5 April 2024: Your Roleplaying Community
My sincerely held personal belief is that the roleplaying community adheres to the 80/20 rule. For those unfamiliar, the TLDR is that 20% of people are responsible for 80% of results. Like, 20% of customers account for 80% of your sales, that sort of thing. It’s not meant to be an exact 80/20 split, but represents the idea that there is a majority and a minority and that the larger number is significantly greater than the smaller.
In this context, most roleplayers do not participate in the greater “community” in any meaningful way. These folks buy their books, dice, minis, and other ephemera online, rarely if ever setting foot in their local game store. They do not participate in online forums or social media groups. Most don’t go to conventions or local game days regularly, if ever. To this silent majority, the “community” begins and ends with the group of friends that they play with full stop.
This means that the folks who are more public-facing are the minority. They’re professionals, aspiring professionals, or hardcore fans. Sometimes they feel like the majority because they’re the ones that are seen. The crowds at conventions make them seem like legion. Online ubiquity makes their voices seem louder.
It’s the same with any fandom. A lot of people have seen Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, James Bond, Marvel movies, and so on. Tons of folks have read Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Lord of the Rings, and a list of other literary properties. Most of them don’t dive into any sort of organized fandom; it was a book, a movie, a TV show, a video game, a bit of entertainment, that’s all. They think these things are cool, maybe own a Funko Pop or a small Lego set or something, but don’t anchor themselves to these things. Only a minuscule number of people connect to a property and decide to make it their entire personality.
So, let’s set aside the “only home groups” people. They’re not the target customers of most roleplaying industry entities, because a lot of them are still playing old editions using the dice they bought in high school and might buy a miniature or a novel once in a blue mood. They’re not the money train. These folks have never heard of the misogynist who made himself the main character of Twitter, the scandals, the high school gossip, the legitimate discourse, or the assorted movements within the hobby. They’ve never heard of me, they’ve never heard of you, and they do not care about our shenanigans.
The minority, then, is the target “community” we speak of. Even there, we don’t have any sort of solidarity or unifying principles. We have edition wars. There are “never D&D” people, and “only D&D” people. Some folks do things in good faith, others want to see the world burn and unleash chaos for fun.
Looking at this theoretical 20% as a separate group, we can hit it with an 80/20 stick again. The 20% are the ones who organize cons and game days and post on forums and social media groups. They make the actual play videos and podcasts. The other 80% are the consumers, who play at cons, mostly lurk on forums, watch, and listen to content.
Just as we don’t think of the invisible minority of home group-only roleplayers as part of the community, we tend to neglect the mostly consumer portion of “active fandom” as a community. We focus on the most visible people with the loudest voices. This is where things go off the rails. The loudest voices frequently think they represent the entire community. Sometimes this is an attempt to control things, the bad-faith actors who will proclaim things like “no one wants this” as if they’ve polled everyone on Earth and got a unanimous result, rather than pushing their subjective opinion as a hard fact. Other times it is a matter of good faith, as I’m doing here, using my observations and experiences to state a belief that the 80/20 rule applies. Using that information, they try to do something good with it, inadvertently creating a perception that things are one when in reality they’re not factually accurate. Basically, either the loudest voices are trying to control the narrative, or they’re loud because they’re confident they’re correct.
The minority, who choose to consume rather than contribute, accept what they see as the way things are. Companies market to the visible presence, not the hidden majority. Other members of the community make decisions based on the influence of the minority. We end up with a certain homogeneity, a sameness, a consensus by default created by just letting the loudest voices dictate things.
My community consists of my home groups, my trusted playtesters, and the people who buy my books. That’s my focus. That’s where my attention goes, those are the people I worry about serving. Instead of chasing after what the vocal minority is talking about, I’m doing things my way, making what I’m interested in, and looking at members of the under-served majority that might like what I do. Because there are enough people out there who like my work to keep my rent paid. That’s what matters. Those people are getting something they don’t find in the mainstream, i.e. what the loudest voices are pushing. Hopefully, by taking Lightspress down my path, some people are being seen for the first time, and getting something they need.
I hope you’re doing well today.
Berin
