This is me making an entry for the manifesto jam.

Tabletop RPGs want be free.   And I mean that a few ways.

First, of course, in the classic way that information wants to be free.  The cost and difficulty of sharing it gets lower and lower; once shared, it has the tendency to continue to be shared.  But it's not just that.

You can remember enough of the rules of most games, after a few hours with a book, to start play without it; you can make up enough of the rest that people do it accidentally.  You can make up rules as you go.  You can call that thing, which you almost entirely made up, after the game you barely remember, and that's perfectly normal.

Going from running games to making supplements or whole games is trivial, and as layout software gets cheaper, POD simpler, the community of design heavier with easy resources, it's getting more and more trivial all the time, too.  You can write your own TTRPG on one page, and those who have gaming in their head can run it off that. If you make a game, you can borrow half your procedures from someone else, and if you're at all fresh with the other half, or celebrate your sources, or do ANY of the reasonable things that borrowers do, it's fucking cool.

If you want it in market terms, there is and always will be an obscene oversupply of creators and products relative to the demand; if this is a competition, it's a natural race to the bottom, and it's only through significant effort that that race downwards is restrained.

They want to be free - free as in speech and free as in beer, libre and gratis.  And we're stopping them.

The way we're stopping them, the actions that make games less free, are moves towards marketability and productization, the transformation of a game as a raw document or bundle of play aids into a locked-in collectible with a professional, official feel, producing a secondary (though also enjoyable) hobby that *doesn't* struggle with this - the game collector.

And we're stopping them for very good reasons.

We're doing it because we're mostly fucking poor, and we live in the hellscape of capitalist consumerism.  We're doing it because we have been trained to equate liberation of creative efforts and contribution to the commons with lack of accreditation and other abuses of sharing, with new examples EVERY GODDAMN DAY, most recently out of the Generative AI sphere.  And we're doing it because we fear that if we say "they OUGHT to be free" we're saying that only those who can afford to design as a hobby ought to design at all, because the world is trash.

And we're doing it because we're squashed for time, because that same clear, clean productization promises that you can get something that "works immediately out of the box, as-is" (though it rarely fully delivers). And we do want that; it's not some bad thing to want.

But.

But we're fighting against that even as we perform it, and we've left and opened enormous crevices in that enclosure of productization as we went along, and we are engaging in counter-movements against the movement of enclosure, looking for compromise states.

D&D never fully enclosed the DM's three-ring binder of prep and house rules and useful stuff, a device by which the game can drift into being the DM's house game just pretending to be D&D.  There are plenty of products with material to stuff in that binder, until it's bursting, but no clean full-product replacement.

The OSR movement, drawing from that tradition, often works on something very like the premise that the three-ring binder IS the actual game at the table; the products are just cogent packages to start drifting from.  Their blogging sphere produces massed amounts of three-ring binder ephemera.

Open licensing abounds, to try and manage credit and terms and create a new commons with clear rules attached that's compatible with the acts of enclosure (even if it's sometimes not very open and can amount to "You are permitted to be a fan and write supplemental material, aren't we generous?").

Indie design is awash with free stuff, much of it with extremely open permissions, and often playing with the nature of it's own productization.

Metadesign itself, making things (even productized things!) meant to assist in game creation, pushes towards the free state.

And now and then we'll see something firmly liberatory, an outright attack on our usual enclosure and productization (even if it's not intended as such); for one example, see MOSAIC strict.

Okay, so here's the part where I've laid the groundwork and I should give an inspiring rant about how bad productization is and how we need to librate gaming from that fully.  I mean, I've already cast everything in those terms, anthropomorphizing games as having a want.  Anarchic design!  A thousand flowers, but this time purple!  Let's all do it my way, which is the best way, and be free!  Fuck the markets, down with the man, and...  ...And I'm already tired.  I'm not terribly interested in deep confrontation with a system that's just people trying to make a living doing the thing they like.

But as long as we're wrestling with trying to productize tabletop roleplaying and find good compromise states, and position it in a competitive market operating at the whims of capital, we won't even know what it is or could be, in a state-of-nature kind of sense.

I think it might be time to set up a space, a bunch of spaces, explicitly exploring alternatives to the way this is currently done, ones that aren't just trying to be novel compromise positions.  Not a fight, or a negotiation, but a walk-out.