The TTRPG Case Study

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Hey everyone, welcome back to The Explainer.

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I'm so glad you're here today because we're looking at something absolutely fascinating.

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Imagine you and your best friends come up with a literally game-changing idea for a new tabletop role-playing game, a TTRPG.

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You know, you want to write the lore, design the mechanics, play test the whole shebang, and ultimately get it out to the world.

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It's a super exciting dream, right?

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But the moment you start actually building it, you hit this classic modern roadblock.

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How do you organize everything fairly?

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Honestly, how do you scale your imagination without totally losing control of it?

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It's the ultimate trap, isn't it?

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How do you turn a passion project into a real business without completely ruining your friendships?

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I mean, we all know the friction of startup projects.

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Let's be honest.

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Getting a gaming group to just agree on a time to schedule a weekend session is hard enough.

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Now imagine building a whole company together.

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You've got one friend spending, say, 80 hours a week writing intricate fantasy lore, another who casually draws character art on the weekends, and a third who just throws down 500 bucks for server hosting.

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If this game actually becomes a massive hit, who gets what percentage?

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Okay, let's dive into this, because you essentially have two paths here.

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On one side you have the traditional static split.

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This is where you sit down on day one, grab a napkin and say, hey, let's just split it equally, 33% each.

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The problem?

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Well, static splits break the exact moment reality shifts.

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What if that lore writer gets a new full-time job and stops contributing after month two?

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Suddenly you have what's called dead equity.

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On the flip side, we have the dynamic split.

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This is more like a living, breathing ledger that continuously adjusts ownership based on what people are actually contributing over time.

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Think of your new venture like a giant pie.

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Instead of locking in static percentages on day one, your ownership is divided into dynamic slices based on three main things: cash, time, which is your sweat equity, and intellectual property.

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As you actually build out your TTRPG, these slices of equity adjust fluidly.

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It's all based on the real-time value of the at-risk contributions each person is making.

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So if someone works way more hours one week, their slice of the pie naturally grows a bit to reflect that actual real-world effort.

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Now you might be wondering about how we value different things, like cash versus time.

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Well, notice that specific 4x multiplier.

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You see, not all contributions carry the exact same risk.

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Cash is after tax, already earned money with a very real opportunity cost.

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If your friend pays out of pocket for the game's servers, that cash typically translates to more shares, like a 4x multiplier in the calculation, compared to sweat equity, which might only get a 2x multiplier.

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The system automatically weights the risk, which ensures total fairness and thankfully prevents constant arguments.

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So your equity is sorted out, but how do you actually structure the team itself?

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The formal framework calls this a united microenterprise, or UME.

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But sticking to our one and done jargon rule to keep things simple and focused on the humans involved, for the rest of this explainer, we're just gonna call our TTRPG creators the venture team.

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This venture team operates strictly on a human scale.

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It's capped at around 15 members, so it doesn't accidentally devolve into some faceless corporation.

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It's a self-governing circle that's fully aware of multiple types of capital, and it rigorously tracks both time and capital commitments.

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This specific structure is an absolute game changer because it allows your creators to focus entirely on what they do best: imagining, writing, and building, while the underlying system just automatically handles the fair ownership and local government stuff in the background.

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All right, let's fast forward a bit.

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Your TTRPG is a massive hit in playtesting.

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I mean, players absolutely love the mechanics and the lore.

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But now you hit a physical barrier.

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You actually need to print heavy, physical rule books and ship them out.

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This brings up a massive challenge.

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How do we handle horizontal physical distribution without just selling out all our intellectual property to some massive traditional publishing corporation?

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Well, this brings us to what's called a strategic enterprise partnership, or SEP.

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It's basically a joint venture between autonomous teams to pursue aligned missions, but without legally merging into one giant blob of a company.

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To keep it simple, from here on out, we'll just refer to this as a partnership.

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Let's look at how this builds practically.

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Instead of, you know, buying a massive warehouse, you form a scoped time-bound partnership with a local organization.

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Let's say it's a local technical school that has print-on-demand equipment just sitting idle on the weekends.

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Setting this up takes three really simple steps.

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First, an intent declaration.

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Second, you draft a lightweight charter, and third, you declare your resource commitments.

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Boom, you're partnered.

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So how is the value actually shared in this partnership?

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Well, it comes down to exactly who brings what to the table.

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The venture team brings the game IP, the marketing, and the design.

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The local school brings the print-on-demand printers, the facilities, and the local logistics.

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Through a dynamic revenue participation model, the proceeds from every single book sold are split proportionally based strictly on these specific resource commitments.

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You're sharing the load, you're producing locally at the edge, and the best part, you haven't created a single shred of new corporate bureaucracy.

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To really support this, these teams operate within a microenterprise ecosystem, or ME.

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You can just think of this as our community ecosystem.

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It acts as a protected, buffered environment, kind of like the fertile soil that sustains both your TTRPG venture team and the local school, insulating both of you from crazy, volatile external market forces.

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And here's where it gets really cool.

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Instead of relying on traditional centralized banks, this network runs on local mutual credit.

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So when your game team needs books printed, you can actually pay the school using local mutual credit.

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The school can then turn around and use that exact same credit with other community sponsors.

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The economic value literally stays in a closed local loop.

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It circulates and enriches everyone involved locally rather than being extracted away to a central headquarters hundreds of miles away.

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But what if your TTRPG just explodes and becomes the next Dungeons and Dragons?

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What if you suddenly need millions of dollars in external funding to, say, make a massive video game adaptation?

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That's where you use a public market interface, or PMI.

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We'll just call this a buffer company.

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This is a highly specialized entity that acts as a shield.

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It takes on that traditional venture capital and cleverly converts those external ROI expectations into terms that actually align with your internal fair share network.

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It totally protects your creators' autonomy.

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And this brilliantly illustrates where your broader community truly gets involved.

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By using automated accelerator tools and decentralized hubs, you can seamlessly manage geodistributed playtesters, localization teams, and even brand ambassadors.

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The technology tracks the actual value these community members generate, like you know, finding game-breaking bugs or translating the rule book into Spanish and ensures they are recognized and rewarded appropriately.

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It weaves them right into the very fabric of the game's success.

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As we wrap up this journey, I want you to remember the core philosophy driving all of this.

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Human needs are the starting point.

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Everything we've looked at today, from that dynamic equity pie to local print-on-demand partnerships, exists to support creator well-being.

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It's intentionally designed to ensure fair value distribution and honestly to maintain the pure joy of collaboration, pushing back against models that just extract value away from the people actually doing the hard work.

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I want to leave you with this really powerful thought from the source material.

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Equity should track what people actually do, not what was guessed on day one.

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It forces us to ask a much bigger question, doesn't it?

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If we finally fix the math of collaboration, could we build businesses that actually strengthen our friendships instead of destroying them?

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Thanks so much for joining me on this explainer.

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Now get out there and start building.