The genesis of fandom as we know it starts and ends with communication. Sports fandom began evolving from the 19th century to today as radio, TV, and then the internet all brought access to more and more people. Literary fandom wasn’t too far behind: Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both inspired fan movements with intensity rivaling the most fervent fandoms of today, famously doing things like publicly mourning the death of Sherlock Holmes.

There’s always a spectre behind fandom, though. Sports has seen a sea change from live attendance to broadcast as team owners can charge more and more for tickets and extract more and more money out of their audience. A massive subsection of the fandom factions collectively referred to as ‘nerd culture’ are owned by Disney, engineered to extract money from the existing audiences of Star Wars and Marvel. The strong feelings of identity and association associated with fandom can easily be weaponized, and the history of nerd culture brings along with it a whole other level of making spending choices feel very personal.

So what of role-playing games? The RPG hobby and RPG fandom are often seen as one and the same; traditional RPGs are high-commitment and there isn’t much of a casual following. Beyond that, RPGs, specifically licensed RPGs, are vehicles for other fandoms, taking advantage of the fandom overlaps implied by that phrase ‘nerd culture’. When we look at RPG fandom, though, we do see things falling out in a few different ways: Those who focus on the act of playing RPGs as a whole, those who are fans of their one chosen game, and those who are fans of the chosen game, Dungeons and Dragons. Just like fandoms of all sorts of other hobbies and media, the RPG fandom is driven not only from the enthusiasm and engagement of its members, but also by the companies who capitalize on those feelings of association and belonging in order to make money.

I know I have deep, conflicted feelings about fandom when you consider my stance on licensed RPGs. With the history of the roleplaying game’s popularity completely couched in fandoms other than gaming, it makes sense to see licensed games as significant avenues towards broader acceptance and adoption of RPGs as a hobby. Hell, some of the most groundbreaking games from the history of RPGs were licensed: West End Games was incredibly influential with both their Ghostbusters and Star Wars games, and while not “licensed” Call of Cthulhu is a powerful crossover between gamers and cosmic horror fans. These games are embedded in RPG history, and it stands to reason that the next d6 Star Wars or the next Call of Cthulhu could be a sea change for the hobby as we know it. The big licenses of the 2020s, though? They have not been that, not even close. Avatar Legends had the biggest Kickstarter campaign in the hobby’s history, and then sputtered out with middling reviews. The last piece of material Magpie released for the game other than a new quickstart came out over 18 months ago, and the company has seemingly moved on to a new edition of Masks and a new license to play with. Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight RPG beat Avatar in Kickstarter size, raising even more money, and now that it’s out, it too is seeing middling reviews (and this time around I haven’t written one myself, just been reading them). I don’t think there’s anything about these properties that couldn’t support a great game, but I do think the fandom those Kickstarter campaigns were aiming at directly influenced the outcome, and not in a way that left the gamers in the room with something great.

I did go into this at some length in the Avatar Legends review, but licensed RPG Kickstarter campaigns are aimed at the fandom for the licensed property as opposed to gamers. Avatar Legends certainly aimed at fans and their FOMO with a lot of the additional materials and special edition stuff, but the Stormlight RPG campaign was nakedly angling for fanboy money. One particular claim that got to me was that each of the game sourcebooks would have unique Roshar lore in them, not available anywhere else. Let’s be completely clear: In the fandom of an expansive series of fantasy novels, that is a threat. That is a threat to the readers that if they didn’t get into the game as well, they would be missing out on part of the setting that other people clearly have access to. And that was a threat that, as we saw, made fanboys capitulate. The game, being 5e and Genesys thrown into a blender and poured into some shardplate, did not.

Love of the game arguably separates most gamer fandoms from other media fandoms; there is an element of participation that is presupposed for any game, be it a video game, board game, minis game, or RPG. And arguably, the more involved a game is, the more passionate a fandom becomes: When you need to spend more time learning, preparing, and finding people to play, you’re going to feel more committed. Of course with that commitment comes identity, and with that identity comes the feeling that critiques of the things you love are in fact an attack on you personally. This comes at all levels, be it a playstyle (grid versus theater of the mind? “Narrative” versus “Traditional”?) a game, or even an edition of a game. This, though, is a tale as old as time; flame wars about game rules trace their way back before the world wide web onto Usenet, and back before the Internet into letter-writing discourse within APAs. And those throughlines show the positive aspects of fandom, the reasons to take the good with the bad.

The best parts of all fandoms are the addition, taking what you love and making more with it. Fanfic, character art, cosplay, and fan analysis are some of the best aspects of media fandom, and games get to add fan rules, fan content, and even fan spin-off games to the mix. Looking at the best fan communities in RPGs, what they all have in common is fans taking the things they love about games and being inspired to make more, enriching the game for everyone and in turn attracting more fans. This is why both Mothership and Mork Borg get so much attention, they’re perfectly positioned to inspire people to create.

And creation is where, admittedly, my personal biases start to creep in. I don’t want to gatekeep RPGs, I want as many people as possible discovering this hobby and enjoying this hobby. When I look at fandom, though, when I look at the ways in which enthusiastic people deepen their engagement with roleplaying games, I see everything falling into one of two channels: either you’re creating something, or you’re buying something. Let’s be real, too, it’s not like there’s an easy version of this hobby where you spend no money: Most people are going to buy games, supplements, and accessories, and that’s not a bad thing. Buying games, supplements, and adventures helps support game designers putting their work out into the world, and injecting more money into this hobby makes it more possible for new game designers to enter. At the same time, a lot of this money is being hoovered out of the hobby by giant corporations, and it’s mostly for things that, like licensed games themselves, I question the value of. Seamus and I are going to forever puzzle over the value of things like licensed games and some of the more substantial tie-in products, like the kind-of stupid but also kind-of delightful Skyrim cookbook.

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I think the short version of this is that the RPG fandom is what creates both the worst and the best aspects of the hobby. As I finally migrated into a few of the smaller Discords where hobby discussions now happen, I was once again able to see so much of the enthusiasm, discussion, and yes, fan work and hacking which used to be easier to access in public fora like Google+ and RPGnet. When you think about it, the shift in modes of communication available to the hobby have left the largest public-facing sites with significant RPG communication on them DriveThruRPG and Kickstarter, and this development of course makes the monetized side of fandom much more visible. It also of course means there’s a need to distinguish perception from reality when it comes to engaging with the broader hobby and fandom.

There is also a more existential question: To what degree does the ‘RPG fandom’ exist? I don’t think anyone here has claimed that the hobby is a monolith, but at the same time most of that framing is created by Wizards of the Coast, who is trying to frame the entire hobby with respect to D&D. We all know my opinion on that, but if we’re looking at the hobby at large, how do these fandoms shake out? There are some large movements, though for the most part even these are too big to be a unified ‘thing’; the OSR has grown significantly since 2006 and fractured in the process, and indie, narrative, or story gaming have grown and fractured even faster in the years since the Forge shut down. That mostly leaves us with fandom existing at the level of individual games, mostly groups smaller than the cultures of play which they fit into. And in fact, it may just be that the notion of something like the OSR ever having a unified fandom is a shibboleth that comes from the time prior to me actually understanding it.

This stratification is what puts so much of the fandom power back in the hands of those who are charging money. We identify ourselves by what games we play, and that provides concrete comparisons for those designing games and supplements. As much as there are at least half a dozen play cultures replete with conflicting end goals for their games, we have all submitted to the signaling power of fancy dice, elaborate trays, towers, and terrain, and shirts and jewelry with d20s festooned on them. Sure, we all know that the d20 is a symbol of Dungeons and Dragons, but if you wore a shirt with twenty d10s scattered on it it’s not going to scream ‘Shadowrun’. The creative lifeblood of the RPG fandom has not and will not go away, even if it’s becoming less accessible. That does mean that the accessibility which is available is going largely to those who want to use it to make money. And maybe that, rather than any issue with the RPG fandom itself, is what’s making me so conflicted about it.

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