Dungeons and Dragons is not the only tabletop role-playing game anymore

Mark Truman is a co-owner of Magpie Games, a national tabletop role-playing game company that produces its games here in Albuquerque. He and his fellow co-owner Marissa Kelly got their start on Kickstarter, a digital crowdfunding platform.

Truman was the guest on this week's Business Outlook podcast, which focused on small business. Business Outlook podcasts are released on Monday afternoons and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Here's a preview of the conversation, which had been edited for clarity.

Could you explain what your company does?

“When you tell people you're a tabletop role-playing game person, they ask a lot of questions. It's gotten easier for me to explain what a tabletop role-playing game is, thank you, 'Stranger Things' season three. You probably are familiar with the most popular role-playing game ever created, Dungeons and Dragons. So if you think about Dungeons and Dragons, it's a bunch of nerds sitting around a table rolling dice about their elves and wizards, warriors and fighters, versus goblins and ogres, you have some sense of it. What we do is very much in the same vein. Our business traces its roots back to the '70s, when D&D was first created. What we do is create role-playing games about everything else, right? So, for example, we have a license for 'Avatar: The Last Airbender,' which is a really popular cartoon. In our role-playing game, you can take on the role of one of those kinds of heroes from the show. We even have games like Zombie World, which kind of rely on well-known zombie fiction. It's like playing out a zombie movie, but instead of watching the movie, you are the characters in the movie."

What got you into playing TTRPGs?

“Oh, man, rewind to Mark at age 12. When I was, 12 I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.”

Could you explain how TTRPGs went from a hobby to a business?

“Kickstarter became kind of the vehicle. We just did bigger and bigger projects until we did big enough projects that we could leave our full-time jobs. There was a really awkward time where you're making projects. It's big enough to leave your full-time job, but you worry, 'Will I ever have another one? Is this the last one? I'm gonna quit my job and then never have another success.' Marissa and I did not take a paycheck from Magpie, having founded the company in 2011, we didn't take a paycheck 'till 2019 so eight years of us reinvesting everything into the business, and we hired other people before we hired ourselves. We had a guy who was the very first employee for the company, he shipped books, he would come in every day, put the books in packages and send them out.”

From what you were saying the path toward entrepreneurship isn't steady.

“This image we have in the Visa small business commercial, you open your storefronts and people come in and buy your donuts, and it's nothing but good things. All I can think about is, 'Oh, my God, if I had that many customers for the first day of my donut shop, we would be totally screwed. I would be completely unprepared for the scale of business.' If I would give advice about how to do this, I would say: Your failures will always be yours, and you have to work through them and persevere. But your successes can be just as bad because that introduces so many new problems that you feel like you're drowning.”

Can you tell me more about these struggles?

“I think there are people who still think I go to bed on a pile of money every night. Surely, Mark has bedding made entirely of $100 bills, in which I snuggle up. In reality, we spent literally millions of dollars shipping books, it is so expensive to do a giant project. As we were coming through that process of shipping books, paying royalties, printing things, Magpie really did have a problem. All of our credit and infrastructure was built around projects that were maybe $300,000, maybe half a million dollars. We didn't go from having a $300,000 project to an $800,000 project to a $2 million project. We went from a $700,000 project to a $10 million project. And I probably didn't have the financial infrastructure to weather the ups and downs of $10 million. It’s so challenging to look at a company and say, 'Wow, you're so successful' because all that person's seeing is the revenue, 'How could you possibly have any problems?' Well, because that revenue was actually an indicator of scale.”

How do you run your team?

“I think on one hand, people probably look at us and think, 'You guys are like every other role-playing game business.' We're a little different. First, in the sense that our industry has a long history of exploitation. It's absolutely the case that people, often, as owners and as capitalists, have an attitude that anybody who works for them is lucky because they get to work in games and sometimes that results in people getting paid like $7 an hour, $8 an hour, to work in a space that you know isn't super profitable. Magpie very much early on, said 'We don't want to be that kind of company.' How we handle wages is really different. We set a goal of what we want to pay people that we think is a fair wage for the work that we're doing."

How do you choose what games to make?

“Well, I'll tell you that that process has changed a lot. I think it used to be we make things we think are interesting, and that's great until you realize that some of the things you think are interesting, no one else thinks is interesting. As you go on in your career, you end up with a Venn diagram, stuff I'm interested in, that's one big circle. Then there's stuff other people are interested in, which is another circle, and hopefully it has some overlap. Then finally, stuff that I can do. And when I say can do, I mean I have the capacity, the funding, the skill. There are things that I wanted to do when I first started in role-playing that I can now do, and things that I want to do in the future that I can't do yet. Acknowledging that is important and hopefully, when you line those three circles up, there is a large number of products that are in the middle of those three circles."