Why Do I Do This?

This is a bit of a "blog" sort of posting. I don't do a lot of these, but today it seemed relevant.

I'm a busy guy. I have a day job that's far from just a 9-5. I have social hobbies outside of gaming that take up a good deal of time. So why do I write roleplaying game material? That question was driven home to me today when I posted a perfectly innocent question to the Pathfinder 2e subreddit. In it, I asked what third party materials people use for PF2e. I honestly wanted to know, and the recent influx of new players made it seem a really good time to raise awareness that there are third party materials.

But the response I got was kind of a shock. At first someone replied saying that it's not appropriate to try to tell people about third party sources when there's new people coming to the game. This seemed counter-intuitive to me, but I figured that this was one person's point of view. I replied, telling them that I let people make up their own minds about what sources are helpful. That comment got heavily downvoted and then the original commenter came in and accused me of making the post just to promote my own material (which I had specifically put in a stand-alone comment so as not to appear to be doing just that, since... in fact, it was not my intent.

The whole thing left me with a terrible, bitter taste in my mouth and I was confused and sad. I pour many hours of effort into Pathfinder 2e, and I rarely get more than a "oh neat," from time to time, but that's okay! It's not why I do it and I don't need the congratulations.

But this... this is different. This is an explicit rejection of that effort, treating me as some sort of a greedy leech on the community. (note that I do not charge anything, other than some variants of what's already free, available for $1 on Pathfinder Infinite, just to test the waters) It made me feel terrible about giving people my time and creativity, and that's just horrible.

So it made me stop and re-consider. Why do it at all? If it's that thankless, why not just do something else?

For that, I defer to the great J. Michael Straczynski who pointed out, (paraphrasing) that writers don't write because they want to make money or because there's a task that needs doing. They write because they have no other option. It's a thing that they need to do because it scratches an itch that they can't get at any other way. I'm not a particularly good writer. I am self-taught and have never spent the time necessary to become more than an accomplished dabbler. But that doesn't mean I don't need to write—I do.

So I'll keep writing for Pathfinder, but I think I'll be more careful about the community. It seems to me that there's a lot of negative bottled up in this community, which is something to always be cautious about. Still, they're not the reason I write, and I'll continue to do so even if it continues to be largely unappreciated.

—Tyler_Zoro AKA Jarvis Canadian, author of free third party materials for Pathifnder 2e.