Mike Shea

I collect RPGs.

I read RPGs just for fun.

I just like to read them and enjoy them if I'm not playing games.

You could argue that RPG prep and world building are their own hobbies.

Map making is its own hobby.

Art.

People just making art and putting it up on websites or commissioning art is a hobby.

Dice collection and dice, you know,

dice stuff is its own hobby for me like miniatures collection was a major hobby of mine i liked collecting miniatures for a little while painting miniatures was a hobby of mine terrain collection and is a hobby of mine right i talk about dwarven forge and i use and love dwarven forge but dwarven forge is really kind of its own hobby right it's its own ancillary hobby now a lot of these hobbies are directly connected to the rpg themselves i can use the terrain that i get in my games

But my game would still run if I had it or not.

And honestly, as much as I love this stuff, I don't think it like makes the game twice as good.

I think, you know, I've done some actual sort of research on this and it makes it about 10, 20 percent better on a good day.

Some days it makes it worse.

I've got games where the use of terrain made things too complicated and took too long and people didn't like it.

So it's not always a sure thing that all of these things always make our hobby better, that the RPG itself doesn't get better.

Well, something occurred to me, which is I think that RPG business punditry is its own hobby, that us paying attention to what's going on in RPG business is its own ancillary hobby.

It isn't going to affect your game in a couple of hours.

It may not affect your game at all.

It does kind of affect like what products are coming out and what kind of influences are occurring with different creators for the kind of games that are going out there.

But sometimes we just like to pay attention to the industry in the same way that we'd pay attention to like which sports teams are trading what people and for how much or how businesses are changing and things like that.