TTRPGs Eat Time for Breakfast

Rumination on Time Spend vs. Success in Indie TTRPGs

I’ve written so many failed blogs over the last year, thousands of words that, like Neil Young recording Chrome Dreams, I’ve tossed in the trash. Part of it is, I struggle to find myself interesting, and therefore what I have to say must be exceedingly boring. I don’t do much—I make games. This follows my interest, is driven by my passions, but the majority of it is quiet contemplation with a notebook. Not exactly head-turning stuff.

What would be a responsible practice in this space, to these ends, as an indie TTRPG publishing house? New content every week, of course. At least a little of something—an update, a newsletter, a blog. I do almost none of these things. Even my monthly newsletter has been unsent for two months because I just do not have anything to say. And yet, I spend almost all my time making TTRPGs. Somehow that adds up.

When I write a blog it’s because I’m trying to get over something, conceptually. You’ll notice, if you care for this blog’s history, that I’m terrible at marketing and should have done an article on every game’s development and every game’s release (where else would the half dozen people who are truly passionate about my releases ever get this information?) Certainly, now that The Psychic Danger Society is my 13th TTRPG publication, I should know how to do that by now. Instead, I post when I am wrestling with a thought that is impeding my progress on doing what I do with the majority of my time, making games. I go where the art compels me—a theme that will come up later in this.

This blog post today is written largely to TTRPG publishers, and really to myself, comparing and contrasting two upcoming releases. Today’s struggle is the idea of return on investment of time and energy. Not money—I don’t care about money—but we only have 1,000 months, give or take, to fool around, and I want to use them well, because TTRPGs eat time for breakfast.

TTRPGs are a Unique and Timely Process

The creative process of publishing TTRPGs is a strange journey. By comparison, magazines (where I got my publishing start) are relatively straightforward—it’s streamlined to save time and money. TTRPGs have a much more substantial creative burden, which throws a lot of that consistency out the window. TTRPGs, from one publication to the next, are all different. They’re different sizes, different page counts, have different art needs, and if you decide to make things really hard on yourself like I do, have wholly different rules systems to develop each time. There’s a format, sure, but generally speaking every new game has its own unique journey to publication. Some games don’t even survive that journey.

Splay of copies of my latest game, The Psychic Danger Society

TTRPGs, even small ones, take a lot of time to do properly and you’re not exactly sure how long they’re going to take when you start them. Certainly, you can be as half-assed as you want to, even by design. You save a lot of time if you skip playtesting, don’t proof, don’t have any art, etc., but then you’re making a very specific gonzo type product, which, while appealing in specific cases, is only justified in my view if the subject matter aligns. Generally speaking, each project has different art and editorial needs and odds are they’re not going to both be quick and easy.

Making a TTRPG is a commitment, and an uncertain one, like writing a blank cheque with your time. You read about film directors waffling on making a movie because they know it’s going to be three years of their life, unless you’re making a Roger Corman slockfest, which—again, if the subject matter aligns, that’s the way to go. Similarly, with TTRPGs, you know you’ve just signed yourself up for a good six-month journey when you take on a project, maybe longer. Maybe it won’t work at all.

Pooka

I have been working on one weird little game called Pooka—a sinister monster collecting game—for about the last two years. It has not been the only thing I’ve been working on, but it’s the main one. For a while I didn’t think it was going to work, but I pulled it out of the fire with a clever scheme and now I think it sings. 

A short sting for Pooka: "I'm going to go on an adventure. I want to sink into a game and get lost. I want to explore strange lands with stranger creatures and maybe die along the way. If I have to I’ll go alone. Will you come too?

So, after two years, Pooka is almost ready to come out, in its rough draft. It turns out, after all that time, the silly little game is actually a very large silly game, and will have many pages.

A preview double-page spread of what Pooka will come to look like.

There’s a lot to explore when you’re travelling the world with little invisible creatures, apparently.

Metal Position

In the meantime, just for the fun of it, I keep side-questing off to do little games, like In Love with the Moon, which came out earlier this year. Then last month, on a lark, I slapped together a neat little game called Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes. It’s an audio tape battle game with some emotional outburst mechanics, and it all fits in an audio cassette’s J-sleeve. (The subject matter aligns!)

Rough layouts for the art as it's coming in for Metal Position.

A short sting for Metal Position: "Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes is an instant battle TTRPG about exchanging mixtapes that turn into robots and making them fight, in and around a community radio station in the mid 2000s. This game is about memory and music, community and sadness in a particular time when the best way to express about your feelings was still to record a cassette tape."

Anyway, the damn thing took about two weeks, making a complete mockery of my Pooka development. Yes, I cribbed some old notes for it, because the idea has been tickling my brain for a while, but there’s a big difference between two weeks and two years!

Time Investment and Impact

Pooka and Metal Position are similar in that they work on the same theme of collecting little things (invisible monsters or cassette tape robots) and having them fight for you, and both are concerned with personifying the dice as those secondary characters, because I’ve been on a real kick lately about designing around dice personification. Where they diverge is their worlds, style, and—goodness—their size. Both of them being similar, and happening so close to each other in development, provokes questions in me, since one has taken such a short amount of time and the other so much longer.

Here’s where I’m struggling. One of these games, Pooka or Metal Position, could be much better than the other—and the former one damn well better be, given how much time has gone into it...but really, it shouldn’t matter which one is better, because either way it suggests something interesting. Either time spent in development is not  a guarantee of quality (however much that means) or, quality is not proportionate to time spent.

The fact is, as TTRPG publishers we have to accept the fact that your quick stupid game could be a big hit, while your intense passion project could flounder and be nothing but a time suck. You could end up like Anthony Burgess, resenting the success of A Clockwork Orange—a thing he just tossed out there, and spend your life wishing people would look at your other works that you put more time and care into. Maybe artists have no idea what they’re talking about. How brilliant would Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams have been, anyway? Maybe it was just a time loss for ‘ol Neil. But that would suggest none of us really know the quality of our work...which I will only go along with so far. The nature and measure of success are complicated in this industry.

Let’s take a TTRPG example, Honey Heist by Grant Howitt, a hugely successful one-pager. You could say it’s a cute little thing, not much use at the table, or you could call it a goddamn TTRPG haiku—doing everything necessary to be a game without needing hundreds of pages to do so. Grant Howitt has won six Ennie awards! But at this rate it looks like Honey Heist might be carved on his tombstone. Certainly, it’s short enough.

That sounds great, let’s design the short way! Tiny games for everyone! Oh, but...people tell me they don’t take tiny games as seriously. They call them unsubstantial and say that’s just not enough. It’s just not that simple. You could dilute your brand. Nobody would take you seriously. Marketing schedules step on the next book’s toes (I found that out earlier this year!) A rapid-fire approach to publishing might increase your odds of someday maybe something catching an audience, but, for one—it’s hard to make art you don’t care that much about, and two, art without passion is generally lousy, unless it actually hits the bullseye of the TTRPG zeitgeist, as some have. I don’t think Grant Howitt holds deep personal opinions about a bear’s ability to commit crimes, I think it just came together.

To boot, a short page count does not necessarily mean less effort. I have certainly gone through 300+ page tomes of TTRPG books that ultimately had less thought put into them than Honey Heist. Of all the books I’ve published, my longest one—Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart—is still, by far, my best seller. It was also the most work, and the most expensive to produce.

Now that I’ve nicely thrown all the messy pieces on the floor, is there going to be a conclusion?

Boo on Relativism

It’s easy to roll over and say do what’s right for the project—sure, fine, yes, every publication is unique and blah blah blah, but that level of relativism isn’t exactly useful, is it?

The temptation is to fall into a conclusion like Douglas Adams did. As his character Slartibartfast put it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “The chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy.” It’s easy enough to adapt that trying to break down the sweet spot of energy/time/effort versus impact, may well be counter productive, anyway.

Sidestepping that, the question is, instead, how do I direct my efforts so they’re the most meaningful for me, in my publishing journey? I do not seek fame and fortune in this, I make upwards of dozens of dollars in this cottage business, but I do want to hit a sense of creative satisfaction and put out something I think contributes meaningfully to the greater TTRPG cannon of my time, more or less, even if it remains relatively obscure. Also, the faint praise. I do it for the faint praise.

The only conclusion I can come to today that is even a little satisfying, is this. Your ideas own you. They hold you hostage. For me, I know an idea is good when it makes my brain feel like it’s on fire, and I can’t not do it. The path of least resistance, I suppose, is to relinquish all will and let the art itself drag you towards its own destination.

• The art leads you along, not the other way around. “I don’t hit, it hits all by itself,” says Bruce Lee..

• Do what you only now have the opportunity to do, exploiting the subject matter, your circumstance, and the opportunities presented to that project.

• Be smart about it but not too smart. Too smart and the project spins its wheels for years, fruitlessly. I could probably afford to be smarter, though, and send out a newsletter or update a blog post now and again.

Well, I’ve gone and made new points when I meant to conclude it all into something manageable. Maybe I’ll deal with those other two points in another blog post. Maybe my conclusion is bogus anyway. I warned you I was bad at this.

Does taking this approach save me time in those 1,000 months? Maybe. TTRPGs are an artistic medium and by extension of that I am an artist, or at least I’m working backwards to that conclusion by my frustration. It feels like I haven’t released anything in ages but I have to remind myself that I released three books in 2025: Kaiju Kontrol, In Love with the Moon, and The Psychic Danger Society.

One good thing about the idea of letting the art lead you, though—you can stop worrying about it. In a way this is still throwing out Chrome Dreams. In a way it’s still doing what Slartibartfast suggested, hang the sense of it and keep myself busy. It would mean letting go.

Releases

Metal Position: Robot Fighting Cassettes will be out on Itch.io as soon as I get the art back from the artist. Pooka will arrive in Q1 of 2026 in its simplest form, and perhaps grow from there. After not blogging for so long I have a few of them ready to go over the next few weeks, so, probably there will be a newsletter in this. Stay turned.

James Kerr

Radio James Games