What is an "indie ttrpg"?

I've seen a lot of people express their affection for "indie ttrpgs", but I'm often a bit confused. Once you remove a handful of companies, wouldn't 99% of the entire ttrpg industry/hobby constitute "indie" products?

I want to be clear, I'm not talking about revenue or market share. I'm speaking about the organizations credited as publishers in the fine print of a product's copyright. These organizations are almost all "indie", in my opinion. They're all basically just one person, and maybe a few others that were hired on a contract basis.

I think we can all agree that D&D dominates the market.

Sometimes I think that there are connotations about which products are "indie", and which aren't that have nothing to do with the publishers.

For example, is RuneQuest (Chaosium) an indie? If not, what about Mythras (Design Mechanism), because they are essentially the same game?

What makes a company too big to be "indie"?

I would love to try and pin this down, but I suspect it may be a slippery subject.

Any thoughts? I know there are publishers, and people that have published products that are active on GP which is partially why I'm asking this question here.

Anything that's not D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Warhammer or White Wolf is indie.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration but yea, it's kind of how I would define it. It's not necessarily an accurate use of the word indie but I'd just broadly separate RPGs between the established ones and indie. That leaves some room for vaguery in the middle, but I never tried to pin down a definition (or thought much about the term in general), so that never bothered me.

Pretty much. The 80% that make up 20% of the market-share, type thing?

The term has almost no meaning anymore.

Indieness is a state of mind. Don’t you just feel so much hipstier when you play indie ttrpg instead of the big corp rpg that consumes your soul? 😝

More seriously… Indie basically means independent no? So anything that has not been acquired by people who wear suits and could be a Cyberpunk NPC should fit 🤣 I would say chaosium is old enough to not be indie by the way… though I know of 15 yo start ups so… 🤔

To my eye, there are large publishers (you know the ones, Wizards, Chaosium, Paizo, PEG, etc.), mid-sized publishers / companies (Modiphius, Free League, Goodman, Frog God, Green Ronin, Magpie, Evil Hat, Arc Dream, etc.), small-press companies (Runehammer, Fire Ruby Designs, Melsonian Arts Council, Necrotic Gnome, Old Skull, Hydra Collective), and then there are the independents, who are doing things on their own, and whose products by *far* make up the bulk of the hobby, numbers-wise if not by games sold and played.

I usually find that saying "small-press and independent games" lets me describe that unique, super-creative end of the hobby pretty well.

Fair. How do you differentiate those tiers? I would classify Raging Swan as a small-press by your breakdown of the companies, but that publisher is effectively just one person with some contracted labor. I guess maybe it would help to ask, "when does a publisher, or game, cease to be categorized as "indie"?" I think this is what I'm stuck on.

WotC has corporate backing via Hasbro, but what's the next biggest company, Paizo? I don't think anyone has come out to say how many people work at any of these publishers, but I remember reading somewhere (and this may not be accurate) that Paizo had something like 50 employees total. That includes everything from management to distrubtion/shipping and so on. A lot of the work involved in creating their products was done by freelancers working on contracts. And they're a big company.

Maybe when it comes ttrpgs there's a different perspective with regards to scale. Not sure.

I ask because I feel like there's a sense of confusion as to what exactly is being referred to. In my mind, there's WotC and everybody else. That "everybody else" are so small that it's hard to know what indie is supposed to represent. White Wolf is owned by Paradox, which I guess makes it a sort of analogue to WotC/Hasbro, but it's hard to know where to draw the line between indie/not-indie. I feel like there's something specific implied with indie games, but it's hard to specify what that something is. If I wanted to go buy indie games to support the creators, where do I do it, and more importantly, how do I go about it?

It's hard to know right? Chaosium is a good example because they've been around for decades, but are they a big publisher? I don't know.

I completely agree on that 80-20 comparison.

Call the number in the book. Who answers?

The receptionist? It's a major publisher.
The authors? Small press.
The author's mom? Indie.
The nursing home receptionist? OSR
A lawyer? WotC

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I'd categorize it further. To me, an indie publisher would not be working on someone else's IP. If they're taking orders on what to do from the people at a TV, publisher, or movie studio, they're not independent, even if they are just one person.

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lol

Maybe it's fair to infer that there's $$$ amount that indie games generate that is, small?

Maybe. This sounds like a business agreement though, but also that there is an implied sense of "Creative freedom" allotted to indie RPGs that isn't present in non-indie RPGs, regardless of the scale of the organization.

It gets especially muddy when you consider 2nd tier (and hugely successful, for the RPG space) publishers like Modiphius and Free League publishing and straight-up helping with the development of various true indie games... which often push limits just like indie games are known to. See: Mork Borg.

I myself don't worry about it, and find that by combining small-press and indie I can generally identify the section of the market I mean. (For me, that's not Chaosium, White Wolf, etc. They are small *companies*, but it's all relative. Those are large RPG companies.)

I don’t think creativity makes you indie… it kind of makes you creative 🤔 though it’s true that if you’re working for a established company you’d be working on a established project and limited by the established rules and worse of all… the established the fans! those horrible creatures that will eat you alive if you touch anything! (but then they like the new version better 😅)

But if it’s about creative independence… allow me to blurry it even more 😁

Theoretically, why can’t WotC do something indie ? (I mean besides them having no 💰 incentives 💰 to do so?) they could even have a indie incubator department like nespresso was for nestle?

A lawyer answering could also be GW...