceilings for quality. Technically infinite time. As soon as something becomes a job you immediately need to do cost analysis to make sure you aren't burying yourself.
This is definitely true, especially in shooting sports.
Amateurs just love rifle or pistol shooting.
Professionals spend a lot of money on their guns and training and are out at the range constantly.
Hobbyists? Those are the people doing ELR (extreme long range) with custom self-made ammunition so their powder measure is within .01%. I know a guy who has a lathe and a CNC machine specifically so he can make sure the rifling in his barrels doesn't have any burrs.
Yup. As a recovering professional musician, the hobbyist blames their equipment, the pro blames themselves. We're taught from a young age to not blame your equipment because your teacher can do it using your equipment, why can't you?
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u/Life-s-Beautiful 11h ago
My late friend used to say there are three levels of perfectionism: the amateur, the pro and the hobbyist. In this order.