This is a hard post to write, and it won’t really be concise. There’s going to be a lot of reflections and context to follow, but if you’re interested in the unvarnished meat you can jump down to What’s Next for RPGW. If you’re interested in the bigger picture and context I appreciate your indulgence, and if you were a supporter you have my gratitude, and apologies.
Away we go….
Also, throughout I’m going to mix “I” and “we” pretty liberally, because parts of this involved the co-owner of RPGW before we parted ways, and some of it didn’t. I’m not trying to erase his role, contributions or the adversity he faced, but I also don’t want to speak for him. Ultimately I can only speak for me, so that’s what’s going to happen.
Time and Money
It’s always time and money. Always. Not surprising since money is really just time with extra steps.
After we took our shots at various MVPs to get the dynamo turning and revenue from the project didn’t materialize I had to take on contract work to keep the project, and my family, afloat. For a time it was possible to split time successfully between a ~30h survival job and 30-40h RPGW passion work. Then survival demanded 35h, then 40h, and probably now contract work hovers someplace around 45-50h per week. RPGW hours shrank exactly as you’d expect they would, to make way.
For a while intestinal fortitude and willful delusion allowed the work to continue, but I was definitely running a mental and physical deficit doing it. It just wasn’t sustainable, and also, I have a family I want to see and interact with, not just earn money for. That’s not even considering I had family responsibilities that my (life) partner was left picking up the pieces on when I was too burned out or busy to pull my own weight at home.
All of which could have maybe been excusable if success in the end was a certainty, but it absolutely was not. Even if at least an end was on the horizon — which it wasn’t.
Scope
So the time compressed, and at the same time the goal posts kept on moving further away. The game concept and the implementation, have a lot going for them, but also there are critical things missing. Critical ingredients are missing, and the scope was too broad in places, and too narrow in others.
The thing is just not viable without upping the level of automation in combat. Also, the character sheet and other in-narrative systems aren’t as well integrated as they need to be to successfully work for enough people to be fun, or functional. That’s not even considering the presentation fixes that are so desirable as to almost be required.
That means the implementation scope needed to grow by quite a bit.
At the same time, when my (business) partner and I parted ways on the project all of the completed game content (and the prospect of the narrative ever being finished) evaporated. That meant that even the system that was there, improved or not, had nothing to play on it.
That’s a one two punch of scope increases at the same time the number of hours available to work was drastically contracting.
The only practical hope for having functional content was to enlist help, and there were even some offers, but suddenly features and systems that worked for an in-house team were completely unsuitable for community members to work with.
Lots of sharp edges needed to be filed down before new creators could work with the system. Tonnes of documentation needed to be written. APIs that were full of jank and caveats that needed to be cleaned up. The thing was designed for someone deeply trained on the existing processes to be able to add content.
Even if/when systems were polished up enough to be usable by external creators, those creators still needed to be liaised with. A whole framework for compensation needed to be devised. Probably up-front payments would need to be made. Licensing and content review was going to be a whole new can of worms to deal with, and even if that was externalized to community reviews that system would need to be crafted and tuned. Not to mention the recruiting and facilitation needed.
None of that even considers trying to maintain a level of quality in an environment where being choosy would be extremely difficult. Foist on top of that needing to have a coherent AI policy for both narrative and visuals, as well as enforcing that policy, and the deep uncertainty in the legal status of the OGL and D&D in general… well, it’s a nightmare. It’s a whole tapestry of nightmares. Nothing individually was a mortal wound, but there’s just so damned much of it.
It’s all made the more painful because people were offering to help. All of it completely forthright and genuine, I’m sure, but also the bandwidth necessary to onboard people and train them up is daunting. Additionally, most folk were likely going to struggle to stay committed in the face of how much work there was to do, the uncertainty about when it would all actually go live, and the ambiguities around compensation.
The few attempts I made to onboard help weren’t very successful, usually on my side, but the few folk who were “successfully” on-boarded didn’t stick around very long. I don’t blame them, how could I? Beyond the few folk who came on-board, there were plenty of others who showed interest, but conversations with people offering help would start and then get put on the back burner (by me) for days, then weeks, and you just can’t build a team that way.
People deserve better when they’re offering their time. Also, I don’t believe that people should be contributing for free, and there isn’t the money to give normal compensation, so any contribution agreement would have to be crafted out of promises for future revenue. Revenue I’m not comfortable promising will ever actually materialize. Not to mention needing to produce a legal framework that would make me confident with the deals I would be making.
Gradually contributors and interested parties melted away from neglect and even when major progress got made, there was still so much left to do, it felt disingenuous to try to keep people engaged with incremental gains and the finish line so far out of sight.
Does this Even Make Sense?
RPGW is a cool idea, and a cool little game, but the space is evolving and it really forces me to consider if any of this still makes sense. As in, even if it were all finished right now, would there even be a market now? Would that market last more than a few months?
D&D is such a volatile ecosystem, never really recovering from the OGL debacle and that it feels like building on sand. For a realistic chance at stability the project would have to expand to support additional game systems way earlier than was planned, and it would absolutely need to support character creation independently of D&D Beyond. Again, supporting character creation was always in the plan, but now it would have to be a major priority. That expands the project scope in even more dimensions a massive amount at exactly the wrong time to be expanding. The MVP has crept up from a little tool assisted choose-your-own adventure system to this massive multi-headed community platform. Helmed by a guy who is uncomfortable writing discord messages.
I believe strongly that in the face of brutal odds you just have to have faith and push on. It’s easy to convince yourself that a challenge is too insurmountable and rationalize yourself into the safety of quitting. It’s a perpetual trap that you have to fight against to ever finish anything. But also sometimes things actually are too big or too difficult, and to be in denial of that fact it just folly. Sunk Cost.
What’s Next for RPGW
RPG Wanderer is going on the shelf.
I don’t want to declare anything dead, because this was a big swing, and a big part of my life. There’s also a lot of awesome stuff in there that I want to bring to fruition, but continuing on under these conditions is a stubborn performance, not a plan. There are simply not the resources to solve the problems present.
Effectively dead, then.
Updates on RPG Wanderer will stop (such as they were), and I’m going to unload this thing from my active memory for the foreseeable future. The site has been stripped down to support only refund requests, and a couple other marginal things.
Until the money materializes to find a new team to pick up the system and carry it forward in a serious way there’s simply no other decision that makes sense.
Making Supporters Whole
While we never hit critical mass, the project had a lot of support, financially and otherwise. For those of you who bought into a tiny project like this, you have my gratitude. It has convinced me that there’s still hope for a tiny studio to exist. I can’t thank you enough. It made a huge difference.
Until April 1st 2025 customers will be able to log into the site and choose to either take a full refund, partial refund for undelivered chapters, or to let things ride (see: What’s next for me, and details on-site). After the 1st, any refund will have to be handled by contacting support@rpgwanderer.com.
Previously I said I would proactively reach out to individuals to offer refunds or credit options, but like everything else the time for that didn’t materialize. No one had reached out for refunds, so I had pushed it back in lieu of coding. Those priorities have now obviously changed.
The Patreon has been paused for pretty much the entire year for obvious reasons, but some charges slipped through. Patreon only lets you pause for a month, and it only lets you re-up your pause after the previous had expired. It’s extremely frustrating. I’ll investigate how to address those charges in the near future.
What’s Next for Me
Game development is still my passion, and this was only ever meant to be one project of many. Without the right team though it’s way too big, content heavy, and way too community intensive to be a coherent first project for a tiny, proto-indie-studio.
I’m still moving forward. In one way or another, I’m not stopping game development until I’m dead, or I’ve successfully finished something at least semi-successful. I have other projects in various states of planning, one of which I think is a good, realistic first project to move forward on. It’s far less content heavy, far more constrained and focused on game systems. It’s also in a genre I’m much more passionate about. I will be writing about that moving forward, though, not here. I’m not sure where exactly, since the company is staying the same, but the existing platform accounts are all RPGW specific. I’ll post some kind of a cross link to the new sites when they exist, and send out a newsletter to all customers and subscribers with details on how to follow future work.
What I’m saying is that I’m not going to skulk away. This is just a regroup and refocus. Without the expectations I set for myself with RPGW I think I’ll be able to finally be comfortable doing development journals as well, discussing new projects.
To be clear though, these new projects are not RPGW and they really won’t even be RPGW adjacent, so it’s definitely possible it will no longer fall into your zone of interest.
Finally
For quite a while these news posts have been mostly performative. My ill-focused dev journals were consumed by effectively no one, and I wouldn’t be surprised, or upset, if these words I’m writing right now are never read. Still, I think I needed to write them down. This was a hell of an experience and I learned so much that the not inconsiderable cost was probably worth it. Maybe. Mostly. I’m going to choose to remember it that way.
I’ll send out updates when the new sites are live where we can perhaps say hello again.
Until then, on this adventure, tis good-bye.