Advice on the RPG Pitch
Armoury99:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on May 03, 2008, 02:30:07 PM
The key part here, Armoury, seems to be that you want to "get a start in the business" so to speak, by starting small, gaining credentials and working your way up to making your own stuff with your own creative vision. Would you say that that reflects your intentions here, or are you really just interested in writing supplementary material for now?
You've hit the nail on the head with the first part of your question. Supplimentary materials are a way of honing my craft and learning more about the industry in these tentative first steps towards it. Of course I'd like to one day produce my own stuff (I'm already looking into that and laying the groundwork) but those are by definition big projects and frankly I'm unsure if I have the discipline and endurance required for it as yet. I thought that in the meantime some small articles for existing publishers would help give me writing practice and discipline, and establish a benchmark of quality required (one I reach it), and to be honest would probably provide some validation that I'm not living in a dream world regarding my skills. So while psychologically I want to get paid, its not my promary goal.
Eero Tuovinen:
Hey, this is starting to sound pretty sensible. Also, Ron's advice is really pertinent here: you don't need to adhere to "professional" standards in approaching publishers and laying your pitch if the goal is first and foremost to train yourself in writing and project management with the goal of becoming an independent/lead designer at some point yourself. It makes a world of difference whether you're into a project for self-improvement or for getting paid - the latter gives the payer something of a hold on you, which affects the relationship quite a bit compared to a more mutualistic relationship.
What games would you like to write for? That determines a lot of how you should approach the matter, exactly. Some companies and/or IP owners and/or designers are easy to approach and gain permission for publishing your stuff, while others are less so, I seem to hear. The important point is that there are always any number of games in the world that crave for attention from talented writers - the threshold issue is getting paid, really, but the beauty of an independent set-up is that this financial and investment issue all but disappears. If your goals are to train and prove yourself, and to get a bit of money for your trouble, then an independently set up project might be just right for you, depending on which IP you want to write for.
As an arbitrary example, consider Clinton R. Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday: it's a flexible, reasonably popular fantasy roleplaying game and rules system that is all about dramatic heroic action. Owners of the game would love a quality supplement, they quack like little ducklings in distress at the fact that such have not been made during the last couple of years. If your sights were, hypothetically speaking, set on writing for TSOY, then there is practically no threshold at all for doing that as long as you're willing to take the financial risk of publishing yourself. (This is because the game is published under an open licencing scheme that allows anybody to work with it.) On the other hand, it'd be almost impossible to find anybody to publish that supplement and pay you, at the same time. Such are the wonders of open source licencing and independent publishing. Consider well; perhaps, depending on what game you want to write for, your best bet is to be your own publisher anyway. It's not that difficult to put out small product in pdf or small run printing.
(Also, about your presumption that you're not ready to publish a whole game yet: some might say that you are wrong and doing a whole game is not a big deal if you're smart about what you really need to write for it. I won't presume to know what kind of games you want to make: if your ambition has you publishing 300-page monsters full of tedious reference materials, then I won't be surprised if you want to hone and prove your writing discipline before tackling that. It's true that the grand work doesn't progress anywhere while you're off training, but the training will help to finish the big game later, and it will also help you realize whether writing an ambitious game is actually what you want to do, after all.)
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