Role-Playing Game RPG Research - RPG Research Status Update June 21, 2025

RPG Research is still alive, though we've had some slow downs and set backs. We'll be ramping back up over the rest of 2025 into 2026 to get back on track.

Some highlights:

• The RPG Community Center is officially permanently closed. We finalized the move-out lengthy process last month. We are going back to the highly successful mobile model.
• Currently all of the community center furniture, books, equipment, etc. is in several storage areas for now.
• The RPG Museum is also currently closed until we have our new setup up and running (completely depends on donations as far as timeline for re-opening).
• Everything is squeezed into climate controlled storage, over a 1,000 square feet of densely packed storage is completely filled to the brim (unpacked we filled around 6,000 square feet of floor space, not counting the RPG Mobile Fleet).
• The Brain Computer Interface Role-Playing Game project is still steadily progressing each week.
• The Game Consent App is nearly ready for public release.
• RPG Research core staff members and volunteers are still meeting, at least once per week. We have regular meetings on Sunday, and other teams meet at other times regularly as well.
• We have our quarterly board meeting coming up this June 26th, 2025, where we will finalize plans for the second half of 2025 and sketch out plans for 2026.
• The 3.5 edition of the Role-Playing Game Professional training and certification program is getting underway, more updates on that as the book updates, online education platform updates, workshops, and training group sign-ups open up in the coming months.

What Happened to the RPG Community Center?

A long story, but basically property insurance requirements due to complete ignorance of the insurance industry (heavily impacted by the negative hype of the 1980s), created an unsustainable situation.

In order to open the RPG Community Center to the public we had to shut down 95% of our operations, and reduce our volunteer scale from 200+ to a dozen, and reduce our footprint from global to only Washington state. Since 90%+ of our donations come from outside of Washington state, these requirements over time were fatal to the center's survival.

You can read the details of all the insurance-related challenges here:

• https://rpgresearch.com/blog/blog-news-category/rpg-community-center-status-update-august-26th-with-some-more-insurance-and-logistics-updates

We are a research company, and we perform all kinds of experiments. The RPG Community Center was one of our many experiments. We gathered a significant amount of data from this experience, learned much, and will continue forward, building on this.

Our analysis shows that the mobile model could serve someone for as little as 25 cents (base) to $1 (extended), while the community center model required nearly $300-$600 per person served. The fixed facility model essentially made our operation 600-1,200 times less cost-efficient while simultaneously reducing our reach by 99%.

This is a textbook example of how operational overhead can completely destroy cost efficiency and organizational impact. Our mobile model was extraordinarily lean and scalable, while the community center model created unsustainable cost structures that made meaningful scale impossible.

We are planning to revert back to our highly successful mobile and online model.

Here is a comparison of key data points between the RPG Research Mobile Model from 2017 through 2022 (5 years), versus the RPG Community Center Model from 2022 through 2025 (3 years):

The data is very overwhelmingly clear. We have far more impact helping people with our mobile model, than ever possible with the community-center model.

The RPG Research Mobile Model is a combination of:

• Using the RPG Mobile Fleet (RPG Bus, RPG Trailer, etc.) (during the community center years, the insurance mostly banned us from this if we wanted to retain the property insurance)
• Partnering with other organizations to use their spaces (during the community center years, the insurance mostly banned us from this)
• Providing online programs (during the community center years, the insurance mostly banned us from this)

So, we are rebooting beginning the second half of 2025. We still have to recover financially from the huge overburden of the RPG Community Center. We have to rebuild our financial and staffing coffers.

The following order-of-operations must take place to get back on track:

• Address long-term storage (current monthly storage costs are going to triple after July 2025 from ~$200/mo to over $666+/month), we're scrambling to try to build some long-term permanent storage through private donation (~$50,000).
• Finish revising the 3.5 edition of our RPG Professionals & Volunteers Training Program:
• Books
• Online Learning Management System
• Certification Testing Bank
• Certification Tracking, etc.
• Train existing remaining core volunteers on the updated 3.5 RPG Pro system.
• Begin accepting new volunteers
• Begin workshops training new volunteers (we have a long learning curve)(generally training 4 hours once per week for 3-4 weeks before allowed to help with our programs, and ongoing weekly training as they progress through the volunteer training levels.
• Once sufficiently staffed up again, resume our online programs for the public.
• Once further staff up locally, resume our mobile programs to the public.