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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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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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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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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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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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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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Did Evil Hat actually go through and refund his pledge because of his pernicious stupidity, or was that just something that was put on the table?
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Aug 7, 2013 01:20
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MalcolmSheppard posted:By conflating criticism with a challenge to the right to create, they falsely shift the onus on other people. This is argument-stopping 101, unfortunately. Crit a piece of visual art, music, writing, whatever and someone, whether the artist or someone from the Peanut Gallery will demand that you produce something better (for them to savage, of course), or invalidate your claim. Happens in geek circles, happens on DeviantArt, happened to Siskel, Ebert and Roeper like clockwork.
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Aug 8, 2013 18:37
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Whoa, I must have missed Pathfinder playing the rape card in the welter of terrible character costuming and useless feats. God help me. I've been thinking about this, and it reminds me of White Wolf putting awful poo poo behind its Black Dog imprint. Not because they had an imprint for the truly vile stuff, but because it was a transparent advertising vehicle for the kind of poo poo they'd already published in spots in their regular line. This 'we're not doing it to edify' is a clarion call to the kind of would-be sociopaths who are really, desperately searching for something to shock their parents and peers with, in the vain hope of looking 'edgy' rather than pathetic and gross.
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Aug 8, 2013 19:27
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I think it comes down to serious misapprehensions (and misappropriations) of concepts like 'inclusivity' and 'persecution', which tie into the old geek social fallacies that demand everyone be friends with everyone else, and tolerate behavior that is frankly intolerable. The furries did it (and some still cling to the concept of being 'fursecuted' like internet Jews), otherkin are predicated on it, and 'true' geeks are getting in on the act now that people are actually starting to call out the worst offenders, these self-styled defenders of the indefensible are starting to throw poo poo like anxious chimpanzees. These are people who think 'geekface', a la blackface, is a real thing. These are people who don't understand criticism. At all. Anything that isn't praise, is abuse. Anything that is abuse must be beaten back. It's an adolescent defense mechanism, being applied to adolescent productions (the word 'mature' belongs nowhere near games like Maid, Bliss Stage, or these things Misery Tourism are 'developing') whose developers want to be adolescent gadflies, while still being taken seriously as adults... and that doesn't work. There are reasons why 'manchild' and 'grow up' are derisive terms and imperatives. And while people like to bandy terms like 'indie' about, there is a strong interdependence in the industry at large. Someone created Apocalypse World. Someone remixed it into Dungeon World. Funhaver's crew has derived Inverse World from that. Would the asshats behind FATAL get anywhere in the industry using their published names, now? Almost certainly not. The industry is small enough that those traditional six degrees of separation are probably four or five at worst. Is there a difference between layout and writing? Yes, of course there is-- but Google doesn't give a drat about it, it is still a central role, and with regards to a creative project, there is a very valid assumption that being associated with it in such a major role implies a certain degree of belief in the worthiness of that project... and if these gatekeepers of geek think they can get loud, they haven't seen people who have really been dealing with persecution.
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Aug 9, 2013 23:22
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Aw man, it's missing the hand-signal graphics! Sigh. Back when this came out, my broad social group was composed of both first-year university students and late-high schoolers, because there was a bit of overlap already, and someone started a LARP, and someone invited their bored tenth-grader friends... I tell you, something in me died when I heard that the high school kids played HoL straight enough to have vicious rules arguments at lunch.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:10
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I think game developers are still sorting out what Kickstarter is really good for. We've seen a few big failures, and some big successes, but nothing that really indicates people are going to keep going in for enormous projects. What amounts to pre-orders for books, card games, and more traditional sorts of board games? Sure. An unlimited number of full-blown miniatures games, especially when backers of earlier ones realize that they're only one of a handful in their area code that did? Probably not. I have to wonder how much they're actually making off that new Cthulhu board game, between the enormous, complex figures and apparent reticence to ship or produce overseas.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:03
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At the same time, if Privateer Press wasn't interested in the sculpt that was produced, they would have told him what they wanted changed, and to fix it if he actually wanted to be paid for the work. They're an employer, not a patron. The problem here is a random Kickstarter probably isn't going to be anywhere near as lucrative as a job from one of the big companies, so the sculptor has a lot more room to consider the project and decide that it isn't worth leaving his comfort zone for. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 04:59
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I think the new game Harebrained is kickstarting is horribly clunky, particularly for the dubious benefit that the software and stylus provides. I'm not dead set against app-based game tracking as an optional approach and add-on-- what I'd love to see, and I admit that it would be hilariously expensive if it was even technically feasible, is near-field inductive battlemats. I think my biggest issue is that I'm not seeing much game involved with these schemes, but just a lot of expensive gimmickry. It's just as easy to count moves and track damage by hand as it is to have a computer do it-- requiring the computer to do it is putting the cart in front of the horse, it's the old Monopoly die-roller or Electronic Battleship in a modern package. Complex systems are a different animal. A friend of mine used to run a horrifying monstrosity of a game that incorporated elements of GURPS with unnecessarily complex starship building and tactical combat; he coded ship CAD software and crew trackers, and damage trackers, and this was the kind of scenario that really demanded companion computers... when it wasn't begging to be taken out behind the shed. Interactive systems monitors and power allocation apps would be ideal for Starfleet Battles and its jaw-dropping reams of rules, though we'll never see it.
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Sep 12, 2013 16:03
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She just looks so disappointed in the whole sordid affair.
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Sep 16, 2013 03:30
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I want to see Ork Grrlz, because there would have to be one named Rozzie da Rivettah.
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Sep 16, 2013 23:36
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Well, I can die... what's the opposite of happy again? I can die like that now. That pay-what-you-want mess stinks.  I think prose-- poo poo, text in general is really undervalued on-line, especially when it's in in forms that seem simple. There's a lot of lazy, pervasive entitlement out there.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:02
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Flavivirus posted: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. I know at least one of the videogame PWYW bundles had to put a floor in because people were buying in at a penny and actually costing the bundle guys money in transaction fees. I've actually bought into one or two of those for cheap soundtracks to games I already had. There was a... what was it? Bundle of Holding or something recently, with a bunch of Fate sourcebooks in. They took the 'above the average gets something extra' approach, but pre-seeded the average calculation with several hundred (a thousand?) purchases at twelve bucks a shot. Dunno how that went over. I thought what they had on offer was somewhere between generic and derivative, and then I remembered that I don't care much for Fate to begin with.
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Sep 17, 2013 19:35
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General Ironicus posted:It's 1000 and Bundle of Holding always does that. The initial average is between $10 and $15 depending on the bundle. I haven't heard any complaints yet, but I haven't gone looking for them either. The Fate one is still going and added Bulldogs and Diaspora since launching. They also support very worthy causes, like eradicating sex slavery. Ah, cool. Can't really blame them, especially since they probably don't have the same sell-through that the video game bundles have. (Just bought in. Kwyndig pointed out Bulldogs, which looks awesome, and Diaspora was icing on that. Didn't beat the average though... the locked ones really didn't appeal. And I'm poor.) Alien Rope Burn posted:Humble Bundle had to put a dollar floor in for Steam keys, mainly at the time because people were using it to exploit a Steam promotional contest where they'd create a Steam account, drop a cent for the bundle, achieve some tickets to enter the contest, and repeat. It's been that way ever since, though that kind of promotional contest has never been repeated. That's it. I couldn't remember the specifics, but I remember it being a lovely situation when it was unfolding. I can't argue with the Bundle of Holding asking for at least a few bucks; even at their minimum, it's still an incredible deal.
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Sep 17, 2013 22:05
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Mikan posted:That "this is a hobby and you should do it for the love of the game" bullshit is toxic and awful. Folks deserve to get paid for their work, and if people feel it's worth shelling out money then awesome. Agreed. My problem is that thanks to asshats who would happily scrape full previews, it can be really hard to see if what's being offered is what you're looking for. Only the passionate seem to bother reviewing, so that doesn't help matters much either. On the other hand, putting it up on your website with a donation button is going to pull in half a buck a month at best.
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Oct 8, 2013 20:16
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Of the people I game with face to face, and the people I used to, I think I'm the only one who does much on-line beyond Facebook or MMO X. Still, one insists on rattling off the same canned '4E is WoW!' sound bites, despite never having played either. The actual existence of other games is carried as rumour by myself or a co-worker, but that's about it.
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Nov 23, 2013 03:17
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Asimo posted:I don't have sources immediately handy, but I distinctly remember lots of complaints about how 3e was too much like Diablo or anime... We definitely compared 3E to Diablo a lot, before we dug our heads out of our asses. Referring to item slots, and buffs in a tabletop context weirded the Hell out of me for a long time after that, even still. Asimo posted:There's just a huge but subtle streak in RPG fandom towards hating and avoiding anything that makes games more accessible to people, sadly. It's not just tabletop RPGs. Hardcore MMO raiders rail at 'casuals' being given 'welfare epics'; WoW's designers learned at the knee of Everquest, the granddaddy bastard of godawful grinds and setbacks, and unlearned much of it when they realized that making content that only 2% of the player base would see was counterproductive. It happens all the time with other forms of gaming, pop literature, and music, anything with a perceived exclusivity. Most of those other industries and fandoms are far too large to be remotely affected by their grumbling grognards. Traditional RPGs might (probably) be the same, but we're a lot more conscious of its relatively tiny size.
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Nov 23, 2013 05:00
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Mr. Maltose posted:I love this argument because it comes up for everything. Comic books, video games, minis, any sort of nerd poo poo. Why do people think "well being a shitlord makes more money, c'est le guerre" and shrug this poo poo off? I think some of it is because people think that they can't affect it. For every person who refuses to buy in on Early Access titles on Steam, cancels their pull when a comic goes to uncomfortable places, or calls a crisis hotline after trying to read an Exalted sourcebook, there are ten willing to put up with it or threaten them with physical violence for not keeping the faith. It's easier to ignore it than to try and do anything about it, on either end of the spectrum: a single player doesn't have much of a voice, unless they're the sort to hurl abuse at a developer for not making stuff for free; (pre)adolescent boys and older shitlords are known quantities with safely predictable appetites, and margins are fine enough that risking that is a non-starter.
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Apr 20, 2014 07:58
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Feeple posted:If we replaced the boob plate with a more practical breastplate, what could identify this as Victoria Haley, as opposed to, say, Victor Haley? I think this point was made earlier, but I wanted to show a concrete example where one's gender could be confusing at Heroic 28mm. Unless there are separate stats for Victor and Victoria, or equally goofy, sweeping rules based on a mini's gender, there really isn't any point to sculpting a pair of 28mm scale L'eggs containers onto a mini's chest.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:45
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Well, they need to give their lady models something to make them obviously feminine, because people are almost always going to assume a model with no clear gender traits is masculine. Boobplate is still the laziest way to show femininity, but I'd rather have a character with relatively tactful boobplate like Captain Haley than an army that just doesn't have any obvious ladies in it. Sorry, I simply don't buy that that's necessary in any way, shape or form. Especially not when the subject in question is being rendered as an inch-tall lump of material. It's silly.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:42
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Cassa posted:So in the wake of WOTC deciding to describe sexuality and gender in their games in a way, best described as a paternalistic grandpa trying his best, but not really helping, Paizo comes out with things like this. Motherfucker, I think I just got a Melf's minute meteor in my eye. I'm  on Paizo and dislike Pathfinder for feeling like playing is more like navigating someone else's house rules, but I like that gesture.Winson_Paine posted:Here buy a goblin. And I think I just found a present for Drakli whenever an appropriate event rolls around again.
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Jul 25, 2014 19:27
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Illvillainy posted:Deadnaming is slang (not sure how widespread the specific term is) for refering to a trans person's previous given name. It's considered rather lovely. I've always heard it as 'misnaming', and at best... yeah, it's awkward as hell. That bio would have looked a lot better if they'd mentioned her original given name once, in the first line. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Strunk and White have a rule for this kind of construction yet, and if you think to ask ten different people with a personal stake in this for their advice, you're liable to get eleven answers. Distractedelf doesn't seem to mind, but that doesn't negate someone else finding it offensive. Best that can be done is to explain why it comes off that way, and hope that it sticks for the next they're writing on trans topics.
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Jul 26, 2014 04:36
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Nah, they'd post a thread in E/N asking for advice.
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Jul 26, 2014 09:46
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It's a bit like finding a gaming group RL. You need to know where or how to look, and from there find an environment that works for you. There's probably a bit in there that wants (whatever) to be considered acceptable by the group too, like introducing your friends to this nerd game you picked up. A bit. I think the real whizzards are the ones whose grasp of social interaction is so tenuous that the above doesn't even occur to them, and instead just take their group on a whirlwind trip through an adolescent Neverland.
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Jul 27, 2014 01:16
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Agronox posted:I didn't mind this; it actually works for the character that she has her mysteries, and you will never, ever, find them out. Reminds me of some school lectures on the topic of desire. Probably a coincidence, but it does work frustratingly well.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:32
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Calling critique "lies" because "it's fiction." (Apparently he's also claiming 1/32 Cherokee ancestry lately? I don't even.) This kind of thing has reentered the fallacious dipshit arsenal recently, claiming expertise or experience in order to silence criticism. Of course, it gets really messy when they twist it up with the classic 'not all X...' wank. Not that it stops them.
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Mar 19, 2015 03:47
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Bucnasti posted:Bringing this back to RPGs... Oh, yeah. It would have been '85 or '86, but the local TRU had an entire book display for D&D stuff, ten feet by six feet if it was an inch, filled with all kinds of BECMI and AD&D modules and related stuff. In another aisle they had Colorforms and Shrinky-Dinks of semi-iconic figures and monsters (not from the cartoon, oddly), humanoid and monster figures with sword-swingin' action built to a slightly beefier scale than He-Man, and D&D candy with statblocks on the back of the box up at the register. I don't know how much of it sold, but someone in the back office thought it was worthy of an aisle next to the Cabbage Patch Kids.
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May 7, 2015 21:48
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Bucnasti posted:Model cars were huge in the 60's and into the 70's here in America. Big Daddy Roth made a fortune licensing his crazy car designs and monster hot rods to model companies. It was still fairly popular here in Canada through the mid-Eighties, but at the same time I think it was being supplanted by more specialized building toys like Zoids and Starriors, or Robotix and Capsela. Standalone toy stores usually had a good supply of midrange models.
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May 8, 2015 15:15
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I love to watch Ghostbusters through that lens, and Alien3 reminds me of way too many lovely games where people forget the NPC they're debating killing is right there. Ghostbusters even has the new guy who really isn't into gaming at first, but wants to hang with his buddies regardless.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was from a way's back, but thanks to whoever mentioned the "Wizards Presents" documents as a window into the design decisions that went into 4th Edition. I almost want to make an F&F of it now to really get at the idea that it was an iteration and evolution of 3rd Edition, and not its own radical change. I'd love to see this, too. In my last 3.x game I played with some of the late-model classes like the Knight, which very definitely had a rudimentary threat/tanking mechanism.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:41
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potatocubed posted:You'd have to swap the standard pastoral genre for epic fantasy, though, or Conan would spend a lot of time doing chores or staring out to sea and sighing wistfully. "Conan, what is good in life?" I asked, gently. It was some moments before the great barbarian stirred, drawing his gaze from the sea that shone like a mountain of gold in the fading sunlight. "At one point, I thought I knew," Conan rumbled. "Now, I know nothing." "Well. Perhaps we could learn anew, together?" Conan was still and silent as a mountainside-- but this, eventually, was a mountain that smiled. "I would like that, my friend," the Cimmerian replied.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:33
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Mors Rattus posted:Interestingly, I saw a copy of The Doom That Came To Atlantic City at Origins last week. I saw one at a local comics and games store last year, and I'm still kind of wondering how that happened.
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Jun 11, 2015 18:44
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Bucnasti posted:What's crazy is that WotC has been terrified since day one of making the same mistakes with Magic that TSR did with D&D, that's why they are so conservative with Magic licensing deals, and there have been no movies, or cartoons. Despite that they're more than happy to make the same mistakes with D&D over and over again. I read somewhere that TSR sold/leased the film rights to some fly by night before WOTC bought the whole thing, and so, thanks to the same kind of licensing rights that have Fox cranking another terrible Fantastic Four flick out every few years, they make new ones with dwindling budgets. The same story claims that Wizards has been trying to buy the rights holders off, to no avail.
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Jun 23, 2015 15:58
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Alien Rope Burn posted:They actually took them to court, arguing dinky straight to syfy TV releases don't actually count as movies. I don't know what the current status of the case is, tho. That'd be great, if you would. Most of what I remember from that period is filtered through secondhand 'Gary's Ex is the Devil' nerd rage. Evil Mastermind posted:I actually met one when my group invited him to our 4e game. His character's whole shtick was "is a blacksmith" and he actively avoided combat. You should have told him to smith it.
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Jun 23, 2015 22:27
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"And now, the envelope..." *rustle* *rustle* "What? No, this is stupid. Give me five minutes." Leperflesh posted:...there used to be solo adventure modules for D&D, which basically did that. I'm the kind of guy who would stick my finger in the choose your own adventure book when picking an option so I can go back, basically savescumming. I've got a couple of those floating around. One is particularly hardcore, both in theme (the adventure begins with your character about to be lynched for a crime he didn't commit, and there are scenes where a coup de gras is set up with a light spell cast on someone's head) and in that you could only really play it a limited number of times-- it was an introductory, no-dice, no-rulebook module where 'random' numbers were arranged in invisible ink matrices.
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Jun 25, 2015 22:23
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