To some degree, I have long thought of myself as a failure.
I earned a summa cum laude degree in advertising from SMU but quickly found that it was perhaps the most useless degree imaginable. When I started looking for a job, I was continually asked “what I did”. Was a I writer? Oh, that would require a journalism degree. Account executive? Sorry, that would require a business degree. And so on. Nobody could tell me what an actual advertising degree got me with the business.
In the end, I did find a job with a placed billing itself as a “technical advertising” firm, but I pretty much just edited technical manuals — not exactly “advertising”. Later, I got a job at a marketing and promotions company but was basically a glorified administrative assistant who also happened to do layout work on PageMaker.
And that’s as close as I got. While I did work at marketing research firm with a boss who was kind enough to let me use my talents to develop some of the company’s marketing materials, I never did get a job in advertising.
In other words, failure. I never “made it”.
And yet, a thought came to me yesterday…
Long before I’d ever thought about a career in advertising, I feel in love with tabletop roleplaying games.
This wasn’t always an easy hobby for me, as I received extreme pressure from certain quarters to give it up as anything from a waste of time to a suicide danger. I’m proud to say that I never did.
Still, I never thought about a job in the tabletop roleplaying industry.
Eventually, I started writing reviews of TTRPGs and receiving review copies for doing so. In essence, my hobby paid for itself.
Later still, I took over the IRC chatroom #rpgnet, which eventually morphed into the Discord server Randomworlds. There, I started hosting Q&As with game authors.
Has all this made me a “success” in the industry by any conventional measurment? No, not in the least.
And yet…
And yet, while I’ve never (successfully) written a word of a TTRPG, I’m treated as part of the industry. Some people in the business with whom I’ve never interacted have heard of me prior to me reaching out to them. Some people in the business have written excitedly about having met me at GenCon.
And yet, I have written the introduction to a roleplaying game. So, technically, I have contributed to the content of a TTRPG.
And yet, multiple game creators have told me how much they value my opinion, to the point that some creators have told me that my feedback is all that kept them in the industry.
And yet, I do receive tips for holding Q&As. Doesn’t that mean that I’m a “professional” in the industry to some degree?
And yet, I (as my Hardboiled GMshoe persona) have been made part of multiple game settings as an NPC. How many people can say that?
In other words, it seems that while I never got anywhere in advertising, I have found my place in an industry that’s been near and dear to my heart since I got the AD&D 1e Monster Manual when I was nine years old.
So while it’s unlikely that I’ll ever retire as a rich man of business, I’m definitely making the most of my passion.
Perhaps I have “made it” after all.
The Hardboiled GMshoe's Office 