What makes an RPG “indie”?

Why does it matter what an indie RPG is? Well if you attend a group that declares itself to be dedicated to the playing of independent roleplaying games then the question is going to inevitably come up at some point.

When trying to answer the question as part of a group you find out that there are a lot of different answers and therefore this piece really just aims to set out my position and criteria for judging whether a game is indie or not.

For me getting the answer right matters because unlike most “industry” games, indie games need the help and support of fans and enthusiasts to be discovered and find their audience.

For something like D&D all that is required is you play the game. For indie games if you play something and love it you really want to try and let people know because chances are otherwise it is just going to languish in obscurity.

Indie and DIY

Wikipedia has a definition of indie music that is helpful:

music produced independently from major commercial record labels or their subsidiaries, a process that may include an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing

DIY

The most indie of indie games is one where the creators of the game write it, publish and distribute it themselves. Where the creators of the game have complete autonomy over their creation then I think you have one of the purest forms of indie gaming.

For me this ranges from people who share a link to a Google Doc to those who put together physical print runs of their games. For me the medium doesn’t matter, what matters is that the authors were able to realise the game to their full ability and vision.

Indie

So if someone chooses to use PayHip, Patreon, Lulu or DriveThru to distribute their game, is this still indie? For me, the answer is yes in the same way that the original indie record labels took on some of the drudge work of pressing and distributing records so musicians could focus more on creating and recording music.

Similarly a game is no less indie if the creators choose to involve specialists such as artists, proof-readers or layout artists. As long as all these collaborators are in service of the original creative vision the game is indie.

The small press

You can take this further; if a game is produced by a collective or in collaboration with an existing publisher who provides a variety of services including arranging physical publication and distribution then the game is still indie if the publisher has no creative control over the product or its nature.

We can therefore ask whether Masks is indie? It has a physical rulebook and set of supplements that are illustrated and laid-out to a finish that is not massively different from professional publications. It is kept in print and distributed by Magpie Games.

I feel it is an indie game, it the game that Brendan Conway wanted to make and its strengths and flaws draw directly from his vision of what makes teenage superhero stories vital.

The small press industry

Is Seven Wonders indie?

To my mind this is where we start to turn the corner out of indie territory. All the games in this anthology may have started as individual works that absolutely qualify as indie, however the curation of an anthology means that there is a separate act of creation that is not related to the component games.

The purpose of Seven Wonders was to highlight and showcase a new perspective on games and to try and bring them to a wider audience.

The component pieces of the anthology have no reference to the greater project or each other. It is a collective work with no collective theme or intent beyond the compilation the publisher wanted to create.

The value of the individual works is in no way diminished by this. They are good games in a well-produced product. It just isn’t indie anymore its an expression of the publisher’s idea not the game creators.

The professional industry

What makes a games company professional? It used to be that it required a certain amount of capital to produce and sell a physical book or boxed game. This is still true to a certain extent but crowd funding has changed access to capital and the cost of book production has tumbled as print on demand technology has matured.

Having talked to people who produce roleplaying games for a living, or perhaps more relevantly who produce roleplaying games on a basis that allows them to employ other people, I feel the distinction between amateur or independent publishing and professional publishing is specialisation.

Essentially a professional games company has access to a staff of full-time and freelance workers who can be called to contribute to any project the company wishes to produce.

The selection of future projects inherently takes into account the likelihood that such products will be able to generate enough money to pay all these staff with a surplus to allow for future projects.

The primacy of the creative vision is no longer present. Equally relevant is the commercial aspects of the proposed work. Sustaining the machinery of production is at least as important and usually more important than the artistic merit of any project.

Specialisation

The clearest property of the industry is that all the necessary work required to create the product is divided across several people with different specialisations. The line editor commissions game designers, writers and artists; all of whom often work with no reference to one another but instead only to the brief they are given.

Here the publisher is the provider of the product vision but the implementation is necessarily collective (and often incoherent).

Re-use of game systems

Pelgrane Press has Gumshoe; Modiphius has the 2d20 system; Evil Hat, FATE. One of the distinguishing features of industry publishers is that they are literally an industry. Having constructed or chanced upon a system these publishers then produce a range of products around the this system.

For me this is the anti-thesis of indie. Having created an expensive asset the cost is recovered through applying the system to a variety of settings and situations.

There is no creative vision here, only a commercial one. How can we best obtain a return on our investment?

The importance of the indie ethos

I think that if you are making a book with a meritocratic agenda, then the small press will naturally get in. Because the work has merit, and because it represents the possible futures of comics more than any other kind of work. That’s the trade-off for being indie, or underground, or whatever. You can do things exactly the way you want.

Bill Kartalopouulos, interviewed in Cometbus #57

This quote sums up the importance and the possibility of indie gaming for me. It is the place where ideas can be ventured without reference to popularity or commercial viability.

Great ideas are here, along with terrible ones that probably don’t deserve a wider audience. The future is here but so is the rediscovery and revitalisation of the past.

Indie is the space where everything, that has a creator motivated to share and an audience prepared to care, can thrive. Without it we will only have a stale, repetitive status quo.

So what is indie? In its essence it is the freedom to create exactly the game you want. At its best it is the wellspring of creativity that renews roleplaying.