Roleplaying games are too concerned with community, customers, with being in conversation with gross matter. They do not stand apart but rather insist on becoming a barnacle, no good for eating, whose only value is to slow our trip and maybe grate the flesh from our bones if you get too rowdy.
There is no incentive to be exciting in the main flow of things. Why should there be? As in all hobbies, all dilitante pursuits, what they want is for you to confirm, comfort, expand slowly and gently, to open by increments and never challenge.. Cool but not too cool, new but not too distant, dangerous but well documented. Customers want an identity from you. Seek zero audience, shun community, and if you must get pulled from the yard arm make sure it’s for something you believe in.
So why still write and publish? That’s simple: roleplaying is occulted literature. Once people had the ability to be taken away by poets, meeting with thew Gods, climbing the tree etc. but it’s no longer possible. Even if we still had the capacity poetry has moved on without us. Roleplaying has the energy to step in to that gap and initiate us in a new aural tradition of gnosis.
Epic poems were aural. Ancient poets would improvise between rest points and the stories would develop over time. Roleplaying is the closest we can get to this today, nothing else can penetrate our modern western crust of fundamentalist exotericism. The books we write are the rest points, the agreed upon meeting times, whereas the games we play are the poets improvisation for listeners ready to be transformed.
This being true it is clear roleplaying is the only path to a living tradition. This is why we must be so thoroughly ourselves. By stepping towards the audience unnaturally you skew the results, we must meet without arrogance.