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spectralent posted:Almost every non-RPG kickstarter I'm aware of seems suspiciously cheap for it's initial funding, and has a massive chain of stretch goals; miniatures games usually moreso than board games, but I see it there, too. And I can rephrase as commonly known, but it seems to be how it works. Yeah, it's exploitative of the system to do so, but I wasn't making a value judgement, and consider the response to the Skullgirls KS, and indeed to other similar KSes that are "overpriced", to be proof that people want to be tricked in that way. I think if you asked them, people would say they don't want to be tricked and that to do so is exploitative, but I've also previously seen that people do, in fact, scream on forums and refuse to pledge if they feel overcharged. As for people upset about being overcharged, besides the fact that some people are just entitled assholes, a lot more people just don't understand the costs from the consumer side either. That compounds the first problem in a couple ways. Creators and consumers often don't realize how scale affects price point and that the $20 price point, for example, really could be a totally fair price for a large publisher's book because of their sales numbers but be far too little for a smaller run. And creators may feel they have to price their book at a certain number because "that's what people will pay for it," which honestly is much more received wisdom and self-fulfilling prophecy than reality - though from what I've seen this has a bigger effect on people either not bothering or "making do" than trying to finagle it the way you describe. At most I've seen folks budget stretch (and primary) goals as the amount to do it at the level they feel is the least version they'd be happy with, with the hopes that they'll get more so they can do an even better version. But that's still a fundamentally different approach - you're still trying to target an amount that pays for the core project needs, even if what you really want to produce is something more than that. I agree that lack of transparency is a major cause of all this. Creators are often too reticent to lay out budgets, and especially too reticent to budget in a cushion, and the lack of shared knowledge mean creators often have to learn this stuff individually, so the same mistakes keep happening.
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May 29, 2018 19:53
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spectralent posted:I don't think an awful lot of people consider effort spent on RPGs to be work done in an industry. I mean hell, look how many people put expansions or entire games online for free, and are happy they get comments back. The only time I put an RPG up I was ecstatic someone played it. I would love that those people get paid, but I can also see how if you do that you might not think "Oh, I should pay these people who've done other work for me". Does the fact that you can see how he screwed up excuse him, in your mind? I am inferring that you think he has a good excuse.
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May 29, 2018 20:13
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homullus posted:Does the fact that you can see how he screwed up excuse him, in your mind? I am inferring that you think he has a good excuse. In the sense that I think this was a consequence of ignorance and not malice, I suppose? I think people are taking this as a failing of his moral character rather than of his perspective, which is likely skewed from being in an industry that historically and in many places still does think it is, as I put it, a hobby that gives people beer money.
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May 29, 2018 20:19
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He also thought friends & family constituted substantial playtesting and then had to change a bunch of stuff post-KS when it got released into the wild. Totally on board with embarrassing ignorance rather than malice.
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May 29, 2018 20:21
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I agree that lack of transparency is a major cause of all this. Creators are often too reticent to lay out budgets, and especially too reticent to budget in a cushion, and the lack of shared knowledge mean creators often have to learn this stuff individually, so the same mistakes keep happening. It doesn't help that budget secrecy is just "business normal" for most enterprises--there are good and many bad reasons for doing that. And then of course those Kickstarter people who put something honest in their budget like 'minimal salary for working' get nailed to the wall for "cheating" backers by expecting to be paid for their labor. It's not just RPG Kickstarters, independent authors who mistakenly admit that some of the KS money would to towards paying rent have gotten huge pushback for...wanting to make a living.
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May 29, 2018 20:22
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It's kickstarter, the venue for complaining is what you get instead of the equity in the company that you'd get if you were actually investing in it and not just making a fancy donation/purchase. You can't start an rpg business without being prepared to ignore some complaints.
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May 29, 2018 20:24
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homullus posted:He also thought friends & family constituted substantial playtesting and then had to change a bunch of stuff post-KS when it got released into the wild. Totally on board with embarrassing ignorance rather than malice. Yeah, very much so; that's exactly what I expect from someone who's treating writing RPGs as a hobby. That said this does make me kind of amazed it's as tight as it is and doesn't have loads of random bullshit confusing the wording of the rules, given professionally published RPGs still struggle with wording... occamsnailfile posted:It doesn't help that budget secrecy is just "business normal" for most enterprises--there are good and many bad reasons for doing that. And then of course those Kickstarter people who put something honest in their budget like 'minimal salary for working' get nailed to the wall for "cheating" backers by expecting to be paid for their labor. It's not just RPG Kickstarters, independent authors who mistakenly admit that some of the KS money would to towards paying rent have gotten huge pushback for...wanting to make a living. Yeah; as I said, I think part of the issue with the hobby, in terms of it's structure as a potential industry, is that a lot of consumers don't see it as a professional enterprise either.
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May 29, 2018 20:28
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Also it's not like it'd have been super hard to like, exchange favor for favor with a contract backing it instead of their word. "This document declares I will write about the lost cavities of the enamel mountains for Phil's Germs and Gingivitis sourcebook and he'll write about the equivalent of carbon dating for organisms made out of silicon for my Uncorked Biochemistry supplement. If documents are not produced by <date> there then the non-delivering party will pay the delivering party X."
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May 29, 2018 21:13
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Another response from Harper courtesy of the Blades Discord, not a lot of new informationquote:Regarding the stretch goals, I've answered this in various places, but to be clear:
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May 29, 2018 21:32
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Wait, six are out? I thought most of them remained undelivered.
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May 29, 2018 21:36
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I'm thinking and here's what I've got: The Leech The Spider Scum and Villainy Blades Against Darkness (beta tho) Illustrated Maps (mostly) Vigilantes (but not Grifters, which I think was abandoned)
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May 29, 2018 21:46
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Inspired/reminded by all this, I finally got around to writing a breakdown of where all the money went on Pigsmoke. tl;dr: Art and taxes.
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May 29, 2018 23:01
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Mors Rattus posted:Wait, six are out? I thought most of them remained undelivered. Like Serf said, he's counting all of the stretch goals like adding the Leech and Spider to the core book, not just 16ish full rules/setting revision hacks.
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May 30, 2018 01:11
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sexpig by night posted:yea I feel bad because he really doesn't seem like he's trying to be a scumbag here, he just seems to not understand that despite the history behind it most people in 2018 (rightly) don't actually view it as a hobby and actually, ya know, see it as their job, for which they expect to be paid. But even then, there's still a basic philosophical problem with treating stretch goal writing like hobbyist writing. If these writers are hobbyists designing for the fun of it who don't need to get paid, why is their work a stretch goal? If they were keen to do the work and happy to write it for free in their spare time, wouldn't they have just written it anyway, regardless of how well the Kickstarter did? Imagine a situation where the stretch goal target for a particular add-on wasn't met, but the author was super-keen and did it anyway, for free - would Harper really have said "No, stop, you're not allowed to, we didn't get the funding!" Especially since the game's come out under an SRD and most of the stretch goal premises involve original settings, I'm not sure he'd even have the legal standing to stop them. The very fact Harper turned to Kickstarter to fund the writing of the book (rather than rocking up with a completed text he wrote on his own time and using Kickstarter solely to fund art, layout and printing costs) suggests that he's not treating it as a hobbyist process - because a hobbyist would have written the text for free already, and probably enjoyed the process of doing so. The doublethink involved here is wild.
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May 30, 2018 10:37
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spectralent posted:I feel like ultimately it's going to need books that cost more (RPGs have easily the best money/entertainment time ratio of anything if you're into them) or writers banding together. Kickstarter has allowed some small press outfits to punch above their weight - see, in particular, Onyx Path - and DTRPG's print-on-demand process means that it's easier than it's ever been to provide a print copy of your rules, though in the latter case that's often at the cost of sacrificing presence in brick-and-mortar stores, though in the event of an industry collapse that may become a moot point. I believe that if the industry collapsed the hobby could happily survive in the form of hobbyists producing materials for each other on a cottage industry basis, with DTRPG surviving as a platform for sales of PDFs and print-on-demand there; the idea of tabletop RPGs as a concept is widespread enough in geek culture to sustain itself, and the popularity of streamed play via twitch etc. allows for a point of entry for new players which doesn't require one single professional publisher to still be extant. The propagation of SRDs mean that many classic systems will never die.
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May 30, 2018 10:49
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potatocubed posted:Inspired/reminded by all this, I finally got around to writing a breakdown of where all the money went on Pigsmoke. I saw that on Kickstarter and that tax payment made me wince. Glad you got through it!
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May 30, 2018 19:14
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potatocubed posted:Inspired/reminded by all this, I finally got around to writing a breakdown of where all the money went on Pigsmoke. I sounds like you could have reduced your taxes by claiming some Allowable Expenses. But you'd need to understand quite a bit of the UK tax code to pull it off.
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May 30, 2018 20:57
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Warthur posted:I don't know what the breakdown of hobbyist designers who churn stuff out for fun vs. pro designers who do it to partially or entirely support themselves is; I suspect the hobbyists outnumber the pros in terms of the number of folk writing, but might not outweigh them in terms of materials published (especially since there's probably an invisible chunk of hobbyist writers who only distribute their poo poo among their friends). Um, this is what people did in 2014. Harper had no idea what he was doing, which is why it took him as long as he did to get the game out in a state he liked. That doesn't make it good, but it does make it understandable. The amount of difference between RPG kickstarters in 2014 and 2018 could fit in a small book, and while it was out of the true wild (far) west of kickstarter that was 2010-2012, the best practices weren't quite where they're at today.
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May 30, 2018 21:23
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Yeah, definitely no one ever got paid for writing RPGs back in 2014. Sorry guys, money was only invented in 2017, so it's normal.
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May 30, 2018 21:53
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Lemon-Lime posted:Yeah, definitely no one ever got paid for writing RPGs back in 2014. Sorry guys, money was only invented in 2017, so it's normal. Harper and the other writers agreed to do things for no pay. Something must have changed between then and now if the writers aren't mad about it but you are. Or they live in a weird spaceland where money was only invented in 2017. We can be dumb and just try and score points. That's always fun. Like, if you want, you could correct my post (the kickstarter was 2015), or you can be really mad about what other people dumbly agreed to.
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May 30, 2018 21:59
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"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. e; like, these ethical imperatives didn't spring out of the aether on the 1st of January 2018, people have been talking about pay in the RPG industry for a good few years now. Plus, you know, "making backers think the writers would get paid by making these hacks stretch goals" wasn't kosher in 2014 either. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 22:05
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He said he traded favor for favor implying that he did some work in exchange for them doing some work. If the point is that an author/artist's time is valuable then he claims he exchanged something valuable for it. There isn't really any excuse for not having a contract here but I don't think exchanging writing favors is such a bad thing and it's hardly the same as pro bono.
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May 30, 2018 22:09
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Lemon-Lime posted:"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. Not paying writers isn't great, but who are we to get mad about agreements between consenting adults?
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May 30, 2018 22:11
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The only issue with this arrangement is that people naturally assume that the money for the stretch goal is going to the indicated writer to produce the specified goal. Like the first non-Harper written stretch goal is Broken Crown, at $13,000. The next-lowest goal was $11,000. So you would think that $2,000 would be paid to James Stuart for the writing... but it wasn't. And apparently, that was the arrangement. Harper would keep the cash and Stuart would produce the writing presumably as a favor for something Harper did/was going to do for him. Okay, fine and cool. But like, that should have been in the campaign. It should have been spelled out that the work was going to be done for free and that it would therefore be produced at whatever pace "free" gets you (slow). If this had been published in the campaign I guarantee you 2 things would have happened: 1) There would have been people scratching their heads and asking about this loving stupid arrangement in the comments and 2) The game would have made significantly less. It doesn't take a certified brain genius to figure out why it wasn't published. Harper has said that he is contacting the writers to offer them pay in exchange for the work, which is good. Why this wasn't the arrangement to begin with is just baffling. But I don't reckon it would have sped up delivery by that much, the SRD only just came out after a long period of playtesting because, as we've all realized by now, Harper wasn't exactly a professional when he started this whole thing and the game needed a lot of core changes to get into a condition that he liked. I do wonder if the other writers will take on the work at this point, and I wonder if any of them have realized how boneheaded their agreement was.
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May 30, 2018 22:49
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Oh yeah good point - stretch goals do make it weird and I just assume that kickstarters are lying scams by default and extended advertisement at best but you are right, that is misleading. If it says there's a $2000 stretch goal for a table of 20 torture devices written by gg allin then it would be misleading if gg allin didn't get any of the money. Though, presumably integrating these stretch goals involves work beyond just writing them - as stated, many authors put their work on kickstarter when the writing is finished, to prove that it's worth publishing and pay for art/layout/etc. What if James Stuart was gonna write the content no matter but but it's not worth it for this guy to integrate it into his published product without the $2000? It's a little dismissive of the other work involved in publishing to say that the stretch goal money should go exclusively to the writer of the stretch goal content, but you're right, that *is* the implication of having "broken crown by james stuart" be the stretch goal at $13,000. Also if a friend called me up and was like "hey remember that thing you said you'd write years ago because I fixed your sink that one time? Well I raised 180k in a kickstarter and promised you'd deliver", well, that might just be "I've altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further." territory. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 23:03
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What's wild is that only 2 of the hacks from the campaign are in public, playable condition, meanwhile you can head over to the Blades site section for fan creations, scroll on down to the Hacks section and find like 20 that are in playable or semi-playable shape. And these people haven't had the benefit of being in contact with Harper through the development process. Some of them are pretty drat slick for freely-made work too. e: I went hunting on Reddit and tracked down posts from Sage Latorra and John LaBoeuf-Little Latorra: quote:As a contributor to the project, I'm taking work I would do anyway (because backing Blades is fun) and using a portion of it (the number of sales that would have gone to KS backers) to back the project indirectly. Laboeuf-Little quote:I'm half of Off-Guard Games, and we've released Scum and Villainy, are releasing Band of Blades, and plan to release Throne of the Void; these are all direct products of the Kickstarter mentioned in the original post. My name is John. (AMA, I guess?) Serf fucked around with this message at 23:31 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 23:19
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Warthur posted:But even then, there's still a basic philosophical problem with treating stretch goal writing like hobbyist writing. If these writers are hobbyists designing for the fun of it who don't need to get paid, why is their work a stretch goal? If they were keen to do the work and happy to write it for free in their spare time, wouldn't they have just written it anyway, regardless of how well the Kickstarter did? The short answer to "why is it a stretch goal" is marketing. People like to feel like their pledge is helping expand the scope of the project, even if that's not strictly true. It's not a particularly open and transparent way to run a Kickstarter, but it happens pretty often and it seems to work (at least as far as getting people's money goes).
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May 31, 2018 00:00
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Lemon-Lime posted:"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. Anyone worth listening to will agree, in general, that paying for people to make things for you is good. However, as every post since yours has shown, there's some degrees of bad decisions here that have no morality attached to them, just a bunch of people not being transparent about their views and doing things that apparently were the norm and/or are still the norm when it comes to stretch goals. Everyone acted in, if not good faith, in a manner without the intent to deceive. Did John Harper do wrong? Yes. Did John Harper create some plan to not pay his friends out of any bad faith? No. Should people not do what John Harper did? Yes. Should we hold John Harper to these standards? Also yes. Should we treat this issue like it's exactly the same as intentionally trying to tell someone that you'll pay them in exposure? No.
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May 31, 2018 01:14
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thelazyblank posted:Anyone worth listening to will agree, in general, that paying for people to make things for you is good. However, as every post since yours has shown, there's some degrees of bad decisions here that have no morality attached to them, just a bunch of people not being transparent about their views and doing things that apparently were the norm and/or are still the norm when it comes to stretch goals. Everyone acted in, if not good faith, in a manner without the intent to deceive. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 01:23 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 01:20
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Comrade Gorbash posted:No one's advocating this, and to read that as what people here are saying is frankly disingenuous. Several folks have in the Blades, actually, and in the original Google+ discussion. Not in this thread sure, but it's not a thing people are making up, either.
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May 31, 2018 01:36
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Comrade Gorbash posted:No one's advocating this, and to read that as what people here are saying is frankly disingenuous. Lemon-Lime posted:"The Kickstarter was run several years ago" is a point that is neither intelligent nor helpful when the argument is that it's unethical to make people produce work for you pro bono, both because you should compensate people for their work so they don't starve and because pro bono work drives the value of work in general down, negatively impacting everyone else who wants to write RPGs professionally. If someone tosses pro bono around a lot, I'm going to assume they mean pro bono. This is a complicated quid pro quo issue, a transparency issue, a stretch goal issue and probably a few other significant issues going on. I don't want to downplay any of those. But the response I gave was specifically in response to that line which makes John Harper out to be some sort of unethical thief when he's just an idiot who didn't think how people would respond to something that, if Sage is to be believed, happens more often than not RE stretch goals.
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May 31, 2018 01:38
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Serf posted:
I'm gonna quibble about this one thing -- I'd actually assume that James Stuart was getting a lot less than $2K. For one thing, obviously Kickstarter and taxes takes a chunk. For another thing, that $2K doesn't come from people who just get the stretch goal. Harper still had to cover the costs of giving some of them physical copies of the book, for example. The reason I'm making this somewhat minor point is because when I see a Kickstarter that has a lot of great stretch goals at $1-3K increments, I assume it's going to be a few pages of work. It's not a ton of money to pay authors. Atlas Games ran their Feng Shui Kickstarter like this, and a lot of Pelgrane Kickstarters also do stretch goals like that. In retrospect, I should have looked at the BitD Kickstarter and said "whoa. $5K additional income may not be enough to cover Jason Morningstar doing a complete reskin for Elizabethan England." This is a good tool to use when I'm evaluating Kickstarters in the future.
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May 31, 2018 03:49
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thelazyblank posted:Should we treat this issue like it's exactly the same as intentionally trying to tell someone that you'll pay them in exposure? No. That's just the thing, though. By treating non-payment for work as acceptable, it's normalizing "for exposure" and directly contributing to a bullshit industry standard where writers work for the "love of the hoby" or "favors." The difference is that this time money was collected in advance for that specific work. We have an actual, exact dollar figure representing what the consumer and management agree that the work is worth. Any writers writers agreeing to this are just as culpable. You might be able to do $2k in free writing - but realize that action directly hurts some other writer who does not have that luxury. Maybe you're seriously not into it for the money? Ok, get paid and sign the check over to charity. But get paid first. Working "off the clock" essentially steals a job from other workers, while signaling that it's acceptable. This shouldn't even be debatable. "But the writers wanted to" doesn't even enter into it. If they want to support the creator "with their time," that needs to be made clear from the start, and can't be conditional upon reaching a stretch goal implying this shady-rear end poo poo practice isn't happening.
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May 31, 2018 12:52
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:He said he traded favor for favor implying that he did some work in exchange for them doing some work. If the point is that an author/artist's time is valuable then he claims he exchanged something valuable for it. There isn't really any excuse for not having a contract here but I don't think exchanging writing favors is such a bad thing and it's hardly the same as pro bono.
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May 31, 2018 14:53
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Thuryl posted:The short answer to "why is it a stretch goal" is marketing. People like to feel like their pledge is helping expand the scope of the project, even if that's not strictly true. It's not a particularly open and transparent way to run a Kickstarter, but it happens pretty often and it seems to work (at least as far as getting people's money goes).
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May 31, 2018 14:54
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Warthur posted:I am increasingly of the belief that stretch goals are a false profit and should be shunned. Stretch Goals seem to always either be "We've already done the legwork for this and we want to get more money out of you for minimal effort on our part." or "Please for the love of god give us more money we'll do anything oh poo poo how to do we do these things we've promised to do!?"
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May 31, 2018 15:26
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Harper has done a lot of work for a lot of people for free IMO, so it's not so much ''for exposure'' as it is personal relationships and favors traded. This is probably not a good way to run a KS, but I don't think he should be painted as the kind of dude who doesn't pay workers.
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May 31, 2018 15:34
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ravenkult posted:Harper has done a lot of work for a lot of people for free IMO, so it's not so much ''for exposure'' as it is personal relationships and favors traded. This is probably not a good way to run a KS, but I don't think he should be painted as the kind of dude who doesn't pay workers. He shouldn't have, is the thing. Work has value, and working for free's a good way to keep people from wanting pay you for your work, because you clearly work for free, and so should others.
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May 31, 2018 15:45
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It's almost as if tabletop RPGs are a hobbyist industry where getting people to pay you is hard for like a million reasons. I personally blame the willingness to work for free on foolish hope of "making it" and having more passion and creativity than business sense.
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May 31, 2018 16:01
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Mors Rattus posted:He shouldn't have, is the thing. Work has value, and working for free's a good way to keep people from wanting pay you for your work, because you clearly work for free, and so should others. If two people realize that both their kickstarters will do better if both of their names are on it, should they not put both names on both of them? Maybe it's misleading if it makes each other's contribution look larger than it is, but it isn't "working for free", both parties give something and get something as part of the trade. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 16:16 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 16:10
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