It's in that spirit that I here (mis-)characterize and then answer four questions that someone on a chat with me asked the chat, because I think they're interesting questions. Here we go.
Where I put things in the questions in quotes, they're quotes from our interlocutor, where it's not in quotes it's my summary. All the quote marks in the answers are my words.
Question/Topic 1: The platformization of tabletop RPGs. There's a historical path from Wizard's Attic to Lulu and RPGNow to Indie Press Revolution and DrivethruRPG to Kickstarter, Backerkit and itch.io. "It does feel like we're more dependent on Kickstarter and Itch recently than we were on previous platforms. So much so that when, say, Kickstarter announced they're getting into Blockchain or Musk crashes Twitter, it has a BIG effect on the scene and everybody's scrambling to react. Does that sound right?"
I think this characterization both over and undersells the situation we're in. It's vital to note that D&D ebook sales (and reprints of past material) changed dramatically in the middle of this, and that commercial distribution decision had a huge artistic impact.
For a relatively short period, D&D's "historical" materials were sold on SVGames.com. They had a set of free materials (including some scans of historical interest), that were no-frills PDFs sold for around $10 apiece (interestingly, this would be about $18 today just with inflation costs - but sure enough, the Rules Cyclopedia is still $10 today on Drivethru.) At the time, RPGNow was just getting underway - the two were rivals. DrivethruRPG was launched later and eventually merged with RPGNow.
Wizards of the Coast eventually, quite unceremoniously, yanked all PDFs from SVGames both for sale and download. This decision on their part was quite consequential, artistically, as it provoked the creation of engines to "play old D&D" and free or very-cheap distribution of those products formed the basis for what would eventually grow into the OSR, which is the second most lively community in fantasy RPGs (the first most lively is, of course, the community around "big streams" of 5th Edition D&D on Google or Amazon platforms, which aren't mentioned in the question - more on this below.)
The important thing about this "path" through to current PDF distribution is that it, like many other platform stories in the same time frame, is one of consolidation and is driven by the increasing desire for visual provocation. Remember, the "pivot to video" that happened on Facebook and the rise of YouTube happened in the same time period. Vine was purchased and eliminated by Twitter for the same reason - they foresaw that Vine would destroy it, and the growth of TikTok showed that Twitter was right to see Vine as a threat. In our space, the continued dominance of the PDF standard falls into the same category. There truly is nothing about the PDF standard that makes it useful for the distribution of tabletop RPGs other than the commercial desires of the audience ("oh, is that all?") HTML is better for accessibility for disabled readers; hell, a simple app that runs the arithmetic of a game would be a better way to organize the rules of most RPGs than a PDF whose index doesn't work but which has three pieces of full color art on every page. But the audience has spoken (the bastards!) and so the art-heavy PDF experience is considered, by them, superior to any other. In a spoken-word hobby where only one person at the table even gets to see the art, this is a nightmarish state of affairs, but everyone but me loves it and it will absolutely, positively, never change, except to get worse. Look at any "GM advice" video on Youtube if you don't agree, and see what the algorithm there tells you to do in your game.
But to bring it back to the specific entities raised by our interlocutor, beyond the RPGNow/Drivethrurpg merger, the arrival of D&D PDFs on Drivethrurpg is a huge deal for them, conclusively establishing that entity as the winner of the decade-long struggle. But Kickstarter and Backerkit are not competitors with DrivethruRPG. In fact, overwhelmingly, DrivethruRPG is used as an electronic fulfillment house and archive for crowdfunded projects. Backerkit might be used to distribute drafts but in the end creators don't want to be responsible for their funders downloading shit over and over forever. And anyway, once a project is done, putting it on DrivethruRPG gets them even more money. (Plenty of Kickstarters use DrivethruRPG POD to fulfill their print rewards - this allows another entity to manage the shipping costs and lets backers be flexible about when they want physical delivery.)
So Kickstarter/Backerkit isn't really a "platform for tabletop RPGs" in the same way the predecessors were. Instead, there are many elements of projects on those platforms that (presently) rely on DrivethruRPG. And the anti-commercialism of itch.io as a tabletop RPG space (only partly intentional - the complete lack of tools to sort, search and find tabletop RPGs on itch.io compared to DrivethruRPG drive this more than anything else) makes it a lot less of a competitor. If you're a commercial creator and you sell tabletop RPG ebooks on itch.io, I guarantee you sell stuff on DrivethruRPG.
I don't even know why IPR is on the interlocutor's list (I mean, I do know but will pretend to overlook it). IPR was a nice thing to have around when Lulu was uncertain and DrivethruRPG had no POD option. But it was just a storefront. It never did anything else.
So, while I think it's notable that DrivethruRPG absolutely, positively won the "platform for the distribution of tabletop RPG e-books" wars of 2000-2010, it certainly has not been threatened by subsequent events. Companies with their own communities of players (Paizo, Pinnacle, Modiphius, etc.) have developed their own in-house storefronts, but these are not seeking to become platforms for the hobby broadly.
Nevertheless, if you're putting Kickstarter in the same "platform" category as DrivethruRPG, you have to take YouTube and Twitch into account as key players in the "platform for tabletop RPG" battles. Twitch particularly, with its integration into Amazon, a major distributor and price-setter for print products ("Why should I buy at my local gaming store when I can get it for thirty cents less on Amazon?" - someone who has been sexually harassed at their local gaming store) is a vital consideration here. A performance of a tabletop RPG on Twitch is almost certainly contributes more to the perceived identity of the game than all other sales or play of the game, and very likely more than the design of the game.
So my answer, in sum, is to be very careful about thinking about what a "platform" is. Like, just because Elon Musk has crashed a second divorce into Twitter and indie creators who rely on Twitter for the discovery of their work by a broader audience are scrambling to find an alternative before the service is overrun with people selling unvaxxed urine and cryptocurrency doesn't mean Twitter was ever anything to the tabletop RPG industry other than an advertising channel, like an ad in Dragon.
Before I tried to discuss the "platformization" of tabletop RPGs, I would be really specific about what activity within that sphere I was considering as becoming attached to a platform. There are readings of this question where DrivethruRPG is truly the only "platform" for tabletop RPGs, and others where Youtube and Twitch are.
Question #2: What's the current status of White Wolf now that the video game company transfers seem to have calmed down? "Maybe it's just me, but I feel like White Wolf games have a much smaller audience and impact on RPGs than they used to. So I feel like WW is just a smaller piece of the overall TRPG story now? Does that sound right?"
Yes and no. I don't think a lot of people have gotten their heads around the fact that White Wolf has, in the last few years, become probably the most aggressive player in melding the video game world, the streaming world and the tabletop gaming world both financially and artistically.
Because I get asked about the fucking timeline of this so much, here's a quick breakdown that I did of this in another dark forest:
In the late 1980s, the dominant tabletop RPG, D&D, was going through some struggles. On the one hand TSR was still chasing the big success of the red box Basic Set, which was aimed at kids and families, and on the other hand they were, in a jumbled and haphazard way, trying to advance the property into AD&D to service the older players who were coming up on 15 years into the hobby. There were strict content guidelines about what could and couldn't go into D&D in an attempt to make D&D palatable to Middle America again (the Satanism-in-D&D scandal was fading out, and the theory was that this was a result of toning down the violent/occult content. I agree with this theory, by the way.) And as always, most in the industry were fine chasing D&D's coat-tails.
So it's in that context that White Wolf comes along with Vampire in 1991, Werewolf in 1992 and Vampire 2ed. in late 1992, in which they use stylish, scary art and emphasize hard at every turn that these are games for adults. Romance, sex, violence, it can all come on the table. Throw in a cultural moment of goth music and a rediscovery of Anne Rice's horror and you have a recipe for success. White Wolf has made its money and its name being EDGY and ADULT.
By the time White Wolf decided (I am summarizing a lot of players here into "White Wolf" because they aren't at the table anymore so please forgive the reductionism) they needed to reboot their games (via the "blue book" World of Darkness) era, this was a necessary artistic step as well as a commercial one. I think a lot of people looked at the "new World of Darkness" era as strictly a cash grab rather than noting that the previous games had a lot of stuff in them that made sense in the 1990s when inclusivity just meant having a bit of art and a Spanish name or two, but in the age of the Web meant you needed to actually think about that material a little more deeply and in a little more of a mature manner. That's why Vampire: the Requiem's edgy stuff is presented more clinically and more "here's a thing you might put in your game if you want" rather than the deranged travelogue into a dark carnival reality that the 1990s World of Darkness material, telling you "how it was". (This is also why I like Requiem more - it is addressed to players as creators rather than experiencers of a game designer's thinking.)
And pretty quickly the old EDGY and ADULT (all caps) World of Darkness disappeared, except in one place, the massive and still phenomenally successful Masquerade LARP world. It was in the LARP world that Masquerade survived in its original form while White Wolf worked its way through Vampire: the Requiem.
Requiem was artistically successful but never reached either the commercial impact of Masquerade nor its influence. So when White Wolf was being purchased and repurchased by video game companies they didn't want Reqiuem - they wanted Masquerade. And the people they put in charge of it weren't Requiem people - they were Masquerade LARP people. (Remember that when the Onyx Path IP licensing/sales deal took place, LARP was explicitly excluded from it.)
That's why, in a lot of respects, Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition feels like a throwback (even more than the 20th Anniversary version of Masquerade!) - because it has the "let's scare a suburban mom!" attitude of the 1990s, still intact in a LARP time capsule after all this time. (Folks, the suburban moms actually played Vampire: the Masquerade.) And this is why the completely insensitive and immature garbage in the supplements eventually landed them in hot water - because they were still in the gleeful transgression mode of the 1990s ("what if you were playing a CHILD PREDATOR?!?!") and didn't get that their audience was now grownups who thought this was very very stupid instead of 14 year olds who wanted to look down on the 14 year olds playing a sanitized Mormon D&D.
But because the video game companies deal with actual money instead of just whoever's friends are friends with who, they fuckin fired all those people. Now, you might be wondering, JD, what are you talking about "actual money"? The answer is the shocking and welcome production of White Wolf video games since Paradox took more close control of the company. White Wolf now has a AAA free to play multiplayer "shooter" (I mean you're a vampire using vampire powers so guns are not all of what's going on), multiple prestige visual novels (is this the ultimate outcome of the tabletop RPG's audience seemingly unending hunger for fancier art in their games?!), a VR game based on Wraith: the Oblivion, and many other projects. The release schedule has been relentless for these games over the last four years and is set to continue. They provide an immediate entrance to the White Wolf properties for the video game audience.
Okay, but how do they get them into the tabletop game? The answer is that if you go to the Paradox page for their World of Darkness games to learn more, they regularly push the tabletop games and an absolutely shocking amount of tabletop streaming on Twitch and Youtube, officially backed, sponsored, scheduled, budgeted and licensed. You can become a Vampire: the Masquerade fan without touching Dungeons & Dragons these days. And they have their own dark forest in that they bring all these fans together in their servers where they can schedule games, meet new players, etc.
White Wolf has, via its video game partners and tremendous support for streaming, made the most aggressive push of any company into trying to meld their video game and tabletop and streaming audiences into one, maybe including D&D and WOTC in that equation. Just look at the disasters around official D&D licensed video games if you don't believe me. (Then look at Solasta and really think about why Hasbro can't seem to get shit off the ground.)
I'll talk about how insanely hard White Wolf is pushing this melding of indie creators, streamers, official creators and streamers, and other fans in another question. But overall, the only way you can say that White Wolf doesn't remain a major player in tabletop RPGs is to overlook the tremendous success of their tabletop RPG streaming shows and the (oft-theorized and finally-realized) connection to their massive video game projects.
Now, this is all pretty recent. And you never have to get me to be a doomer who says it's all for nothing and nobody will ever cross the bridge from video games to tabletop games (and do we even want them to?! have you ever met someone who has played a video game?! good heavens!). But the idea that they're not doing anything special in the tabletop space is wrong.
Question #3: "How do we assess "open gaming" as a movement at this point? I mean, everybody and their brother releases SRDs now or has a branded way for people to release supplementary material for their game in a "Powered by XYZ" format." Since you can't really enforce copyright on game mechanics, can we just shrug our shoulders at it and say that it was all just about reassuring people that they won't get in legal trouble, we promise?
I think this actually might relate back to the platformization question a lot more clearly and specifically than the platformization question. I do think that, on the community end, the open gaming licensing of 3e D&D was a promise that Wizards of the Coast would not return to the litigious and aggressive days of T$R, as we wittily called it, in which fan materials were targeted by takedown letters written by lawyers' assistants and not proofread. But what it, in practice, means nowadays for games is that a dedicated shopfront will open on DrivethruRPG where the holder of the IP will get a substantial cut from the production of the fan material.
There are a huge number of contributors on these storefronts that make, essentially, beer money for selling shit that they write for their home games, and DrivethruRPG, as the winner in the PDF platform wars of 2000-2010 has set the amount of money that a creator gets from publishing this stuff at 50% of the price. That expectation is now "priced in" to questions about open gaming - how much is it actually "worth it".
Other games are still released into the creative commons, the public domain, or even informal "yea, just write whatever thing you want" permissive structures, but as far as an explicit "license offered openly and which can be accepted for commercial purposes", until this year DrivethruRPG's 50% slice was the industry standard. People who worked in this space more or less had to swallow it. Of course people could (and still did) work under the d20 OGL or a SRD for a different system and sell their works at full price, but the strong push to bring it under one commercial umbrella traded literally half the revenues for visibility, showing how little of the latter most of these creations had, and how little the former was perceived as being worth.
But as mentioned above, White Wolf recently took aim at this by allowing an open license for Vampire: the Masquerade video games after a 2021 itch.io video game jam resulted in massive success in the video game, tabletop and streaming spheres. And what's insane is that - even though video game money is "real money" compared to the tiddlywinks exchanged for tabletop RPGs - White Wolf is offering 75% of the revenues to the creators.
I think this "open video gaming license" is the first real sign that the partnership of tabletop gamers with itch.io might actually bring about new creative and commercial cross-pollination instead of just trying to get customers from one column into two. It remains to be seen how important a step this will be but if other game companies follow suit, DrivethruRPG 's 50% sum will come under increasing pressure. You can either sell a PDF about a new Vampire clan for $2.99 and get $1.50 for it, or download a free copy of Ren'py and make a visual novel about an exciting adventure within that clan and sell it for $5 and get $3.75 for it from a much larger audience (not just Masquerade fans, but horny visual novel fans too!)
Of course it may all come to nothing - Paradox might go under, they might shuffle off White Wolf in a fire sale if Bloodlines 2 is a flop, or something else might happen. Or it might spread to other companies and properties and put real pressure on DrivethruRPG for the first time since open gaming really was a thing. We will see. It was an absolutely jaw dropping development to me.
Question #4: "if you had to describe "why do people make and publish their own indie RPGs" in the 2020s, what would you say the main thrust of it is? I feel like "alternatives to D&D" is still a major part of it, but it's more clearly just a creative medium that many people are working in and interested in becoming better at, now? And they're not necessarily designing indie games in response to the limitations of mainstream games anymore, right?"
First, and I can't believe I'm saying this again but, the people who battled me for a literal decade insisting that "indie RPG" just defined a particular property relation between a creator and their work, while I vainly insisted that it meant "all play and publication of all non-D&D RPGs" are now seemingly coming around to the idea that, in practice I was completely right - was right from the start - and have never been wrong on this subject for as long as I have lived. As the term is actually used, "indie RPG" means "not D&D", and always has. Call of Cthulhu was on the "indie RPG" display at my local mall game store just two months ago! The agony of being right pursues me through this life like a hound of hell.
But okay. Back to the question. I feel like the answer is what it has always been. People just want to make these fun games and contribute to the art form. It's honestly nothing more than that and never has been. There were plenty of people in 2002 who were making "indie games" (by both definitions, "not D&D" and "creator-owned") who were completely within the mainstream of RPG thought back then (if the "mainstream" could be truly identified, he said, through clenched teeth.) It really is a question of why do artists make art? (Or, in this case, why do saxophone reed makers make saxophone reeds for saxophonists to use in making art?) I think you can identify particularized movements within "not D&D" at various times but I'd really want to focus in on one of those movements before I commented on whether I felt it was here or had any particular motive force in the present.
Anyway, it's very likely this essay won't help at all - neither anyone who read it, nor the interlocutor who definitely isn't going to benefit from me begging "please, please, please spend some time in tabletop RPG Twitch streams and their associated discords and really count up the numbers of viewers, chatters, and other participants" so thanks for reading. I'm sure you feel it was time well spent, right?
