Money. A sad necessity for pretty much everything in our lives and Raleigh Tabletop RPGs isn’t any different. As much as the Organizers would love to provide everything RTR does for free to everyone, it simply isn’t feasible. We, just like everyone in this community we love, come from all walks of life. Sadly, we can’t spend XP on Resources 5 and cover the costs to keep RTR running.

I believe in transparency, or as close to it as we can get. With that said, I want to take a moment to run down our financial situation.

Current Funds

At the end of Future Inc, our last in-person event before COVID (Q1 2020), RTR held approximately $1,500 in donations. We paused fundraising until Q4 of 2022 due to the pandemic. By that time, we were under $1,000 in funds. As of today, we have $300 remaining in funds. That’s… a substantial drop in 3 years. Post-COVID, gaming space reservation costs have substantially increased and has been our most significant expense. This was true before COVID, but we’ve gone from approximately $400 a year for gaming spaces to closer to $1,000 or more if we returned to pre-COVID levels of activity.

Given our current planned offerings and our subscriptions, we have about 6 months of funds remaining. 

Expenses

Meetup

This invaluable service is what we use to handle all of our event registration and has long been our best way of finding new people to join our community. The visibility it provides, along with the platform’s stability, have made it a staple of all 10+ years of RTR’s existence. I cannot overstate how essential Meetup has been for RTR’s smooth operation.

Cost: 

$200 per year, currently. This has increased substantially across the life of RTR. Right now, we don’t know of any plans by Meetup to increase their fee.

Physical Play Space

For many reasons, we choose to hold our events in public spaces, Friendly Local Gaming Stores, or other places outside our homes. The people who own, rent, and maintain these spaces have their own costs and we, wanting to be a positive part of the community, help cover those costs with reservation fees. Currently, we’ve partnered with Gamers Geekery & Tavern for private play space for our Semi-Organized Campaigns. Their location, food and drink selection, and late hours make them a great fit for us. Plus, they’re wonderful hosts.

Cost: 

$35 per event, when paid in advance by season. Each SOP season is $210. Currently we have 2 active SOPs and 2 more coming online soon, so this cost is between $400 and $800 a year.

Web Hosting

For a very long time, RTR never had a website. We decided to change this when we went through a redesign of our logo and other assets approximately 7 years ago.

Cost

Currently free. We are incredibly thankful that an Organizer Emeritus covers the entire cost of our hosting. This is a substantial donation on their part, and we’ve worked with them to keep RTR’s web hosting needs to the bare minimum to save money. If this changes, annual costs for our web hosting would be between $100 and $200, depending on what host we selected.

Kanka, Obsidian Portal, Roll20 and other Online RPG software

Many of us prefer to play online instead of in-person. In addition, we use software like Kanka and Obsidian Portal to help provide easily accessible information to our members.

Cost

$60 per year for our current package with Kanka. We have suspended our membership with Obsidian Portal and all of our space on their service is an archive of wonderful past SOP memories. Other costs, such as Roll20, vary as many volunteers choose to absorb these costs as part of their volunteerism, for which we are very grateful.

Printing

We still provide Player Packets and Character Sheets to our members for SOPs, but in digital form. Those who prefer paper copies can print them using whatever method works best for them. 

Cost

Zero, thank you digital era. Before the digital switch, it was approximately $25 per SOP in printing costs. There is still the occasional cost for printed material, but isn’t notable at this time.

Fundraising

For RTR’s balance to stabilize, we need to raise approximately $300 per quarter. So far, the A Dream, Awakened donations have come the closest to this goal, but still fell short by about $75.

For quarters where we don’t have in-person SOPs, we would need to raise between $50 and $100 to cover ongoing subscriptions and one-off expenses (such as in-person Try-It-Out events).

If you’ve attended an in-person event recently, you’ll notice we have a QR Code available to accept digital donations. In-person donations of cash are also always welcomed. Currently, we don’t use platforms like Patreon or Meetup’s donation option due to the fees associated with those services.

There has been discussion about offering RTR merchandise on RedBubble or similar, but this is still in the most early stages of investigation. If you are particularly interested in RTR swag, please bring it up on Facebook or Discord, so we know to dedicate more of our time to making this happen.

What If We Run Out of Money?

Well, at that point, we have to start prioritizing what is essential to RTR. I will personally cover our Meetup subscription as long as I can. Other costs might have to start being passed back directly to the community via fees to participate in our events, both virtual and in-person. I hope we never reach this point, but I believe in being honest and clear about the reality. Our volunteers are wonderful people, but I do not expect them to both donate their time and hundreds of dollars to offer SOPs, Quarterlies, or other events.