A Modest Literary Analysis of "Use of AI" Sections on TTRPG Kickstarters, Part 1

As you are no doubt aware, the use of AI-generated content in TTRPGs is increasing. I was unfortunately reminded of this fact by @Ettin64, one of the creators of the fantastic Hard Wired Island.

Well, this sucks. There are a bunch of TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns and 500-1000+-page (!) books on DriveThruRPG that are obviously just AI-generated slop: https://t.co/2gJit8okGK

— lo-fi ettin to study/relax to (@Ettin64) December 13, 2023

The associated reddit post contains 13 links to DTRPG pages, of which about half have been delisted at the time of writing, and 4 links to completed Kickstarter campaigns that declare they have used AI.

I decided to revisit my November crowdfunding stats as well as my ongoing December crowdfunding stats to see exactly who is using AI and how. The full stats will come later (around the beginning of January), but right now I, like Ettin, am interested in the rhetoric these campaigns are using to talk about their use of AI.

Just so that we're all on the same page here, this is what Kickstarter has to say about using AI in projects on their platform:

Projects using AI tools to generate images, text, or other output must be:

• Open and Honest: Disclose in your submission and on your project page
  • what AI technology you plan to use in creating your work 
  • how you plan to incorporate the AI-produced content in your project

AND

• Original and Creative: Disclose in your submission and on your project page
  • the extent to which your project is your original work, and 
  • the specific elements you will be creating using AI output

Seems simple enough. So let's see some of the examples of this in action.

Standard Fare

First up is the standard stuff. I won't link any specific campaigns here, suffice it to say that it boils down to "We used Midjourney. We have a license to use Midjourney images." (Substitute Midjourney for whatever AI image creation was actually used). There's not much to say here. It's simple, it's to the point, it fundamentally misunderstands the question that they're allegedly trying to answer:

Do you have the consent of owners of the works that were (or will be) used to produce the AI generated portion of your projects? Please explain.

Almost by definition, artists whose work has been used to train these LLMs cannot consent because the training data is scraped from the internet. The one exception seems to be Adobe Firefly, which they claim is only trained on Adobe Stock and public domain images.

The question of credit raises its thorny head again in the next category of answers...

In the Current State of AI

Several campaigns use shockingly similar language (well not that shocking, two of those campaigns come from the same creator):

In the current state of AI we do not think there is a way that you can credit, but if such a thing occurs in the future we will be sure to implement it. 

Notice the use of "we think" and "if such a thing occurs in the future," creating a rhetoric of plausible deniability. "Well gee, we recognize that this is stealing from artists, but unfortunately there's just no way to get around it. Aw shucks, well if we can steal more ethically in the future we'll be sure to do that."

These campaigns also have identical answers to what parts of their campaign will use AI:

For the illustration of the pages we are using Midjourney, then use Photoshop to edit the illustration for the desired result.

So they're using Midjourney, but human labor is entering the picture to get the "desired result." If I had to speculate, this labor involves mostly eliminating the telltale signs of AI-generated art, but I will grant that there could be other goals here. Speaking of other goals...

Our Artistic Vision

One creator, Mizo Games, has a fascinating take on why they use AI art in all three of their campaigns:

The art generated for this project was created using Midjourney AI exclusively in response to our own unique prompts and direction. We did not use any pre-existing prompts or works from other Midjourney users as the basis for our art. While Midjourney's algorithm inherently draws on its training data, we made original creative decisions in iteratively guiding the AI output through descriptive prompting and deliberate selection. The resulting images reflect our artistic vision and choices alone.

There is a strong focus on "artistic vision" here, a real attempt to show ownership of the generated art by tracing its creativity through their human brains. Interestingly, they show more concern for the property and creative license of "other Midjourney users" than the artists whose work was used as training data in the algorithm. By focusing on how "unique" their prompts are, they seem to feel they can claim artistic legitimacy, ignoring presumably that anyone could use those same prompts and achieve exactly the same results. Still, this presents a fascinating rhetorical turn by virtue of recognizing that there is some illegitimacy tainting the use of AI-generation. If there weren't, there would be no need to defend it this way. Artists don't generally feel the need to disclose that their art was produced by their own unique thoughts and actions, as it's generally understood to simply be true. When it isn't (plagiarism, tracing, clear inspiration that isn't credited), people tend to take notice.

This concern about artistic legitimacy takes on a new form in the next category...

Specifically Not Writing

Too many campaigns to count have some variation of the following in their Use of AI section:

Covers are made with AI. All interior art is made by artists. No AI was used for writing any of the encounters, rules or any part of the product itself.

This one in particular is fascinating as it seems to admit that only humans can be artists (making AI what exactly?). But it's the latter half that bears closer inspection. "No AI was used for writing any of the encounters, rules or any part of the product itself." Well, if it's good enough for cover art, why is it not good enough for the writing? It appears to be almost a recognition that AI generation of writing in a TTRPG project would be illegitimate. The many campaigns that have some version of this all betray the same fundamental concern: that use of AI will render their products corrupted in some way. And while Mizo Games wrapped their use of AI into their overall creative vision, these other creators have instead divorced visual art from their TTRPG product. By separating visual art (cover or otherwise) from the writing, they are creating two categories of creativity in TTRPGs: the core (writing, pure creativity that cannot be touched by AI) and the periphery (visual art, incidental concerns that can be tainted by association with AI because they won't affect the perception of the core material).

Next time

 And with that, I'll leave the rest of the categories for next time. These are:

• Stretch Goals
• The Economics
• Outliers

As a final note, there is a small category of campaigns that report using AI tools like Grammarly to polish their writing. I don't know where I personally stand on this, except to say that a human editor is going to be able to do that job much better. On some level, I commend those campaigns for disclosing that information in the first place as it is certainly nowhere near the level of AI use that these other ones are.

A System of Deliberate Violence

When attacking someone, gain +1 or -1 to the attack roll (your choice) for every applicable item from the following list:

• You know their first name
• You know their last name
• You know their parents' names
• You know their partner's/partners' name(s)
• You have mutual friends
• You have drawn their blood before
• You have killed one of their species before
• You studied their movements
• You studied their anatomy
• You had sex with them
• You lived with them

For every applicable item, regardless of the effect on the attack roll, gain +1 damage.

November 2023 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I recently became curious about the state of TTRPG crowdfunding (full transparency, it's partially because I am gearing up for a ZineMonth 2024 project *shameless plug*). How much money is actually being made? Who's making it? What are they making? And how many people are backing?

I know that this information is tracked for ZiMo by a variety of people (scroll down for the credits), but what about the rest of the year? What about bigger projects?

Essentially: what about the real money being made?

So because I am deeply unwell, I decided to take this project upon myself and start to keep a record of all the TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns I could find. To keep this work mildly manageable, I used the following criteria to filter through projects:

1. I compared campaigns across three platforms: Kickstarter, Crowdfundr, and Backerkit. Kickstarter is the most obvious as it remains THE crowdfunding platform (despite announcing a pivot to blockchain technology in late 2021, followed by public outcry and decline in TTRPG project revenue in 2022, and a seeming retreat from the controversial technology in 2023), but Backerkit is giving Kickstarter a run for its money, having started its own crowdfunding operation in mid-2022. Crowdfundr is the odd one out in this pack, a smaller site that launched in 2022 as part of the ConnectionPoint family of crowdfunding websites, but it's the platform that I personally have used and it has a dedicated event called Tabletop Nonstop that coincides with ZiMo/ZineQuest in February.
2. I limited myself to successful campaigns that ended during the month of November, with the goal being to see what is actually getting funding and where money is going. It would be interesting to see what kinds of projects don't get funded, but I don't want to draw attention to things that could potentially embarrass their creators. I know that I wouldn't want some random person on the internet pulling up things that didn't work out for me for the world to see (except for when I mastered out of a PhD program - I'll gladly talk about that anytime and highly recommend it to anyone).
3. NO DICE/MINIATURES CAMPAIGNS. This is completely a personal choice, but I just did not want to sift through all of them. There were too many, and I don't consider them important to my goal. This does not, however, exclude campaigns for physical/digital accessories directly related to playing TTRPGs (things like character sheets, virtual tabletop platforms, etc.).
4. I converted non-USD units into USD using the conversion rate on whatever given day I recorded the campaign. Does this accurately reflect the exact amount of money raised? Absolutely not. If you want to look up the conversion rate for the day that a campaign ended and fix my numbers, be my guest.

With all that said, witness the fruits of my labors.

Some big picture statistics for the state of November 2023 TTRPG crowdfunding:

• 175 campaigns
• 10 Backerkit
• 1 Crowdfundr
• 164 Kickstarter
• $10,275,932.48 raised
• $1,256,857.98 on Backerkit
• $455.00 on Crowdfundr
• $9,018,619.50 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 7 accessories
• 2 Actual Play shows
• 41 adventures
• 2 advice books
• 8 campaign settings
• 1 magazine
• 58 supplements/expansions
• 56 systems
• 39 distinct systems used across all campaigns
• 66 campaigns (37.71%) used D&D 5e and raised $5,621,468.60 (54.71% of all money raised in November)
• 43 campaigns (24.57%) developed original systems and raised $751,587.43 (7.31% of all money raised in November)

But now let's dig a little deeper into some more interesting stats, starting with Backerkit.

Kickstarter's November

The top 5 TTRPG campaigns on Kickstarter in November are as follows:

• The Crooked Moon: Folk Horror in 5E (just over $4 million from 21,793 backers) by Legends of Avantris
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness (almost $1.3 million from 8,383 backers) by Palladium Books
• Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint ($333,010 from 1,972 backers) by Autarch (whose owner, Alexander Macris, was the CEO of Milo Yiannopolous' company from 2016-2018 and remains an active participant in the US alt-right fascist movement)
• Dungeon & Potions - Treats & Dragons ($238,342 from 2,788 backers) by Blue Wave Publishing
• Elyse's Guide to Magic - A 5e supplement ($233,709 from 2,668 backers) by Draco Studios

If we take out D&D 5e campaigns, we're left with a top 5 of:

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness (almost $1.3 million from 8,383 backers) by Palladium Books
• Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint ($333,010 from 1,972 backers) by Autarch
• Dungeon Dwellers Roleplaying Game ($207,775 from 1,783 backers) by Reaper Miniatures
• Deadlands Night Train 25th Anniversary ($140,094 from 2,184 backers) by Shane Hensley
• Orbital Blues: Afterburn ($129,224.12 from 1,186 backers) by SoulMuppet Publishing

What can we learn from these two related top 5s? Two things: first, that D&D 5e still reigns supreme in the Kickstarter ecosystem (accounting for 62% of the money raised in November); second, reprints are the best bet for non-5e crowdfunding (accounting for three of the top five non-5e campaigns - TMNT, ACKS, Deadlands 25th Anniversary).

Backerkit's November

Of the 10 successful TTRPG campaigns in November on Backerkit, the most successful was either Monte Cook Games' reprint of Invisible Sun's Black Cube (raised the most money at $665,980) or Goodman Games' reprint of Grimtooth's Old-School Traps for 5e and DCC, which raised less money at $203,426 but had the most backers (3608) and surpassed their goal by the highest percentage (2,034% funded - goal of $10,000). The third most successful campaign was Evil Hat's Deathmatch Island (raised $161,870 from 3111 backers, 540% funded), a game based on the PARAGON system by John Harper.

While there were other successful campaigns in the $50,000-$75,000 range, these top three are the most interesting to me as they are most similar to the successful campaigns on Kickstarter: reprints, driven by established companies, large books full of art that only entities with considerable extant capital can produce. Those three campaigns alone account for 82% of the money raised on Backerkit in November.

Crowdfundr's November

There was only 1 TTRPG campaign on Crowdfundr in November: GVW: A Mork Borg Hardcore Wrestling Zine! by Gallant Knight Games. It was the only one to feature on the platform since the end of September. There's not much to say here, except to note that there have been just 40 TTRPG campaigns on Crowdfundr compared to Backerkit's 53 and Kickstarter's who-knows-how-many (there have been 99 campaigns that made over $100,000 in 2023 alone). Crowdfundr has a ways to go if it wants to compete in this particular arena, even despite its Tabletop Nonstop promotional event.

Big Conclusions

I want to drill down into a very important question - how sure of a bet is 5e? The average amount of money raised across all three platforms (well really two since Crowdfundr didn't have any 5e campaigns) for a D&D 5e-based campaign in November was $85,173.77.But Crooked Moon is an enormous outlier. Just take a look at this histogram:

Crooked Moon skews the data so much that it creates a category all its own. So what happens when we take it out?

The average becomes $24,634.38, and there are still two outliers that skew the data. Remove them and:

The data look practically the same, with a new average of $17,372.06. This is because the median value of a November 5e crowdfunding campaign is $4,026.84. Half of all campaigns (33 in total) made $4,000 or less, and if you take out the top three the median sinks to $3,671.56. Now this is nothing to sneeze at - hell, my own crowdfunding campaign in February made juuuuuust under $600 - but it's a far cry from a surefire runaway success. Indeed, the saturation of the market with 5e products probably helps depress the overall success of those same campaigns. Half of them aren't even appreciably more successful than system neutral/agnostic campaigns (average value: $10,117.02; median value: $3,392).

Takeaways

There's money in the TTRPG space. No reasonable person can claim that there isn't. The problem is that the space is awash in projects using D&D 5e and made by larger indie publishers, and also it's locked up in platforms like Kickstarter that aren't accessible to most people outside of North America and Western Europe. How do we fix this?

I have no idea.

Until a better answer comes along, I plan on continuing to catalogue TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns. Someone should keep an eye on them after all, and it may as well be me.