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Crackbone posted:Let me put this another way - despite whatever they say, KS functions like a store. They built the site to allow creators to create what is essentially a store interface (pay X, get Y, different options available). They built the pledge system to allow people to pick rewards just like you would buy a product (I paid X, I want tier Y). They built what functions as an inventory system (we only have 100 available slots to pledge at this level). They have language on their site that basically tells the pledger they have a purchase contract (if you paid X and were promised Y, the creator must deliver Y). Why? I'm not sure why it's such a big deal that some projects work as a preorder, some work as patronage of things you're never going to benefit from, and some are for things that wouldn't happen without KS. What's behind the urge to make Kickstarter fit into one discrete category, even if it means slicing off useful bits of the service?
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Apr 19, 2013 17:30
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moths posted:I'm not as worried about UpFront! as you guys, but I'm also not in it for as much. There have been some setbacks, but there have also been a lot of updates and significant progress - I just hope Texas doesn't gently caress this. With respect, I think we're in a very different position to the 80s in terms of cultural awareness of geeky pastimes. People are far more likely to play, or know people who play, games and board games and rpgs, and the Satanic panic of the 80s wasn't just spurred by a monster manual but had its roots in the evangelical church's artificial fear of satanism, something we don't have a comparable analogue for today. Not to say this kickstarter isn't awful, but I'd say they're worth deriding because we don't want the hobby to be a lovely place, not because we're scared of what the media will say about us.
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Aug 6, 2013 12:35
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Jimbozig posted:Thanks, Mikan, for sharing your experience. I've got a small project I was thinking of releasing PWYW. Now I think I'll either charge normally or put it out totally free depending on how much work I put in. I'm only a few hours in so far. I've got a project I'm planning on putting up on DTRPG pretty soon, and was planning on trying out PWYW with it. Now I'm probably going to just put it up there for 4 or 5 dollars and also circulate a free pdf, so that people browsing on DTRPG see the one that costs money, I don't get spammed by the people who got it for free, and people who got it for free have an easy route to take to pay for it if they want to.
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Sep 17, 2013 08:09
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Jon Joe posted:From what I've read with video games (specifically articles about the humble bundle), the pay what you want model is less of a way to release a product and more of a way to promote it after it's died down. When you initially release a product, charge what it's worth. Then, after your initial sales, put it on sale for a lower amount to promote more sales. Finally, after going through the normal price/sale cycle for a bit, set it to PWYW to squeeze the last bit of money out of it. This maximizes your profit, exposure, and perceived quality of your product. Even in videogames though it helps if you have some sort of mechanic providing an incentive to pay more, even if that's just showing the average paid and giving a bonus for paying over it.
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Sep 17, 2013 16:18
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If I wanted to get a copy of Paranoia for the local RPG society library, which edition would I be best off buying? It looks like they recently brought out new books but split them into Troubleshooters and High Programmers, and then you have anniversary editions and old editions too. I'm just looking for a book new roleplayers can pick up to learn how to play Paranoia.
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Nov 24, 2013 16:07
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Misandu posted:Not that I've seen. From everything I've read it seems like it boils down to the margins not being enough to actually afford the sort of professional work that it would take, which is why I think if you want to make money in this hobby you've got to largely abandon the "book that has everything you need" model in favor of something more friendly to beginners. There's no doubt in my mind that we won't see another big success story until someone puts out a moderately priced starter set that includes a short introductory campaign and some characters and then directs you to an app that lets you buy the content you're actually going to use. I'm talking something like the old offline Character Builder where you can play premade characters or make your own low level guy, except then for a $1 you can buy access to new content. Don't AW-derived games fulfill this, at least those whose playbooks are free to download? You can essentially grab everything you need to play for free, then buy the book to get advice on setting up and running a game, explanations of how moves work and ideas for creating your own content.
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Jun 25, 2015 16:13
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Speaking for one sample, my university RPG society has been running since 1977 with a steadily growing membership. Looking back at the records, approximately twice as many new students are joining each year now than 10 years ago, and even more than that for 20 years ago. Maybe we've got better at marketing, but I think the general penetration of geek ideas and the social acceptability of neediness may have made people more likely to jump in and give it a shot. An additional factor might be that we focus on larp rather than tabletops (something like Megagames if you've seen them but spread over 8-16 sessions), providing something you really can't get elsewhere.
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Jun 26, 2015 08:27
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Halloween Jack posted:Even as someone who has played extensively, I wouldn't want to try to pick up AW using just the playbooks and basic reference sheets. Oh certainly, I meant a heavily emphasis on need as in bare minimum. Maybe something like Lady Blackbird is a better example?
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Jun 26, 2015 17:45
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ExiledTinkerer posted:Agreed that taking a GOG-like stance is probably the wisest move, especially drawing the parallels in trading with nostalgia to an equal or greater degree than current works. The effort spent on DRM nonsense or contracting out for such has to have better outlets. Essentially, there's next to no benefit in protecting yourself from piracy in the current market if you're an indie publisher. Most of your money is going to come from people wanting to show you goodwill or because they liked your pitch, and the risk of alienating those people is much worse than the risk of somebody getting your work for free. Even when people get something for free, if they like it it'll increase the chance they'll buy something of yours in the future.
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Oct 28, 2015 15:33
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I can heartily recommend Claudia Cangini - she did the playbooks for Legacy (examples here) and was punctual, responsive to feedback and more than willing to include diverse characters in the art.
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Oct 31, 2015 11:56
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I can see a lot of teething problems in the DMG's future. In particular, one which just occurred to me - there doesn't seem to be anything stopping you grabbing someone else's product and putting it straight back up at a lower price. Now I can see that being stamped down on, but what if you use a bunch of fan-generated subclasses in an big DMG supplement and provide a better deal to buy them that way? Surely there'll end up being some kind of race to 0, given that this makes everything uploaded there one step removed from being pay what you want?
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Jan 14, 2016 16:54
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rkajdi posted:Couldn't the same thing have been done with OGL 1? If you can rope off your own stuff like you could previously, it's not a big deal. All the halfway respectable places don't put anything back into the pot that's useful to anyone else, so only the rubes get screwed by this. It sucks, but it might help make sure that a real glut doesn't happen and the amateurs stay on the sidelines. The OGL won't allow this, essentially because you still own all the original content you publish under the OGL. With the DMG license, however, you give everyone else using the DMG license permission to use everything in the product for their own products, and so there's no roping off possible. There's been some worries already about what this means for the fonts and art used in DMG products.
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Jan 14, 2016 18:36
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Kavak posted:Now what's this about Atari stopping 4E video games and a murder/suicide killing digital tabletop? Pretty simple: Atari had the D&D license for 4E's tenure but never made any games with it, and the designer of the 4E digital tabletop killed their partner/was killed by their partner (can't remember which way round) in a murder/suicide. As they were they only person working on the project it effectively killed it.
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Feb 21, 2016 10:30
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DigitalRaven posted:Unfinished ended up being in the hottest titles for like a week because I got BoingBoinged. It's still only copper because fewer than X people have paid cash money for it (not that I can blame them, it's 150 loving words). I have a rough idea of where copper and silver's threshold is in terms of paid sales, but I wasn't paying attention to B7 when it went electrum so I have a gap in the data set. I'm reasonably certain that Gold's around 600 paid sales, and Electrum's around 250, just going by when I noticed things crossing the threshold. I *think* free sales - from bundles and kickstarter fulfilment - don't count at all.
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Mar 24, 2016 09:44
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Aaod posted:That is something I don't understand, could someone in the industry comment on this? Why are the books so badly done when the price is so seemingly high? I can get books written by someone with a PHD and professionally edited with more work put into it due to the research requirements for cheaper which makes zero sense to me. For that matter why are ebooks so insanely pricey when compared to physical copies? Normal book is 15 and the pdf is 10-12? That is barely any savings. As someone with published books I might offer some answers on the latter. Essentially the only savings you should expect between physical and PDF is the literal cost of printing the thing - $3-5 is a pretty good estimate for that. The reason for this is that it doesn't take significantly more work on the publisher's end to sell a game as print+pdf rather than just pdf, so why should they get paid any less? The main costs of making an rpg are writing, art and layout, and they're all equally present in a pdf. As for payment, a big factor in putting together a kickstarter budget was working out respectable pay grades for writing, editing, layout and art. Ended up budgeting 5 cents/word for writing and editing, and I was very happy to pay that. Without kickstarter however I'd be running on fumes and having to pay people very low rates or royalties, so I'd probably have tried to do it myself.
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Apr 23, 2016 08:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:What do you mean by "diegetic design"? I know what that means in regards to video games, but I'm not sure RPGs have a direct equivalent to that. IIRC it's that the abilities and powers of the characters are known by the characters - think Disciplines in Vampire.
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May 14, 2016 13:01
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, sadly, that doesn't help with the core books, you know? Depending in the precise supplement it might - each event book had a version made that also included the core rules so people can just pick it up and play. You'd be missing the standard marvel hero data files in favour of more civil war-specific ones but the whole system should be there.
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May 31, 2016 23:44
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clockworkjoe posted:In a more general industry question, is there a good place to point people who want to break into writing for the industry? The rpg.net freelancer forum seems to be filled with artists looking for work. I want to point out a few sites to some friends who are interested in it. I'd say that there isn't really much in the way of an industry to break into - or at least, not one with gatekeepers. If your friend wants to get involved in freelancing for one of the big companies/settings I don't have much advice except that Evil Hat seem really great to freelance for and regularly get new talent in. On the other hand, if you want to make your own RPG products I've found some success going down the indie/self-publishing route - writing things that interest me, running them for my friends and then if they pass muster putting a bit of polish on them and selling them. It's not second-job levels of income, but I'm making ~£150/month of sales even without launching any new products, and have been able to secure money through crowdfunding for art and layout when needed. If they want to go down that route, the biggest advice I have is to follow some of the creators who are doing interesting things in the field. Even outside discussion spaces like this forum, G+, story-games.com etc there are some blogs I get a lot out of:
Hope that helps!
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Aug 24, 2016 12:17
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clockworkjoe posted:What do you publish Flavivirus? So I publish as UFO Press - website here. My first published game was Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, an Apocalypse World hack whose big feature was that each player controls a family of post-apocalyptic survivors as well as a character from that family, with a big focus on how that family grows and adapts to the new world they find themselves in over years, decades and centuries. I kickstarted it a couple of years back after coming 2nd place in a PbtA design competition here, and got enough funding to make a full-colour book with plenty of art and layout by the guy who did Chuubo's Wish-Granting Engine and the Italian edition of Dungeon World. Since then I've released a supplement of various extra bits that were stretch goals for the kickstarter, and I'm currently working on a second supplement alongside a fan who contacted me out of the blue with a book outline that looked really interesting! In terms of finances, I paid £1800 for art, £800 for editing (standard per-word rate), £320 for layout. Once kickstarter fees had been deducted that left me with £800 for myself, equivalent to about a .05 cents per word writing rate - always important to make sure you get paid too! One nice thing is that as I was left with the InDesign files to play with, I could drag and drop the text for the next book into the same layout and make whatever small tweaks were needed for it to work meaning that that book only cost about £200 in art to make. I'd really recommend Shutterstock, by the way - they have incredibly cheap and good-looking stock illustrations, and group things by artist allowing you to find the pictures to create a consistent style for very little money. I've also released Ultranormal Encounters (written with two other authors as part of the Threeforged Challenge), a gm-less story game of alien abduction and FBI interrogation. It's essentially the game version of the X Files episode Jose Chung's From Outer Space - lots of contradictory narratives coming together to create a story of what actually happened somewhere between them all. I'm also currently kickstarting What Ho, World! - my Jeeves and Wooster-flavoured attempt to merge the storytelling power of PbtA games with the easy pick-up-and-play and beginner-friendlyness of card games, with game mechanics that remove the need for a GM to control character spotlight, plot pacing, subplot development etc. At least, that's the theory! It's my first venture into making a project that I'll actually have printed and shipped rather than relying on DriveThru to handle that, but I've been working with a fulfilment company to hopefully deal with any snags and wrinkles there.
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Aug 24, 2016 22:17
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potatocubed posted:Reading Burning Wheel back in the early 2000s opened my eyes to a lot of story-game design stuff that I'd never really thought about before and I was much impressed. I still think beliefs and instincts are great tech. Playing it was kind of an exercise in frustration. It's a game which rewards system mastery -- just like the D&D it pulls away from so strongly -- and as such it's entirely possible to 'build to concept' and end up with a woefully ineffective character even in their supposed area of expertise. Yeah, the biggest surprise for me from our game (aside from the high chance of failing to draw a stick figure) was how a wizard's high Will just trivially made them better at social things than other characters, spellcasting gave them more opportunities to advance it, and then they also had magic things to do. I had ideas sketched out for splitting the two mental attributes into four to match physical and resolve that problem, but it's likely more effort than it's worth.
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Aug 31, 2016 19:01
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clockworkjoe posted:I was just going to post that. Sucks even more for non-US gamers who want physical products. I wonder if international shipping rates are just as bad outside of the US - is it super expensive to ship things from Europe to Asia or Australia? In my (limited) experience we're better off - it's about 2/3rds of the price to ship outside the EU/US from the UK as it is from the US. Royal Mail is pretty hosed by our government, but less so I gather than USPS.
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Sep 2, 2016 21:24
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Covok posted:I imagine shipping within Europe is easy as its all overland travel and relatively close. The problem must really come when its to Asia or Africa or somewhere equally far off. Or so I presume. What I mean is that UK->Australia, for example, was uniformly cheaper than US->Australia on the services I checked. Same for Brazil, South Africa, Korea, and then I stopped checking. E: essentially, for my product (a small-box card game, essentially size of 2 poker decks) it cost $19 to have UK royal mail ship it anywhere in the world, and $37 for USPS to do the same. It may be true that cheaper alternatives exist, but the difference was significant enough that it made it worth my while to switch to having cards printed in the UK instead of China despite costing quite a bit more per deck. Flavivirus fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 3, 2016 |
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Sep 3, 2016 09:13
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Let's use the effortpost I made up in the WW thread: Zak is a piece of poo poo for sure, but Neo-Nazi is a new one for me. Personally I'd keep it to things I know he's definitely done - the harassment and sockpuppeting - to increase the difficulty of them dismissing it out of hand, but certainly this is a good compilation of sources that show paradox has hosed up here. Oh also FYI I checked Amazon today and Ed Kramer's name isn't on the dark destiny cover anymore. Funnily enough Tobias Ericsson decided to place his name where Kramer's was: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Destiny-Karim-Muammar-ebook/dp/B01G7GP96U Has anyone checked to see if the book still contains Kramer's stuff? e: Just checked myself, the foreword is still written by him ~_~ Flavivirus fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 21:49
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Oh gently caress, here's said foreword written by a child molester: Far too much focus on ~childhood innocence~ to be anything but stomach-churning 
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Feb 17, 2017 21:55
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Serf posted:Maybe we should ask Mikan whether or not Zak S' harassment campaigns are real. Wait, you can't because Zak S drove Mikan into hiding. Man I miss Mikan. Thankfully we can also ask his targets - Anna Krieder, for example, or Tracey Hurley, or Filamena Young - if the harassment campaigns they experienced were real. And wouldn't you know, they've blogged extensively about them. But actually talking to them was far too much effort for nuWW apparently.
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Feb 18, 2017 15:27
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https://twitter.com/gshowitt/status/853613567739867136 (In reference to the newly released edition of Paranoia)
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Apr 16, 2017 15:47
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Agronox posted:This hobby has the biggest cheapskates known to man. I feel like if one of the three headline writers of a product is calling it out as overpriced you done goofed? Not to mention that $50 for a pdf is more expensive than a lot of academic textbooks.
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Apr 16, 2017 16:06
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I mean, here's a second author chiming in: https://twitter.com/JamesWallis/status/853626969942106112 (should be mentioned this is the 'Director's Commentary' annotated pdf, a $20 markup on the base game)
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Apr 16, 2017 16:17
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Rand Brittain posted:That's not really a great measure of anything, honestly. Especially as they were selling a box set of books, handouts and dice for £30+EDIT:NO Shipping. It's basically certain that all ended up as a loss. Really with any product you should work out how much you'd have to charge yo make it profitable, and if that will price it out if your market. There's a sweet spot at around $10-$20 I think: if your business model means a pdf sold at that price won't work, you should probably reassess your plans. Flavivirus fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 17:05
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Nuns with Guns posted:That doesn't really tell you much about pricing in the industry as a whole, though, which is what your point to start with. Paranoia's got enough of a built in fanbase that I can't see the numbers falling that dramatically if shipping had been charged to backers as part of fulfillment. Yeah - drawing a line from 'this kickstarter was priced very badly' to 'nobody makes any money in this industry' is a bit of a stretch.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:
I think what gets me is the inconsistency - if the second paragraph wasn't there it'd be a lot less weird. Like, do they want to deal with/joke about discrimination on grounds of gender, sex and sexuality or not?
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Apr 19, 2017 18:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:What gets me about this is that up until this edition, sexuality has been handled with "everyone is on a fuckton of hormone suppressants; gender is more or less meaningless because <see above>" and calling it a day. Yeah, from what I'd heard this edition goes far away from being able to play a serious, dystopic game in Alpha Complex. Maybe they thought that making straight people the oppressed group makes it comedic instead of oppressive?  (Also with they explanation they give it should be *procreative* sex that's banned, not heterosexual sex. Conflating the two is its own can of worms, and again has little place in Paranoia)
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Apr 19, 2017 18:39
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Somewhat relevant to current discussion, I was wondering if people would like to give feedback on the page for my next Kickstarter? It's the second edition of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, a game birthed from this own forum's PbtA design competition way back in the mists of time... I'm planning on pressing the launch button around the 20th, so there's plenty of time to fix things if something looks off.
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Jul 12, 2017 07:19
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ravenkult posted:Well, blaming a delayed game on 9/11 is definitely original. Man that's some delay.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The traditional RPG model seems like a really weird choice for football, or any team sport. I made a one-shot RPG about a team going to the space olympics, though that's at least as much about trying to understand weird alien sports and doing backroom diplomacy as it is about the sports themselves. e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TICjEsvC8o
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Jul 13, 2017 08:23
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occamsnailfile posted:The worst thing about the really toxic trolls is not just their attitudes (though those are awful) but their infinite time and energy to make bad faith arguments--they don't eat, don't sleep, will not just let something die because their identity is built around their insecurity and the need to silence opposition. And once they've exhausted everyone into giving up, they declare victory and a thread is destroyed. Banning these people actually allows more genuine, free speech because their personal chilling effect is highly detrimental--all of us have seen it happen somewhere. There's even been some work studying the direct attrition of user bases in heavily unmoderated spaces. Minority voices tend to drop out quickly, as fighting that fight during one's leisure time as well as the rest of the time is pretty exhausting. Yeah, having no official mods just means the most obnoxious people get to decide who gets to talk.
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Jul 17, 2017 20:37
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AlphaDog posted:Apparently I wasn't clear. What I meant was that I was going to say that when I started reading the twitter thread, but the rest of it showed me that my initial impression of Mentzers intent was wrong and he is, in fact, a loving creep.
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Oct 19, 2017 10:32
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah I don't need that explained, I totally get it. Fair enough, no worries.
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Oct 19, 2017 11:43
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Nuns with Guns posted:I just don't like giving Beasts an in-game reason to be lovely to physically-disabled children. And yes I've thought this since before the new information about Matthew McFarland came out. It's a Hunter supplement, right? So the intended use is for players to be the physically-disabled children. And yes, a storyteller could include them in their Beast campaign, but that's a choice they've made on top of the existing awful choice to run Beast, so I don't think the hunter supplement is to blame.
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Oct 26, 2017 15:58
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moths posted:A more fair model would be to pay the author a percentage of gross. So word count becomes irrelevant if what's being said is good. I mean, for my most recent kickstarter I offered my stretch goal authors either a share of the profits of their book and an advance, or a flat fee that came out at ~$0.07/word. 3 authors took shared ownership, 2 took the flat fee, so I think it was a good deal either way. But I guess a lot of creators aren't budgeting for a fair wage for their writers in this sucky industry.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:41
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