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Mors Rattus posted:Empyrea's dead, apparently. I like how neither he or anyone in the comments brings up the whole Jessica Price thing. Funny, that.
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Oct 19, 2017 00:27
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Mors Rattus posted:Empyrea's dead, apparently. This update is somehow both confusing and infuriating. I am confuriated. Every single paragraph he wrote, even the one that's only one sentence long, is stupid.
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Oct 19, 2017 01:34
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I don't get how he ever thought this was a good idea as of the campaign launch. The product had no real hook, the amount asked was way too much for the market and the product, and his name just isn't a big draw. A little research would have exposed these flaws
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Oct 19, 2017 01:46
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My "favorite" part:Frank's taking his ball and going home posted:In saying “I only back finished products” some are telling creators to sell out… to create corporations with investors, or go borrow large sums personally, and pre-fund everything before it goes public. The product doesn’t need your ideas or participation (just your money), will sell online via Kickstarter or otherwise, and those on top can keep all the profit for themselves and just use the community for advertising. "Screw you, people who only want to spend money on a product that exists instead of a great idea for a game I might write someday! And screw you, people who don't ask for money until they have something substantive to show potential buyers! How dare you not want everyone in the hobby to be able to pay 20 bucks to make you write their sweet-rear end OC with a pet owl named 'Trigger Warning' into your game?!"
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Oct 19, 2017 02:15
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Mors Rattus posted:Empyrea's dead, apparently. So, how many hit points of butthurt do you think he took from all of this?
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Oct 19, 2017 02:22
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Any feedback on Too Many Bones? The reviews seem to good to be true and $215 seems really steep for a dice game.
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Oct 19, 2017 02:27
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This is a Kickstarter game with a really neat X-Wing style movement system. It's ultra-small so you can get some of that maneuvering fix in a pocket-portable game. The $29 pledge also includes an attractive 3'x3' mat (suitable for X-Wing, if anyone plays that - it's water-themed, but could be cool if you want your ships skimming across a body of water like Episode 7). Alternatively, a cheap $9 gets you the full game minus the mat. Leviathan: 2-player nautical combat "micro" card game inspired by Moby Dick It's ending soon and still short of being fulfilled, so thought I'd share it around a few different places!
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Oct 19, 2017 04:06
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Antivehicular posted:My "favorite" part:
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Oct 19, 2017 04:41
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dwarf74 posted:Yah, that was baffling. He doesn't seem to realize there's a middle ground between "I have written nothing" and "I have a completely proofread, playtested, and layout-complete game ready for publishing, and I need money to print." Like, I get that that's not always realistic. But the best kickstarters will show you something. It's not even like this is limited to kickstarter. You always try to have proof of concept first.
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Oct 19, 2017 04:43
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dwarf74 posted:Yah, that was baffling. He doesn't seem to realize there's a middle ground between "I have written nothing" and "I have a completely proofread, playtested, and layout-complete game ready for publishing, and I need money to print." Like, I get that that's not always realistic. But the best kickstarters will show you something. Likewise, when he describes Kickstarters as "circumventing the hobby" (because he's weirdly equating game stores with "the hobby"), he's ignoring (or more likely has no idea) how lots of us Kickstarter project creators found ways to work with retailers.
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Oct 19, 2017 04:57
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dwarf74 posted:Yah, that was baffling. He doesn't seem to realize there's a middle ground between "I have written nothing" and "I have a completely proofread, playtested, and layout-complete game ready for publishing, and I need money to print." Like, I get that that's not always realistic. But the best kickstarters will show you something. ProfessorCirno posted:It's not even like this is limited to kickstarter. You always try to have proof of concept first. If Frank Mentzer had dived into Kickstarter back when it was still the shiny new land of wonder and endless possibilities that it used to be perceived as he could absolutely have milked a quarter million grogbucks out of people based purely on the strength of his name alone, but tradgame crowdfunding hasn't been that way for a while and these days not having even a draft or print-and-play to show people is a huge red flag out of the gate.
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Oct 19, 2017 05:52
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Ah, what better way to deny your failure than to conclude the whole system is broken and the only successes are either cons or crooks?
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Oct 19, 2017 06:11
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I'm always really careful with RPG kickstarters because there isn't an equivalent of the "No Rules, No Pledge" rule, since the rules for an RPG are the entirety of the product.
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Oct 19, 2017 06:25
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Ewen Cluney posted:Likewise, when he describes Kickstarters as "circumventing the hobby" (because he's weirdly equating game stores with "the hobby"), he's ignoring (or more likely has no idea) how lots of us Kickstarter project creators found ways to work with retailers. Like half of the kickstarters I've backed have a retail level where for a discounted rate retailers are able to get a pack of books
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Oct 19, 2017 06:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ah, what better way to deny your failure than to conclude the whole system is broken and the only successes are either cons or crooks? The "It's never me, it's you" breakup.
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Oct 19, 2017 06:32
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Tekopo posted:I'm always really careful with RPG kickstarters because there isn't an equivalent of the "No Rules, No Pledge" rule, since the rules for an RPG are the entirety of the product. I don't know about that, there are a number of RPG Kickstarters that have posted enough of the rules, even if they're still in progress, to constitute proof of concept and even allow people to play the game should they wish. Blades in the Dark held open playtests using an evolving draft of the game right from the start, Demon: the Descent posted a complete draft of the entire game (albeit unpolished and without art), etc. It's not an impossibility for someone who wants to make a successful RPG Kickstarter to make sure they have enough produced beforehand that they can show people what they're pledging for, but of course that does take more work than whining about how crowdfunding is undermining the hobby in between insulting peoples' ability scores and threatening to blackball women who block you on Facebook.
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Oct 19, 2017 06:33
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Yeah, like Kai Tave said, there are a good number of RPG kickstarters that at least offer beta versions of the rules for backer perusal. Certainly the rules are a bigger part of the value of RPG kickstarters than board game ones, but usually the goal of funding there is to afford art, layout, printing, and other costs associated with producing a professional final product, as well as allowing for more playtesting and the production of additional content for the game. I don't insist on downloadable beta rules for backing RPGs, but I prefer to see that most of the writing of the core game is done; I imagine a lot of other potential KS backers feel the same. At this point, I feel like launching an RPG Kickstarter without at least a mechanical shell available to backers requires a lot of things Empyrea didn't have: most notably, name recognition in the hobby and reputations for getting products written and out the door. Invisible Sun didn't have much more than "D6 resolution system" and "it's another adjective-noun-who-verbs game, guys!" to show for its mechanics during the KS, and I'm pretty sure the game wasn't more than outlined during that period, but Monte Cook and MCG have a reliable industry track record for delivering on their deadlines with stuff with good production values (as far as I know), and obviously the name recognition also moved a lot of
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Oct 19, 2017 07:33
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quote:I love variety. You’ll find me playing and trying all sorts of games at most of the conventions I attend. I try to support and talk about the great variety that’s been around for 17 years (broad perspective, sorry) due to the OGL Open Game License of 2000, which produced Osric and Pathfinder and then ideas from a thousand other talents with a mutual love for tabletop gaming. Frank loves the variety of dozens of versions of the same rules.
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Oct 19, 2017 08:27
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Tekopo posted:I'm always really careful with RPG kickstarters because there isn't an equivalent of the "No Rules, No Pledge" rule, since the rules for an RPG are the entirety of the product. There definitely is. Plenty of RPG KSes will share a draft of the rules with $1 backers, and plenty of people don't back unless the draft is available.
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Oct 19, 2017 09:23
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Lemon-Lime posted:There definitely is. Plenty of RPG KSes will share a draft of the rules with $1 backers, and plenty of people don't back unless the draft is available. After the last couple of years I've found myself in that camp. I think it's only fair to expect at least a rough draft of a game if you've gotten to the "ask for money" stage. I'm not expecting people to quit their real jobs to work on elfgames, but if you're going to be working on a game in your spare time around your real obligations I think you should do it before you ask strangers to pitch in their 
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Oct 19, 2017 14:34
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Lemon-Lime posted:There definitely is. Plenty of RPG KSes will share a draft of the rules with $1 backers, and plenty of people don't back unless the draft is available. I don't remember who said that Eypiwhatever felt like Mentzer emerged from 30 years of cryosleep and tried to dive into the modern hobby head-first, but that's really what happened. He's convinced that his name has any sort of weight outside of the hardcore OSR circles, his whole pitch was basically "so hey, I helped create D&D", and he just assumed everyone would flock to him because of it. e: forgot to finish my thought: Now he's getting pushback because he acted in a creepy/assholeish way and tried to defend it with what amounts to "back in my day" and he doesn't get why that doesn't fly anymore. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Oct 19, 2017 |
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Oct 19, 2017 16:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, there have been so many high profile failures in RPG Kickstarters that "we have at least a draft of the rules" is a bare minimum for most people to pledge. At least barring a name that has a rep for delivery, like Onyx Path or...um...I dunno, maybe Evil Hat.
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Oct 19, 2017 16:20
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To be fair, I also expect MCG to deliver product that they've promised. It'll be bad product, but they won't stiff you.
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Oct 19, 2017 16:25
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Mors Rattus posted:At least barring a name that has a rep for delivery, like Onyx Path or...um...I dunno, maybe Evil Hat. Pinnacle, who the one time they were late on delivery it was because their warehouse was completely unmanned due to a literal epidemic, not due to not having the books. (And they still delivered the PDFs on time or a little early)
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Oct 19, 2017 16:38
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Admittedly my knowledge of tabletop names and movers and shakers kinda pales to other folks I know but as someone who has seriously never heard the name Frank Mentzer in his life before the last few weeks, I agree with EM. His name and supposed accomplishments mean nothing to me, Johnny Ignorant, and as someone whose history of GMing involved a brief fling with "I can run this in d20" before learning about other games, the last thing I will ever want is a generic unisystem designed by a d20 pioneer. And I'm not claiming to be, like, The Authority on the average reaction to this whole affair. I'm just speaking from the perspective of someone who has no knowledge of this guy and would never have heard of the project outside of y'all and outside of his inability to not be salty and of Price's accusations (who I am inclined to believe, judging by all of the dumb poo poo I've seen him say in two weeks alone). Like I do kinda get one thing about this whole thing. I googled him and saw his Wikipedia page. He left TSR after Gygax was kicked out and his solo ventures failed in the late 80s so he left the industry proper outside of little things like consulting in the 90s. He opens a bakery in 2000 and they're all shut down in 2008 because running three bakeries is time consuming (or maybe because of the Recession, who the gently caress knows). And then 2010 he's like "I'm back!" followed by this....seven years later. This was never going to go well. This was never going to succeed. There was no clamor for this dude to make a comeback and while I do understand love of the game and love of the industry and all that jazz, there's a fine line between passion and ego and the ball was firmly in ego's court. And I get that. I understand that. But I don't think this could've gone any other way.
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Oct 19, 2017 16:43
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Hostile V posted:Admittedly my knowledge of tabletop names and movers and shakers kinda pales to other folks I know but as someone who has seriously never heard the name Frank Mentzer in his life before the last few weeks, I agree with EM. His name and supposed accomplishments mean nothing to me, Johnny Ignorant, and as someone whose history of GMing involved a brief fling with "I can run this in d20" before learning about other games, the last thing I will ever want is a generic unisystem designed by a d20 pioneer. But even so, nowadays you can't get by too much on your name when a non-insubstantial chunk of the hobby weren't even born when you were relevant. So saying "hey everyone I'm back!" is meaningless because so many people never heard of you in the first place, or have moved on to other stuff. Then you stack onto that the fact that there was no information on the setting itself beyond "worked on for 40 years" and "did I mention I'm Frank Mentzer?", and the whole thing was doomed from jump street. I mean come on, out of the 10 systems he was going to design this thing for, 7 of them were direct variations of D&D. Hell, four of them were D&D!
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Oct 19, 2017 17:02
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ah, what better way to deny your failure than to conclude the whole system is broken and the only successes are either cons or crooks? He raised in excess of 60 grand. That would have been a massive success for any trad RPG kickstarter, if not for the absolutely ridiculous goal he set for the project. I'm honestly not sure if it was greed or if he just had stars in his eyes.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:33
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Falstaff posted:He raised in excess of 60 grand. That would have been a massive success for any trad RPG kickstarter, if not for the absolutely ridiculous goal he set for the project. Knowing the way Kickstarter works, had he set $50k, it would have likely ended up somewhere past the $60k he raised from the 'it funded' momentum.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:36
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Exactly. I find it surprising Mentzer wouldn't have at least consulted with someone familiar with Kickstarter for help or advice in setting up the campaign. Even if just informally. Hell, even just a couple hours spent browsing through past TTRPG Kickstarter campaigns would have allowed someone to glean that starting with that kind of a goal was probably a bad idea.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:40
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Falstaff posted:Exactly. I find it surprising Mentzer wouldn't have at least consulted with someone familiar with Kickstarter for help or advice in setting up the campaign. Even if just informally. Judging by the PMs he is obviously a deranged narcissist. Consult? Why? He knows best. He's Frank loving Mentzer. You 9-int, 1-wis clod.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:44
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Frankly I'm glad his kickstarter failed and I hope all of his future endeavours fail too.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:46
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MollyMetroid posted:Frankly I'm glad his kickstarter failed and I hope all of his future endeavours fail too. The way to say this, as I understand it, is 'We wish him well in his future endeavours.' Vince McMahon taught me that.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:49
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Some dude who was part of Empyrea made a blog post about how he had loved Frank, but he wouldn't be around for a relaunch or any further endeavor because of the sexual harassment. So good for him! But a background thing for the post was that, while an author, he had no RPG writing experience, and the whole reason he was on the project was because he was friends with Frank. I feel like this is emblematic of how this Kickstarter was run, even when it comes to the Actual Big Names that were attached in some capacity. While it might be possible for some people to just get some friends and go "hey let's make a book", that's a pretty weak pitch for getting investors or whatever the gently caress crowdfunding dollar-havers count as. And he still got $60k!
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Oct 19, 2017 18:46
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MollyMetroid posted:Frankly I'm glad his kickstarter failed and I hope all of his future endeavours fail too. as much as I love his old stuff yea if he is this lovely abusive guy I'm kinda glad he's burning his bridges and going down as a bitter old rear end in a top hat, can't say he doesn't deserve it. This is a big ol bummer of a story.
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Oct 19, 2017 18:57
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Falstaff posted:Hell, even just a couple hours spent browsing through past TTRPG Kickstarter campaigns would have allowed someone to glean that starting with that kind of a goal was probably a bad idea. fake edit: A Far West update is coming before the end of the year! For real this time! No, really!"
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Oct 19, 2017 18:57
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Falstaff posted:He raised in excess of 60 grand. That would have been a massive success for any trad RPG kickstarter, if not for the absolutely ridiculous goal he set for the project. I get the impression his notion was to pay like six to eight writers 30k or the like a year, which makes some sense, but that's a team larger than most RPG companies these days, and well beyond the scope of most RPG kickstarters.
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Oct 19, 2017 18:58
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screech on the beach posted:Any feedback on Too Many Bones? The reviews seem to good to be true and $215 seems really steep for a dice game. It's an exceptionally well produced game, with components that are "best in class". The game itself is a fun adventure/tactical combat dice game. You can build your characters however you want. I found the game worth it, in the first campaign. I am considering backing for the expansion, though it really hasn't hit the table as much as I expected.
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Oct 19, 2017 19:06
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Evil Mastermind posted:I went and looked because I figure it was a FC0B situation, but he's actually backed a bunch of stuff, including Jamie Chamber's Metamorphosis Alpha, which had a a whole loving cavalcade of problems. So no excuse there. a pyschic predator
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Oct 19, 2017 19:10
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Arivia posted:a pyschic predator What, you expect proofreaders for all his vaporware?
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Oct 19, 2017 20:34
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screech on the beach posted:Any feedback on Too Many Bones? The reviews seem to good to be true and $215 seems really steep for a dice game. It's wonderful. I've played two session so far. Pluses: The combat system is a lot of fun. The game liberally gives out skillpoints at a pace that feels really good, and has kind of ruined other co-op single session experiences for me. Each character feels really different from the other characters. The characters themselves feel like you can really build them in a lot of different directions. The components feel great, and the use of mousepads with holes cut in them as the player mats really keeps everything from sliding around when people knock the table. Having health represented as a pile of poker chips under each character feels really good and provides a great visual of how much health everyone has left. While the rules are in a lot of ways needlessly complicated, when there is ambiguity, the game actively encourages you to resolve things in the way your party wants to, which results in a lot of fun discussions and makes it feel like you are doing something clever to give yourself an edge, which works well with how the game's difficulty scales up. The use of 'misses' as a sort of super meter on your character you can cash out for different benefits made it feel like there weren't that many bad rolls, and instead rolls that resulted in a change of strategy when something unexpected happens. Most events give you what feels like a meaningful choice in how to approach them, sometimes it was as simple as "harder with more rewards versus easier with less rewards", but others had you choose between two tough drawbacks for the fight, or two interesting benefits for the fight. Between events you have an opportunity to look at the top of the piles of upcoming monsters and can choose to send that monster to the bottom of the pile, this was another fun point of decision making and collaboration, looking at the monsters abilities, and comparing them to our own. Minuses: The rules are complicated and not super well written, we made a lot of mistakes our first game. This reference sheet helped us understand a lot of edge cases and we made less mistakes our second game. The game comes with only 4 characters in the box and we instantly wanted more, which they sell as extra. One of the 4 characters in the box, the grenade focused one, felt like it should have been an expansion character and not base game, as it was kind of awkward to play. Our first game also took way too long, we had accidentally picked a longer campaign, that plus us moving slow in our first game resulted in like a 4 or 5 hour session that we didn't finish. The game could be streamlined a lot, there is an entire dart throwing mini game that takes up a page or so of rules that we never did. Lock picking also had a lot of weird rules that ate a lot of time, but at least it did show up in a lot of our games. The biggest takeaway I have from it is something I wish other games would do more frequently. It's OK to give players a constant stream of skill points to spend on improving their characters. So many other games we've played, like Massive Darkness, have felt really stingy with giving out player upgrades. You look at that character sheet, get excited about a lot of what you can do with your character, and then as you play you realize it would take 5 to 10 hours of game time before you start getting to the fun stuff. In Too Many Bones we were generally getting 2 skill points to spend after each combat, and we were getting the fun abilities quickly, which was awesome.
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