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Another success of the KS model is Shadow of the Demon Lord. I gotta hand it to Rob Schwalb, he managed to put out 1 supplement for the game per week for almost a year.
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Feb 15, 2018 13:48
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Subjunctive posted:I literally cannot keep up with his supplement production. How much of it does he write himself? I think over the past year he wrote maybe 1/3 of them. And the weekly supplements were separate from the KS-funded supplements too. I have no idea how he keeps up with all of it.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:28
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i loved sky captain but i'm not sure if i would call it "good"
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Mar 2, 2018 19:02
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when they are exhausted shadow of the demon lord can show up to finish them both off
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Mar 7, 2018 22:13
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You know, when Palladium started selling "Raw Preview" editions of their books - basically the final draft without the art or layout, I was like "Ha ha, that's so funny, that you would think I would buy an unfinished book, ha ha, what a ridiculous company. Ha ha." so like a printed book or a pdf? does palladium even do pdfs?
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Mar 7, 2018 22:20
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Alien Rope Burn posted:A physical printed book. Yes, but not their whole catalog. yeah that's wild. i'll pick up an unfinished pdf if i trust 'em, but i would not buy a literally unfinished printed book unless they promised to mail me a completed version later at no extra cost
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Mar 7, 2018 23:56
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Xelkelvos posted:The solution at this juncture to resolve LFQW is to just remove pure Martials. the solution at this juncture to resolve income inequality is to just remove the proletariat hyphz posted:The problem with that is that it addresses the problem of “i hit one dude and the wizard fireballs 20”. or retool how magic is broken up and distributed like in shadow of the demon lord
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Mar 10, 2018 16:08
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Banana Man posted:What is lfqw? Also what is shadow of the demon lord and 13th age like compared to say dnd 5e? shadow of the demon lord is basically dungeons and dragons but better in every respect. the only sticking point i've seen is that people aren't fans of the dark fantasy elements of the setting, but that stuff is easily excised or ignored. would you like to know more?
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Mar 11, 2018 03:21
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clearly you make a d&d movie with guns
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Mar 13, 2018 12:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:I too enjoyed Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent Six remake the original was itself a remake of seven samurai so we're not that far away from a typical d&d adventure
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Mar 13, 2018 13:12
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imagine trusting anything a corporation says
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Mar 16, 2018 19:34
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wouldn't it be more accurate if the dungeon crawl took place in a gated community or private billionaire island or some poo poo? they would actually have things to take, private security and traps and they'd be full of weird, alien monsters
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Apr 28, 2018 06:05
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I found this on the G+ discussion from Harperquote:I'm totally willing to pay stretch goal authors if that will help them put the work on the top of their queue. I have zero problem doing that, even though that wasn't the original deal. Which, aside from the aggressiveness, seems really scummy. If people had been paid up front for their work... well, we still probably wouldn't have all the stretch goals since the SRD wasn't completed until like November 2017 but I imagine they would be coming out real quickly.
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May 29, 2018 14:18
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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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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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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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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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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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The only really hosed up part of this is that the backers weren't told this was how things would work. If people knew that the stretch goals would be delivered on "whenever I can get around to it" time, there would have been fewer backers. I may have been jumping to conclusions earlier when I said that Harper withheld it intentionally, but come on. None of this makes sense, and I feel like not explaining it was an obvious move.
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May 31, 2018 16:43
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It's almost as if capitalism has created a vicious living situation for most people wherein they live on a razor's edge and therefore need to be paid for any labor they do. But at the same time, the industry they want to work in is small and incestuous and the only way to start earning money for your work is to get your name out there by producing either free fan content and marketing yourself heavily or by doing work for bigger names and your name in front of their audience. In neither of these situations are you getting paid, so you are most likely still working a full-time job to support yourself, or more likely working several part-time jobs to barely get by, which necessitates that this work actually be your "hobby" and competes with what limited leisure time you have. This leads to a situation where you're most likely desperately unfulfilled in your working life and you want to "break into" a creative field, and you're willing to make the concession of working for free in exchange for that opportunity. And you don't want to ask for pay because you know that there are plenty of other people out there who would do the same job for nothing, and you're convinced it will lead to something better. Really it is reminiscent of the "how do I get experience for a job application when all the jobs require experience" issue and the "I had better do whatever my boss says because I am easily replaceable" issues, which are also tied to the capitalist mode of production. Harper and his crowd have internalized this state of affairs so much so that even when the money begins rolling in you are trading favors and repaying debts from years ago when you got help and owe someone else for what they did or you worked for free so it makes sense to ask the same of the people who asked it of you and so on and so on. It's a loving toxic rear end system which, like all capitalist hierarchies, produces few winners (if you can call the meager existence of a game designer winning) and many losers in the form of people who wanted to pursue their passion but couldn't handle the strain of doing that and working on another full-time career. In short, eat the loving rich.
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May 31, 2018 20:05
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Mr. Maltose posted:So how many of the promised hack writers also ran Kickstarters where Harper's name was attached to a stretch goal, anyway? I've been doing research on this actually, and it looks like John Harper was a stretch goal author on Dungeon World, so presumably Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel's hacks were gonna be in repayment for World of Dungeons. Jonathan Walton hasn't done much and probably best that we don't hear from him since he apparently quit selling things on DTRPG in response to them "censoring" Chris Fields lol. Jason Morningstar apparently got the art from Fiasco from Harper so maybe that was unpaid too and Coneycatchers was gonna be the repayment for that? Allison Arth and Dylan Green are first-time designers and appear to have been longtime PBTA hackers that were friends with Harper. James Stuart has made a few things, and Acimovic/Nittner/Labouef-Little appear to be amateur designers who were friends of John who are now moving up with some professional work. I remember hearing some talk at one point that Throne of the Void and Band of Blades could turn into full-fledged Kickstarter projects as well, if so we'd likely see Harper attached to those. Of course, if the envisioned hack ideas for Blades were as simple as World of Dungeons I can maybe see why the parties involved figured it wouldn't be a big deal to work for exposure. Given how substantially Blades changed over the course of two years, it definitely looks like the hacks became more and more involved and substantial too.
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May 31, 2018 20:49
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Warthur posted:Between this and Serf's points I am coming to the conclusion that the real moral failing isn't people devaluing each others' labour by working for free so much as it's the industry pretending it's a place where more than a very few, extremely lucky individuals are able to make a full-time living designing RPGs. This is how it works in nearly every creative occupation and entertainment industry in the world. See the stereotypical story about the young kid moving to LA with dreams of making it big as an actor and ending up waiting tables for the rest of their life or until they give up. Look at how many writers send out work and get rejections or musicians who never get recognized. And those industries are far older, bigger, and more profitable than elfgames, and some of them have things like unions and protections (as inadequate and poo poo as they are, they're better than literally nothing but they generally only kick in once you've started to "make it"). This is of course because creative work is seen as having negligible value, and the devaluation of labor across the board throughout the last century has only made it worse. Since the money is tightly controlled and the people holding the pursestrings are skittish about risks you drive wages down and people who want to do this for a living become more and more accepting of poo poo pay because they have bought into the lie that you can be anything you want to be under capitalism. All of this produces a sort of brutal hierarchy where you have to "put in the time" to become worthy of having some money handed to you, and that sort of cycle is perpetuated in tabletop RPGs but far smaller and more vicious. You have to prove yourself, get name recognition, and also be very lucky to get to the point where your work could possibly scrape out a peasant-like existence in the modern world. Even moreso than the average worker you have to accept that you will live on a razor's edge and you could fall off at any time. It's a loving precarious way to live, and that's why so much work is made by people who do it as a hobby. It can't sustain you, and asking to be paid for your work will get you ignored or replaced by someone who will do it for free (which is, again, just a worsened version of how most people won't challenge their boss at work because they know that they are ultimately replaceable and unimportant under the dehumanizing system of capitalism). And the people who are in a position to change this system (but I'll get to that in a moment), went through it themselves and see it as a rite of passage because we're conditioned to think that suffering is good and necessary in order to prove that you deserve what you want. But in the end, there is no "reasonable" solution to the problem of why it sucks to work in any sort of creative or entertainment industry. To the capitalist, unpaid labor loving rules because that means more profit, and in an industry where profits are as skinny as a loving flatworm that becomes even more important. On the less malicious end, this is how you get Harper and friends trading favors for labor. The only solution to this problem, in the sense that there is a solution, is political. Foolster41 posted:For the "but you need exposure to into this industry", seems to be as if we're living in about 10 years in the past and places like DriveThruRPG doesn't exist. Most of those designers I've talked with have described their profits as "beer money."
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Jun 1, 2018 13:54
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Kevin Crawford actually did a pretty good interview with Adam Koebel recently about how he was able to succeed at making RPGs into a career. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziteyWHAzCs The highlights appear to be: -put out freebies so you get people on your DTRPG mailing list, but have actually products behind that so that people can give you money -know what you can deliver through KS and don't overextend yourself -mechanics are more important than setting -find the niche your game appeals to and market it to them -actually do the work of writing the game and putting it up for sale. Don't give away everything just for name recognition -as a newbie, stay away from PWYW because it just doesn't work
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Jun 3, 2018 17:44
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Xotl posted:What's confusing about that? Zak and Pundit are pretty much polar opposites: the only thing they have in common is an enjoyment of the OSR and being widely disliked. I mean they also have the common element of organizing harassment campaigns against people who criticize them. Which is why they are both widely disliked.
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Jun 21, 2018 15:27
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Xotl posted:Yes, but what does that have to do with the idea that you could be friends of one and not the other? Generally you shouldn't be friends with people who run harassment campaigns. Regardless, the two are not "polar opposites" unless you're a real smoothbrain.
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Jun 21, 2018 15:31
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Xotl posted:Nobody said otherwise. What are you on about? They're both garbage because they do the exact same poo poo. Zak S is the living embodiment of performative wokeness.
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Jun 21, 2018 15:40
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I'm still laughing at the idea that being an insane reactionary has no bearing on whether you're a good person.
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Jun 21, 2018 16:10
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Xotl posted:Mostly. All it was was an idle part of a post commenting on one poster's bafflement that you could be friends with one but not the other. They obviously have different lifestyles and concerns and a lot of other things, even if they're both toxic people with similar brigading behaviours; you can be broken in a lot of different ways, yet still use the same tools to achieve your ends. Or: Was it tiring to move those goalposts that far?
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Jun 21, 2018 16:36
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zweihander is just shadow of the demon lord but poorly made
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Jul 7, 2018 03:39
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evidence of what? if its their public email address, then its really not anything
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Jul 9, 2018 16:55
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Kurieg posted:Posting a private email to prove a point is lovely regardless of if the e-mail is public or not. Not redacting the e-mail address even as a matter of caution is bad form. Particularly coming from Hill, I know this has happened to her before. 
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Jul 9, 2018 17:09
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lmao that ken hite is gonna be the lead designer on vampire: nazi edition
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Jul 9, 2018 18:27
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i mean, i listen to ken and robin talk about stuff and i know what ken hite is. dude is still living in the pre-escalator world and hasn't quite caught on to the fact that his chosen party is fully nazi now, which really just makes him an idiot (though he does have absolutely abhorrent politics even outside the current paradigm). it owns that his product, much like his party, has slipped away from him in the exact same manner lmao
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Jul 9, 2018 21:02
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"why doesn't [thing i don't like] exist already??"
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Jul 9, 2018 22:55
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"please stop owning us and talk in private where we can dictate the terms of the conversation" lmao
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Jul 9, 2018 23:36
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literally inventing stuff to get mad about
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Jul 10, 2018 00:02
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"so what if we were to post the hitler number just... jumbled up? would that work?"
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Jul 10, 2018 10:53
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MadScientistWorking posted:It's really really really really obvious who it is now and not Zak. To make a long story the scathing criticism he got was you should consult and ask harassment victims before you jump into an issue because you can very well make their lives worst. The guy effectively just harassed one of Zak's victims and she's pissed right now. how about you just tell us who it is
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Jul 11, 2018 15:11
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not only is that some horrifically offensive poo poo, its also extremely poorly written
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Jul 13, 2018 15:20
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head58 posted:Is Ken Hite still involved in Vampire5? of course
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Jul 13, 2018 17:33
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