Copyright 2005 Lewis Pulsipher

"Old-timers"--and there seem to be a lot of them--remember that in the late 70s and 80s I wrote a lot for game magazines, and was contributing editor to White Dwarf, The Space Gamer, and (if I recall correctly) Dragon magazine (and possibly others that I've forgotten).

I stopped writing for The Dragon when they insisted on buying all rights to articles. That is, they wanted to pay me once, and thereafter I would not own my work, they would. No self-respecting writer will do this; often material can be used again later, perhaps even make money again later. (You'll see that one of the articles on my Web site is a revised version of a Dragon article, which will likely be republished (no money this time) in the e-zine Games Journal.) "Real writers don't sell all rights." Instead, they sell first world serial rights, a one-time right to use the material.

When I got back into the hobby, having played D&D for all those years since the early 1980s, and saw the revival of D&D with the third edition rules, I looked into The Dragon, and found that they still insist as a policy on buying all rights. I thought to myself that if I had unlimited time I might still dig out a few old articles and mine material for some new ones, and perhaps even bite the bullet of "all rights". But I don't have unlimited time.

Moreover, what D&Ders seem to want these days is an unending stream of new prestige classes, new magic items, and other new stuff to make characters more powerful. In general, third edition D&D seems to be an excuse for players to find unearned advantages for their characters. The more new rules you can get hold of, the more ways you can find to circumvent play balance. This is why, in my House Rules for 3D&D, I don't allow any rule additions beyond the core books.

But I have to admit, I'm also disenchanted with 3D&D generally. It is more complex than first edition D&D (I never played second edition, which is very much like first anyway), battles take a long time to resolve because movement is non-simultaneous, and some of the rules are just bizarre. You buff up one or two fighter types and watch the fighter pound on the enemy; if the fighter goes down, you cure him, he leaps up again, and the fight continues. Duh!

So I don't play 3D&D very much, and I'll never be an expert on the rules the way I was with older versions. Moreover, writing 3D&D adventures requires extreme attention to detail (in the stat blocks) that takes a very long time, according to current authors. This just isn't worth five cents a word, to me.

I attended some seminars at Origins (summer '04) to listen to FRP writers, and was appalled to learn that even the most successful of them sell all rights to their "books" (some of which are truly book size)! So those big FRP books that seem to be everywhere, with D20 versions for SF, modern, and so on, with sources from every historical era, are all written as works for hire, at as little as two cents a word (down from a minimum of three cents). One of the best writers (and one who makes enough to incorporate, and provide for a large family), won't write for less than five cents a word, but he is the exception; and even he works for hire. So he says he aims to produce five thousand words a day.

Five thousand words a day, folks, is really humming. This article is less than a thousand words. A double-spaced typed page is less than 300 words, so we're talking about 20 pages a day. Some novel authors can reach that output, but they're writing stories, not game rules.

5,000 words per day at 5 cents per word for 50 weeks would be $62,500; but that assumes final copy rather than draft, assumes only two weeks vacation a year, and assumes you could sustain that kind of output, which is unlikely for game rules.

Hearing this, I understood why so much of the D20 output is junk. Authors are working for hire, so their main interest is word count. There is no time to actually playtest the rules that are written. The pay is generally lower, even for works for hire, than it was over 20 years ago, and that's without accounting for inflation. Why is the pay low?: because there are so many fanboys and fangirls willing to write for low pay in order to get their names in print. It's a buyer's market. And yet the market is becoming glutted, because there are so many, many supplements and books.

Games (board, card, etc.) are still produced on a royalty basis. So if your game sells well, you make more money; if it sells poorly, you make less money. When you work for hire, if your d20 book becomes a national best seller, you don't make a dime more than if it sells only 50 copies.

From an economic viewpoint, producing this stuff is a poor way to make money. From a creative viewpoint, it's a poor way to produce good game rules. From a business viewpoint, writing for hire is a poor way to do business. So I don't do it.

Lew Pulsipher