Game Design | Roleplaying Games | Crowdfunding
How Zine Quest Could Remake the Tabletop RPG Landscape
Insights from food trucks and Kickstarter data
Each year since 2019, Kickstarter has hosted a tabletop roleplaying game design event called Zine Quest for small-budget design projects. Creators launch campaigns and run them for just two weeks, and Kickstarter promotes them.
Here, I discuss the potential of Zine Quest (and similar events) to transform and expand the world of tabletop RPGs. Then I visualize the story of Zine Quest’s growth using a new, comprehensive data set I constructed. It is the only up-to-date data of its kind, as far as I’m aware.
Why Zine Quest matters
Zine Quest is remarkable for a few reasons. The first is that the vast majority of the campaigns reach their funding goals, even though many were launched by first-time creators. Participating is a low-risk way to fund a small project.
A second reason is that there are a lot of projects — hundreds each year. For the small (but growing) tabletop RPG design community, that’s a lot in a short time.
The third is that the projects are astonishingly diverse. You’ll find traditional RPGs in pretty much any genre you can name, as well as solo RPGs, experimental epistolary games, games spotlighting specific political issues, graphic-design- and art-driven projects, system-neutral worldbuilding tools, and much more. There’s a huge volume and diversity of creative work on display, and Zine Quest by and large succeeds at bringing it to the people who’ll enjoy it.
At the same time, Zine Quest came into controversy in 2022. That was the year Kickstarter moved the event from its usual date in February to August to align with Gen Con. This decision came less than two months before the projects would have launched. That left creators scrambling to adjust. During the backlash, a group of indie game designers even launched a rival event, Zine Month, that ran in February 2022. In response, Zine Quest moved back to February in 2023 and will stay there for the foreseeable future. Kickstarter is still repairing its reputation with the RPG design community.
This rocky episode notwithstanding, there’s something remarkable going on with Zine Quest (and similar events) that stands to remake the tabletop RPG landscape. A good analogy is the restaurant industry.
Until the ’90s in my hometown of Austin, Texas, if you wanted to start a restaurant you usually had no choice but to go in for a brick-and-mortar establishment. This cost a lot of money, tied you to a location that might turn out to be a bad fit, and thus made the food business financially riskier.
This all changed when new land-use rules allowed food trucks in many locations. Now, you could start a restaurant in a vehicle, sell at initially low volume while meeting your more modest costs, and drive your truck to your customers. If your business failed, you’d lose a fraction as much money. If it succeeded, you could upgrade to a brick-and-mortar restaurant with more surety of success. Innovative experiments in food that might not have been worth the risk before became possible (see Chi’Lantro, Korean Tex-Mex fusion).
Some of today’s successful national chains have started from such humble beginning. Torchy’s Tacos is the prime example. Many of these experiments wouldn’t have survived to adulthood without the low-risk opportunities offered by food trucks.
Zine Quest projects are the food trucks of tabletop RPGs. The small size of projects submitted to the event places them within the reach of first-time developers through low upfront costs. Kickstarter handles much of the marketing. This allows less-well-connected game designers to get a start. And, because Zine Quest puts almost no restrictions on the nature of the games included, there’s room to experiment with niche, risky ideas that big game companies with an eye on mass appeal wouldn’t often invest in.
Not all the innovations produced in an event like Zine Quest will work out. But a few will take the design conversation forward. Thanks to Bucket of Bolts, we have the tools to tell stories not only about the intrepid crews of space ships but also about the storied vessels themselves, creaking with character. Thanks to Beak, Feather, and Bone, we have a system for competitive, map-based worldbuilding. Thanks to Last Sabbath, we have a beautiful journaling game about witches and memories. These are just a few of the design innovations made easier by low-risk funding accessible to small-scale developers.
Where is Zine Quest headed?
Up to this point I’ve talked about Zine Quest as a whole and given a few anecdotal examples of projects. To better understand where the event is headed, we need data on where it’s been — starting with the basics: the number and nature of the projects, and how this has changed over time. To this end, I constructed a data set of every project since the event started in 2019. What follows are some figures that put numbers to Zine Quest’s five-year story.
Note that I have converted all funding goals and pledges to 2023 US dollars based on inflation from 2019–2023 and exchange-rate data from the OECD.
How many Zine Quest projects are created each year?
As of 14 Oct 2023, Kickstarter lists 1,196 Zine Quest projects, 1,191 of which have launched.
The figure below shows the number of projects launched by year and whether they succeeded (met their funding goals). The number of projects peaked in 2021 at 407 before plummeting to 169 in 2022 when Kickstarter moved the event to August. The number recovered partially in 2023 when the event was moved back to February.
How likely is a Zine Quest project to succeed?
The short answer is: “very.” A project’s success, of course, depends on the details of the product, whether the creator has an existing audience, and so on. But in every year since Zine Quest started, over 90% of projects have met their funding goals, as shown below. Across all years, 1096 (92%) have succeeded. Together, these successful projects have raised about $6,250,000 in funding (in 2023 USD).
A technical aside: The shaded area shows the 95% confidence interval (CI). Every project in the “population” of all Zine Quest projects is included in the sample, hence we know the true population mean. That means we should be careful when interpreting this CI. Specifically, the CI is only meaningful if we treat the success rate as a random variable so that the observed population statistic becomes a sample from a theoretical distribution of population success rates. Then, the CI illustrates the likely range of success rates that might have occurred, and by comparing across years we can see whether any changes in the success rate are likely due to chance. In this case, they are: we don’t see much evidence of change in that rate.
What game systems are most used in Zine Quest projects?
Many Zine Quest projects use an original system. Others are hacks of existing systems, or supplements to them. The figure below shows the number of projects by year whose descriptions mentioned (by name or synonym) four major systems: Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons (5E), Old School Renaissance (OSR; not actually a single system but a playstyle), Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), and Forged in the Dark (FitD).
We can see that OSR has generally had the most projects of the four, with 5E close behind and overtaking OSR in 2022.
Just how “small” are Zine Quest projects — what’s a typical funding goal?
The projects vary widely in funding goals, and those goals follow a (positively) skewed distribution, with a few projects aiming much higher than the rest. The median goal was $742, and the mean was $1,273 (in 2023 USD).
The central line in the figure below shows the median goal. The top and bottom of the shaded area correspond to the 80th and 20th percentile goals, respectively.
We can see that the funding goals haven’t changed much over time. The skew towards high goals has increased, but the average goal has remained mostly constant.
How much money do Zine Quest projects raise compared to their goals?
Not only do most projects meet their goals, but they usually wildly exceed them. The median “percent funded” (pledged amount as a percentage of a project’s goal) is 330%, and the mean is 683%. I expect that this overfunding is partly the result of creators’ setting the goal low, to put it within reach, knowing that it will then be exceeded as more backers get behind a “winner.”
At the same time, it’s important for the funding goals to at least cover the fixed costs of a project (this excellent blog post breaks down goal calculations here). I expect that in most cases the goal meets this minimum. Under this assumption, most Zine Quest projects either make a substantial profit or allow creators to meet big stretch goals, relative to the sizes of their projects.
The figure below shows the median (thick line) and 80th and 20th percentiles (top and bottom of the shaded area, respectively) of the percent funded over time. We can see that the distribution hasn’t changed meaningfully over time. We can also see that the distribution is positively skewed, with a few projects receiving pledges valued at many times their funding goals.
How many people back Zine Quest projects?
The median number of backers for a project was 156, and the mean was 252. Since backers may back multiple projects, it’s hard to estimate the total number of unique backers — the size of the Zine Quest crowdsourcing community. But for first-time or indie projects in a niche (but growing) industry, hundreds or thousands of backers strikes me as a lot.
The figure below shows the median (thick line) and 80th and 20th percentiles (top and bottom of the shaded area, respectively) of the number of backers for a project over time. Once again, this metric has been holding pretty steady since the project’s first year. Once again, there’s a strong positive skew, with a minority of projects receiving overwhelmingly more backers than the rest.
Are bigger or smaller Zine Quest projects more successful?
Projects with lower funding goals tend to receive more funding relative to those goals. The figure below plots the proportion funded (this is the same as the percentage above divided by 100) vs. the funding goal for all projects across all years. There’s a bit more to this plot than the others, but the big takeaway is the direction of the relationship: downward. If you want the details, check out the technical aside.
Technical aside: I’ve put both variables on base-10 log scales to adjust for their positive skews, and I’ve added 1 to the proportion funded to avoid missing values when taking the log. The black dotted line corresponds to 100% funding on this modified scale. The thick blue line is a standard linear regression line. According to this model:
- a project with a funding goal of $100 typically received about 859% of its funding goal,
- a project with a goal of $500 typically received about 462%,
- a project with a goal of $1,000 typically received about 346% of its funding goal,
- and a project with a goal of $2,000 typically received about 255%.
Note that this is an attractively simple model but not the most accurate. The relationship isn’t fully linear (e.g., we can see a cluster of projects below their funding goals, and negative proportions funded aren’t meaningful). Even so, the coefficient for the funding goal is significant (p < 0.01), and the model has R² = 0.16 — moderate for this sort of observational data.
Where is Zine Quest headed?
Drawing the above trends together, we have a more complete picture of Zine Quest’s story thus far:
- The event took a major hit in 2022 due to Kickstarter’s poor decision to move the event to February, but the number of projects has since partially recovered.
- The size of projects, the number of backers, success rate, and other fundamentals have held steady throughout the event’s history.
- Projects usually receive multiple times their funding goals in pledges, and small projects are especially likely to exceed in this regard.
This is where Zine Quest has been. Where is it headed? I believe 2024 will be a critical year for the event. It will either mark a second year of recovery, or it will signal that the event is unlikely to reattain the scale it achieved in 2021.
Either way, Zine Quest has demonstrated a need in the tabletop RPG landscape: a low-cost, low-risk way for new creators to get their foot in the door and experiment beyond boundaries. As the RPG scene draws in wider and more diverse audiences, this experimentation is exactly what we require to create games that speak to everyone’s experiences and enable new forms of play.
No matter the fate of this particular event, there will be new and different funding solutions to fill this need. The future of roleplaying games will be bright, plural, and stranger than anything we’ve seen.
