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A lot of kickstarters I've seen are just putting up International versions of reward tiers that are appropriately higher priced.
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Jul 11, 2013 07:42
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As long as digital versions are offered for TTRPG projects then at least I can get my hands on the stuff somehow. Good thing I'm not into painting miniatures!
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Jul 11, 2013 07:50
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I suggested to one Indy Kickstarter and might as well suggest here that for books the international option could use a POD service like Lulu to cut the shipping costs to a minimum - print and ship from within the country. (I'm even considering it myself for a project I'm vaguely thinking of; has anyone done a walkthrough of what Kickstarter involves?)
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Jul 11, 2013 13:08
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As an international backer myself, I use a courier system in the US. Stuff gets delivered there, and they send it here. I still have to pay taxes+their fee of course. It can be kind of a hassle when KS projects don't send tracking numbers as sometimes when they get to their warehouse they have no way of telling me who it came from (let alone how much it was worth) so I have to guess :p Of course, I am lucky enough to live in a country that HAS that courier service available. It does lower the S&H price for some of the most expensive stuff tho! (... for some of the cheaper stuff, I find I may have to pay MORE, but its worth it just for the package to not be in international travel limbo). Right now I'm waiting for the Reaper Bones box. It weights 21 Lbs. If it had shipped internationally, the price would be EYE-GOUGING. I still expect to pay over $50 when it gets here. This is likely still cheaper than what I would have had to pay normally. I guess what I'm saying is... it's hard to be a geek/compulsive buyer and not live in the country where most of that stuff is cheaper and easier to get :p
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Jul 11, 2013 14:20
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Cheap Trick posted:Kickstarter-related question: what caused the price of international shipping from the US to skyrocket recently? Is this only affecting USPS, or are courier companies hiking up their rates too? The USPS lost $16 billion last year on paper. This is mostly thanks to the 2006 Postal Accountability Enhancement Act which says that the USPS has to fund health benefits to retirees, fully, for 75 years... and they had to come up with the money to do that in 10 years. Why would Congress do that? Possibly it's entirely coincidental that the USPS has one of the strongest public sector unions left, who knows?
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Jul 11, 2013 15:16
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jivjov posted:A lot of kickstarters I've seen are just putting up International versions of reward tiers that are appropriately higher priced. I've seen a lot of this since the shipping rates went through the roof. It makes the pledge structure look a little ungainly, and it's made it so that I basically can't impulse pledge for anything that has a physical component, but it's better than things like Evil Hat telling internationals to gather a dozen of their closest friends and split a $100+ retailer pack because they won't ship anything smaller. neonchameleon posted:I suggested to one Indy Kickstarter and might as well suggest here that for books the international option could use a POD service like Lulu to cut the shipping costs to a minimum - print and ship from within the country. (I'm even considering it myself for a project I'm vaguely thinking of; has anyone done a walkthrough of what Kickstarter involves?) Big, big problem with this is that while you'll arguably save money on shipping, print-on-demand costs will usually eat those savings and come back for seconds, especially if you're dealing with things to be printed on nice stock or in colour.
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Jul 11, 2013 16:26
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Bieeardo posted:Big, big problem with this is that while you'll arguably save money on shipping, print-on-demand costs will usually eat those savings and come back for seconds, especially if you're dealing with things to be printed on nice stock or in colour. Yeah, colour is pretty huge. But a 300 page perfect bound paperback costs $10 to print from Lulu and from memory about $5 to ship. Or less than the shipping costs from the US come to alone. And if you use Amazon as publisher/distributor, using their shipping prices again you can get a $10 paperback quite happily. When shipping costs of the order of $20 unless you do it locally I can only consider this a win.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:13
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Wow, that's better than I remember it being. I wonder how licensing would work out-- if someone who pledged for the PDF/ebook edition would have the rights to have a copy professionally printed, or if the developers would need to reach an arrangement with different POD outfits that could deliver more cheaply overseas.
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Jul 11, 2013 18:06
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jivjov posted:I thought that was because of the wide distribution. If I sit at home and carve a perfect likeness of Darth Vader out of wood and give it to my dad as a gift, I'm pretty sure that's not copyright/trademark infringement. The "gift" poo poo KS claims is a paper-thin veneer and will crumble the first time a government entity examines the arrangement in any detail. Overseas KS backers have already seen this with the Ouya, for example. KS is a store. What it does fits the legal definition of a sales contract, no matter how many semantic games they want to play. Copyright infringement doesn't go away because somebody claims it was a gift while slipping a $20 in their pocket.
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Jul 11, 2013 20:15
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Cheap Trick posted:They are the cutest guardians of my bookshelf Rusty is guarding one of my computers from those evil metal swords. You can actually buy them through the website now.
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Jul 11, 2013 22:45
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 That is all.
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Jul 12, 2013 00:40
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Rusty is guarding one of my computers from those evil metal swords. You can actually buy them through the website now. That gives me an idea for a practical joke to play on a friend. "I'm sending you a set of cutlery/new PC part/[insert metallic item], thought it might come in handy." Within the box is packing peanuts, Rusty, and a note written in crayon that says "I ATED IT" If said friend rejects Rusty, they have no soul 
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Jul 12, 2013 08:31
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I really wish the management of my FLGS was more...accepting of Kickstarter. I'd really like to support my local store more, and every time I see a cool Kickstarter that has a retailer backer level, I try to convince my store to buy in, but it never seems to happen. The owner is of the (somewhat justified) opinion that Kickstarters are harming Brick and Mortar sales; people who are super interested in a game and would buy it Day One probably already saw and backed the Kickstarter. With brick and mortar gaming stores being such a niche idea these days, I can really see his point, but I'm not sure if how much of his attitude really is justified and how much is just bitterness.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:02
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I assume that any game that isn't being developed by a household name simply isn't going to have very much demand outside of Kickstarter backers. Buying in at a retailer pledge level that includes, say, five copies leaves the store out however much that level cost, and leaves them with merchandise that may end up mouldering in inventory when it does eventually arrive. Even something like gimmick dice can take ages to move. I imagine that retailers recall the glut of lovely d20 supplements too. Maybe if you have a really cosmopolitan customer base, that will eventually buy anything that goes up on the shelves, it's worth the risk. If you're running on razor-thin margins and have trouble moving anything that isn't D&D, Pathfinder, Magic or Catan, buying in on Kickstarters for stuff to resell is really irresponsible.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:29
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jivjov posted:I really wish the management of my FLGS was more...accepting of Kickstarter. I'd really like to support my local store more, and every time I see a cool Kickstarter that has a retailer backer level, I try to convince my store to buy in, but it never seems to happen. The owner is of the (somewhat justified) opinion that Kickstarters are harming Brick and Mortar sales; people who are super interested in a game and would buy it Day One probably already saw and backed the Kickstarter. With brick and mortar gaming stores being such a niche idea these days, I can really see his point, but I'm not sure if how much of his attitude really is justified and how much is just bitterness. That's because retailer packages don't fit the business model of many retailers, who move low volume items (like RPGs) according to pull requests instead of stocking and praying someone will pick them up. So "blow some money and buy ten!" doesn't work for them at all unless they feel confident they can move them.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:32
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I just really feel sorry for my local store sometimes...I want to support them, but sometimes its hard to make a purchase from them when I can either A) Back a kickstarter and get the game + a bunch of KS exclusive extras or B) Buy from Amazon or CoolStuff and save anywhere from 30 to 60 percent off the cover price.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:37
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My former FLGS would give a discount on special orders. Sometimes I think they were just ordering from Amazon themselves, but I didn't mind, since they provided play space for free and I met some cool people there.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:53
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If I'm not going cheap and getting it in PDF, I'll check my local store and ask if they'll order it in if they don't have it. I don't think they've let me down, and I don't mind eating a bit of time or Amazon's ruinous discounts. Amazon... I've had a couple of Secret Santas buy me books through there, but the last time I ended up with three copies of a book I didn't need because their fulfillment bins were mislabeled.
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Jul 23, 2013 08:21
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Bumping this so people have a place to go to debate about the true spirit of Kickstarter.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:24
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Dragging this derail to the right thread this time!  nesbit37 posted:Carcosa has some nasty rituals in it but you most of traditional RPGs have rules built around crafting characters as efficient of killers as possible. That's ok because most people just assume you will be slaying evil as crafted by the authors but if you detail something dark that the players could possibly use, even if ill advised and intended more as something to drive emotion out of players as a GM tool it must be a bad thing. The problem with "but why is sexual violence not okay to depict in games when murder is okay?" is that it's a category mistake, which is to say you're comparing two things that are different enough that a comparison of relative value is meaningless. Like if you said "This game about acting out a violent rape is worse than a ham sandwich" or "I'd rather be jivjov than have a wombat poo poo in my mouth". While it's quite likely better to be a rape survivor than a murder victim in real life, it doesn't follow that stories and games about rape ought to be less offensive than (or even equally offensive as) stories and games about murder. This is why Angela Lansbury starred in Murder, She Wrote and not Rape, She Wrote. Death (or the threat of death) in games fills a number of useful purposes, like increasing dramatic tension by upping the stakes or making things harder . A game like D&D without the threat of death becomes much tamer - yes, there are a lot of ways to threaten the player that don't involve potentially killing them, but death is a particularly dramatic threat! You can easily make a (completely irrelevant, but still valid) case that the portrayal of violence in games is pretty hosed up, but the threat of death is still an important ingredient in these things. Rape or the threat of rape, on the other hand, doesn't just add to the dramatic tension but changes the entire tone of the story, adding feelings violation/humiliation/trauma that death alone doesn't do. There are a lot of games (from d20 knockoffs to super-crunchy scifi games or whatever) you can make without having to add rape to the mix, whereas a game without the threat of death in it is a very different affair. Rape and murder thus belong to entirely different categories, and trying to link them to say "you don't like rape but you play violent elfgames, check and mate suckas!" doesn't work.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:25
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I just would like to clarify that I'm not defending rape as an action. I am defending the right for game creators to make any sort of game they want, and players to play any sort of game they want. If that involves rape, that's the concern of said creators and players. I was not trying to draw a direct 1-to-1 comparison between murder and rape, I was merely making the point that traditionally RPG player characters do all manner of poo poo that wouldn't fly in the real world.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:28
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I have no idea where this derail came from but holy moly it sounds like a doozy.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:35
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jivjov posted:I just would like to clarify that I'm not defending rape as an action. I am defending the right for game creators to make any sort of game they want, and players to play any sort of game they want. If that involves rape, that's the concern of said creators and players. I think it is, at least in part (and I am gonna guess other people will articulate this better than I will), is because a lot of the other acts done in RPGs have some penumbra, somewhere, where they are acceptable. Killing a guy is acceptable sometimes if you are defending someone or if you are a soldier or whatever; if you are Jean Valjean and are starving and steal a loaf of bread and some candlesticks people will empathise. There is no like, "justifiable rape" or "acceptable standard of child sacrifice" or whatever. There is nothing gained there, it is just unpleasantness inflicted for its own sake. Murder or theft or other tricky bits in games can be interesting because there is some kind of moral range there where you can explore if something is all right or not. Unless you are Ferretball, there is never that area for rape so it gets a special spot.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:35
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Countblanc posted:I have no idea where this derail came from but holy moly it sounds like a doozy. There is a Kickstarter of bad sounding games, one of which ends with "the rape scene" where a sword tells you to rape someone and you do it. No poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:36
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And the Victim (who is a player) gets to day whatever they want, but don't get to add anything officially, unless the Sword and the Thief agree.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:38
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jivjov posted:I just would like to clarify that I'm not defending rape as an action. I am defending the right for game creators to make any sort of game they want, and players to play any sort of game they want. If that involves rape, that's the concern of said creators and players. And by doing that, despite Ettin's post not even being directed at you, you somehow manage to make the exact category error Ettin's post refutes. If game creators want to make whatever they want, hey, guess what! Free speech applies to people who want to call them shitlords for gamifying rape. And it doesn't just relate to RPGs; This is something that has been explored, and criticized, in the larger game industry, and has been the subject of critique in literature for decades. Now, let's explore this game in the specific. Its entire premise is that a group of players will sit down and get into the mindsets of a) a soon-to-be rape victim, b) an ancient intelligent psychicically dominating sword, and c) a thief who is a serial rapist. Two of the players are intended to gang up on and play out the violent rape of the third player, who is only allowed to make suggestions as to how their character is raped during that act. Let's assume for the moment that we accept that people can write rape into books, movies, games etc. based on serious maturity or artistic merit and be taken as such. In this environment, there also exist prurient depictions designed only to shock or titillate, and they are generally not considered of much worth or merit. This game is asking me to accept taking away one player's input in the game, essentially, because they are being raped with the help of a magic sword. Why the hell would anyone, ever, be raped by a magic sword? What magic sword would wish this act on someone and take part in it? The premise isn't just offensive, it's also stupid. On top of that, it's prurient - the people are expected to enjoy describing the violent rape of a woman by means of a magic sword. They state outright that it's for "fun". The game's creator tried to explain it as underscoring the violence inherent in RPGs, but - once again - rape is not equivalent to the threat of death or the use of violence in drama. Equating the two is fallacious. Since it fails to underscore said violence in any way (something better done by using the actual violence being underscored and not something on another level entirely), what we have left is shock factor and prurience mixed with some RPG author's cluelessness about sexual violence. And I'm somehow supposed to accept that it exists, and even encourage it, because it's a "right". It's also my right to point out that this is poo poo, and the people who defend it, buy it, enjoy it and write it are covered by said poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:43
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Winson_Paine posted:I think it is, at least in part (and I am gonna guess other people will articulate this better than I will), is because a lot of the other acts done in RPGs have some penumbra, somewhere, where they are acceptable. Killing a guy is acceptable sometimes if you are defending someone or if you are a soldier or whatever; if you are Jean Valjean and are starving and steal a loaf of bread and some candlesticks people will empathise. There is no like, "justifiable rape" or "acceptable standard of child sacrifice" or whatever. There is nothing gained there, it is just unpleasantness inflicted for its own sake. Murder or theft or other tricky bits in games can be interesting because there is some kind of moral range there where you can explore if something is all right or not. Unless you are Ferretball, there is never that area for rape so it gets a special spot. Hadn't really thought of it that way, that's actually a really good point.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:44
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Now, let's explore this game in the specific. Its entire premise is that a group of players will sit down and get into the mindsets of a) a soon-to-be rape victim, b) an ancient intelligent psychicically dominating sword, and c) a thief who is a serial rapist. Two of the players are intended to gang up on and play out the violent rape of the third player, who is only allowed to make suggestions as to how their character is raped during that act.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:54
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, I read that description and it didn't parse until now. But holy poo poo does that sound both horrible and awkward. Every time something like this or boob-girl prestige classes comes up, I immediately wonder... Who would sit down to play this poo poo? Like a bunch of guys with howling wolf shirts sit in mom's basement and pretend to be a magic rapist sword while munching on cheetos? How do you even pitch this to your friends? "Hey guys, there's this awesome sword game where the sword is a rapist. Want to play with me?" A terrible KS posted:We don't design games to make a moral point or push an agenda. We don't design games to offend you or your sociology professor or your congressman. We do it because we believe there is fun to be had in exploring tragedy and depravity with your friends in the safety of your kitchen, den or mother's basement. Apparently they think this is fun.  I would like to request a list of everyone who backs this KS, so I can be sure to NEVER EVER PLAY ANYTHING WITH THEM.
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Aug 6, 2013 05:13
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There's also this whole thing about how nearly 1 in 5 women in a US survey reported being the victim of a rape or attempted rape. If there is a woman in your group, it therefore follows that there's a 20% chance she has been raped or someone has attempted to rape her. This statistic is obviously wildly different for "percentage of people who have been attacked by kobolds" or even "percentage of people who have been involved in a gunfight," although members of the military are obviously at higher risk for the latter. There are contexts in which one can explore the topic of rape appropriately; in therapy, for example, or in serious academic studies of the prevalance of rape in our culture, or in sex ed classes, or in social studies classes, and so forth. All that said: I do think that many games we play treat violence in an overly-casual way. Sometimes it's fun to play a "bad guy" in a game, but for me at least, it's only fun to do that if the violence is cartooney and mostly summarized. I am not interested in roleplaying a torture scene, as the victim or as the perpetrator or even as a witness, to be honest. Torture is kind of right there with rape as one of those things Winson was talking about as not really having a justifiable circumstance where you can decide it's OK in this case. There are of course not-really-torture things (dom/sub S&M might be your scene, I dunno, but that involves lots of roleplaying, or so I'm told) but I think you can see the point: it might be fun to play Orcs of Thar and go beat up some pansy elfy adventurers, but when you catch one, the closest you're going to skirt to torture is just say "OK the orcs get info out of the elf, let's move on". Roleplaying the scene in detail? Ugh, no thank you. Now I don't know anything about this sword rape game but in addition to being horrible because the creators think roleplaying a rape scene would be fun, it's also a little more horrible because the creators appear to be so thoroughly oblivious to why this idea might be offensive and bad. If there were room for a game with rape in it (and there isn't), you would at least expect the creators to go out of their way to explain in detail and at length exactly why they feel they're treating the subject with the seriousness and delicacy that it deserves, who should not buy or play their game, and give some careful consideration as to how to deal with the powerful emotional content of such a scene in a mature and healthy way. Not brush it off, like 'heh if you're mature you can handle it, it'll be fun'. e. I just want to add that women are not the only people who are the victims of sexual assault and rape. The article I cited suggests between one and two percent of men have been victims, often as children, and about 1 in 7 men have been the victims of domestic violence. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 05:40
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I think there's a possibility that that game is intended as black, black satire of narrative games and nordic-rpg-style games and Raggi's shockjock style. I might be wrong, but it's worth skimming it with that in mind - some of the dumb is so heavy-handed that I can't believe someone would write it seriously. quote:
I mean, c'mon.
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Aug 6, 2013 05:49
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There is also http://www.miserytourism.com/6pagemanual.pdf from the same people which is a straight satire of Nordic larp.
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Aug 6, 2013 05:53
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No. If you take a poo poo on my carpet, then make a fuss claiming that it's art, then laugh at me afterward while claiming that you were parodying what you misunderstand as avant garde art, you've still taken a poo poo on my carpet. Kickstarting it is asking me to provide lunch, so you have something to 'produce' for the gag.
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Aug 6, 2013 06:04
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xiw posted:I think there's a possibility that that game is intended as black, black satire of narrative games and nordic-rpg-style games and Raggi's shockjock style. I might be wrong, but it's worth skimming it with that in mind - some of the dumb is so heavy-handed that I can't believe someone would write it seriously. One of the absolute most difficult and problematic aspects of writing satire is that good satire can get too close to what it's satirizing. Rather than poking fun, it becomes just another example of what it's trying to satirize. Bad satire just wallows in it. One of the most notable instances of this is the world's most beloved adventure story, Gulliver's Travels. It's a satirical parody of the colonialist tropes of its contemporary adventure fiction, but it was such a good example of it that it's become the defining work of its genre. If you satirize games with rape in them, and you're poo poo at doing satire, all you're doing is writing a game with rape in it.
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Aug 6, 2013 06:09
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I think a great deal of confusion arises from the fact that RPGs have traditionally blurred the line between what you might deem "acceptable violence" and "wanton destruction and looting." A lot of people point to D&D as an example of this (and, to be fair, it totally is), but RPGs have been traditionally structured around violence, things that are related to violence, and rewards you might get from doing violence. The traditional D&D "dungeon and town" setting is philosophically troubling for a lot of reasons. It comes from the wargame roots, really. A wargame is, at its heart, simulating something incredibly horrific. War isn't nice, no matter how you cut it, and the blase way in which casualties and damage is dealt could be seen as equally troubling. It's so much a part of our gaming culture that Golden Sky Stories reads almost as a postmodern critique of RPGs. Rulebook Heavily posted:One of the absolute most difficult and problematic aspects of writing satire is that good satire can get too close to what it's satirizing. Rather than poking fun, it becomes just another example of what it's trying to satirize. Bad satire just wallows in it. This is where the differing critiques of Lolita arise from.
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Aug 6, 2013 06:19
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Bieeardo posted:No. If you take a poo poo on my carpet, then make a fuss claiming that it's art, then laugh at me afterward while claiming that you were parodying what you misunderstand as avant garde art, you've still taken a poo poo on my carpet. The problem with this analogy is that in this case, the game is not being forced on you. The creators are not coming to your house, sitting you down, and making you play the game. Nobody is forcibly "taking a poo poo on your carpet".
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Aug 6, 2013 06:19
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jivjov posted:The problem with this analogy is that in this case, the game is not being forced on you. The creators are not coming to your house, sitting you down, and making you play the game. Okay, fine, but they are marketing "hey, pay for lunch and we'll come poo poo on your carpet!"
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Aug 6, 2013 06:21
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Gau posted:Okay, fine, but they are marketing "hey, pay for lunch and we'll come poo poo on your carpet!" Fair enough, as analogies go, that's not a bad one.
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Aug 6, 2013 06:24
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He's basically done it to everyone who's read the kickstarter. It's been dragged into two different threads here and defended on the flimsiest of premises, and it's probably getting the same treatment on other forums and blogs.
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Aug 6, 2013 06:26
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And it may yet get funded by the special kind of toxic people who think they're being transgressive and acting against the norms of society by trivializing rape and making light of the suffering of other, non-white people who aren't as well off as they are. When breathed on, they will poo poo themselves and roll on the floor yelling about free speech. Welcome to the tabletop industry!
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Aug 6, 2013 06:32
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