If you build it, will they come?
All right, luvvies? Welcome new subscribers, and thanks everyone who responded to January's newsletter by email and on Mastodon. I've been reassured not to give up on cooperatively-run roleplaying games as convention showpieces after all. I'm keen to see how other people run these games for convention groups - if you can recommend a UK con where I could do that, let me know!
running order
soliloquy: if you build it, will they come?
asides: what's new with Merely Roleplayers, Interactive Soup, what I'm making and enjoying, #pinspiration
fin: is there a piece of creative advice you've taken to heart?
soliloquy: if you build it, will they come? if you build it where they are, will they stay?
There's a piece of advice that goes around in podcasting circles. It applies more broadly too, to anything you might create for an audience. The advice is, concentrate on making a good podcast first, then think about audience-building and marketing and monetisation and the other business-y parts later. Because if you don't start by making something worth listening to, no amount of outreach or marketing spend will get anyone interested.
That's been my approach to Merely Roleplayers. To concentrate on creating, first, a good experience for everyone involved in recording the show, and second, something that's entertaining and enjoyable to listen to.
A question-and-answer session at a networking event a couple of years ago made me realise that's not actually the only way to go about it. But it also made me realise it's the right way to go about it for me.
(Quick disclaimer: Merely Roleplayers is not – was never envisioned as – a commercial project. Its main goals are a) have fun, b) share the fun with whoever wants to listen, c) learn and practise skills that make other projects possible and/or better. I maintain a website, I post on social media and I do promo swaps with other podcasts, and that's the extent of my audience-building and marketing activity.) (cont'd)
aside the first: breaking ground in actual play
Last year, under the Merely Roleplayers umbrella but not on the podcast, we released The Feed - an actual play of Unreal, an asynchronous video-journalling game designed by Josh Fox of Black Armada Games, where we played contestants in a haunted Big Brother house. It was our first tentative foray into video, with a small cast of three: me, Ellen and Josh. You can watch The Feed on Youtube if you didn't catch it the first time around.
This year, The Feed is back for series 2, with a bigger cast of housemates from around the roleplaying game community, and a new home on the Merely Roleplayers Instagram. I'm pretty sure this is the first actual play done entirely through Instagram; someone besides me better call us groundbreaking for this!
This is a game that plays very differently with different sized casts, and I'm excited for more conflict and contradictions between our various unreliable narrators this time.
Speaking of, joining me in the Diary Room for this round of The Feed will be:
Merely Roleplayers regular Alexander Pankhurst (@apankhurst on Instagram)
host of What Am I Rolling? (and guest in Merely Roleplayers Studio production The First Nova), Fiona Howat (@wair_podcast)
host of Monster Hour and designer of Absurdia, Quinn Majeski (@monsterhourpod)
host of Snyder's Return, Adam Powell (@snyders_return)
designer of The Andromeda Ward, Alongame and more, Chloe Mashiter (@chloemashiter)
The Plot Doctor (@therpgplotdoctor)
Each player is posting videos on their own Instagram account (with the exceptions of me and Alex, who'll be posting @merelyroleplayers). So if you follow any of them already, then you'll have started seeing weird Diary Room videos appearing about every two weeks. Then thanks to Instagram adding collaborative videos not long ago, if you head to the @merelyroleplayers Reels tab, you'll see all our various videos collected together - so you can piece together the whole story.
soliloquy continues
So in January 2020, I made a resolution to go to more networking events. I live in London! There are regular tabletop gaming industry and audio fiction meetups, not to mention conventions! It was time to start really taking advantage of my city, meeting interesting new people making exciting things, shaking their hands and clinking our glasses!
...so yeah, by March of the same year it was becoming clear that wouldn't happen. I hope it wasn't just me that jinxed it.
But once the systems started getting put in place for remote events, I did start Zooming along to tabletop gaming industry networking events once in a while. I was usually the only podcaster there, but I think I held my own in conversations with game designers, artists, publishers, and similar.
Then one month, one of these events announced an actual play podcaster as the guest speaker. I logged in, excited to talk to someone else about the specifics of recording and broadcasting a gaming table: the balance between table talk and roleplay, between showcasing games and telling immersive stories, nerdy craft stuff like that. (cont'd)
aside the second: see—be seen
Next Interactive Soup: Tuesday 14 March, 6pm, Theatre Deli, London
Interactive Soup tickets cost £5 and get you entry to the event, a bowl or two of soup, and a vote. All the ticket money (usually about £200-£250) goes in a pot (separate from the soup), five different people pitch ideas for how the money could fund or improve an interactive performance, and everyone votes on which idea gets the money. Tickets go on sale on 13 February – get yours from the Interactive Soup website and I'll see you there!
soliloquy continues
The talk focused on the technical side of launching a podcast: equipment, hosting, and so on. Afterwards, I jumped into the question-and-answer, keen to turn the topic from logistics to craft for at least a moment. I think a lot about how different games create different experiences for a non-player audience, so I asked how they’d decided which game to play for their show.
(It was a Dungeons & Dragons show.)
This was quite a while ago, but I remember a look of … confusion?
I remember that look better than the specifics of the answer. Because from the look alone, I realised with a jolt that even though both our shows use a similar format, and fall into a similar category, they were built on fundamentally different foundations.
The response was along the lines of, “Well, I suppose we could have used Pathfinder, but then you’re starting with a much smaller percentage of audience share.” (cont'd)
aside the third: the world's a stage—& we're all Merely Roleplayers
Now playing in the Main House: Vigil: All Aboard
A siren call at the Witching Hour takes Gwynned, Jess, Calistarius and Harper on a perilous rescue mission far from Sherrydown.
Backstage: Backstory | Calistarius character creation | Harper character creation | Kit character creation
Coming next
in the Studio: Falling Cadence, a soft-boiled noir mystery starring Vikki, Ellie, Helen and Alexander Pankhurst, playing Fate
then in the Main House: Vigil: The Great Fire, starring Ellie Pitkin as Persephone Byron, Strat as Brier, Dave as Mick Mason, and Chris MacLennan as Ed Kincaid
then in the Studio: an as-yet untitled production starring Fiona from What Am I Rolling? and Naomi, writer of The Secret of St Kilda, playing Court of the Lich Queen (beta) by Ursidice
soliloquy continues
“Which roleplaying game will support the story I’m trying to tell and the experience I want to create for the audience?” is an important question behind the scenes at Merely Roleplayers. Often our starting point for a new production is a genre; we want to do a film noir-style story, for example, so is there a game designed to emulate that genre, or one that won’t stop us keeping secrets and acting morally grey? On top of that, can I teach it easily, can the players pick it up quickly, and will any of the rules or mechanics get in the way of the audience following the story?
For this other podcast, it seemed, none of this had ever been in question. The effect of D&D on the storytelling, pacing and performances was not a consideration - only the game's place in the market was. D&D was their only real option because that’s the game most people would listen to.
Now, I’ve got my views on D&D as an engine for actual play; I think the best D&D actual plays (“best” from my point of view as someone wanting to enjoy them) are the ones that huck most of the engine into a ditch, just keep the chassis with the logo on the side, and power the vehicle themselves Flintstones-style. Despite that, it probably is the game most people listen to. I’m sure this other show had done their research on that.
What I couldn’t get my head around at first was that that’s where they’d started. Because that flies in the face of The Advice, right? The advice says, start by making the best show you can make, and let the audience follow. These folks started by looking at where the biggest audience was.
And I don’t doubt they work hard at making the best show they can - but they’re working at that within the constraint that is D&D, imposed from start because they thought if they used a different game, even if it made the show better, they’d never find an audience. (cont'd)
aside the fourth: create—consume
Writing: I've finished polishing the scripts for a 12-episode season of I Need A Miracle (a microfiction fantasy podcast where every episode is an urgent plea to a benevolent deity), which means it's time for Dead Weight (a cyberpunk Upstairs, Downstairs about yeeting the rich into deep space) to come out of the drawer. I've got one overlong pilot episode script to turn into probably three shorter, better episodes based on feedback from last year's table read.
Reading: The Inheritance Trilogy by NK Jemisin (omnibus paperback - I'm rereading some favourite trilogies this year, this is first on the list!); Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (paperback - in advance of seeing the Complicité production!); Madly, Deeply: The diaries of Alun Rickman (audiobook)
Listening: Worlds Beyond Number (Fortunate Horse), In a Walled City (Disparition), Dames & Dragons/LegendLark soundtracks (Noel Shiri)
soliloquy concludes
I’m inferring a lot from a momentary look. Maybe they just liked D&D and wanted to play it for an audience. But it felt like a significant moment and it sticks in my mind, because it made me realise a couple of things.
1. Despite all the advice out there that says write for yourself first, make the thing only you can make, then find your niche, there are people out there identifying advantageous niches and making work to fit them, and that is a legitimate choice and can even lead to some success. It’s worth turning over advice and truisms even if you agree with them, just to check they aren’t hiding legitimate alternative approaches.
2. The market-driven approach categorically is not for me, at least when it comes to creative work. The thought of having to fight against a game to tell a good story, instead of the game supporting it, out of fear of not finding an audience, made me recoil. It was visceral.
And this applies far beyond RPG actual play. I’m thinking about how best to monetise I Need A Miracle right now, and it’s a struggle. It’s audio drama, already not the most attractive to advertisers, and it’s short-format, so there won’t be a lot of places to put ad insert points. Subscriptions can be an alternative to ads, but the show is new and unknown and, again, short and bite-sized, all of which count against that model. But I would much rather be struggling to find a way to sell something I’m confident is a good story, than start from a commercially ideal format and struggle to wrangle something creatively satisfying out of it. I want the commercial side to support me as a writer to make better and better things - not to dictate what I make and how I make it.
aside the last: accessorise—advertise
Top: a hard enamel pin in the shape of a flick-knife, with the word "words" on the blade in gothic capitals. From Life Club.
Bottom: a black enamel pin of the word "Doomscroller" in tall white capitals. This is merch from the latest Metric album - I saw them touring it live at the Roundhouse last week! I think I've seen them four times now and they never miss. Apparently they sell out arenas in Canada; I'm lucky I get to see them in the Roundhouse and Academy-type venues when they come to the UK.
fin: readers—writers
Thanks for reading to the end! Now it's your turn. Is there a piece of creative advice - about craft, commercialisation, or any other aspect of creativity - that you've fully taken to heart? Tell me in an email (just hit reply) or tag your answer on the socials with #FoggyOutline.