Learning From Kickstarter

My RPG, Parsec, is currently up on Kickstarter.  So far things are going great - we've over 100% funded and still going strong.  I've found that I have preposterously generous friends and family, and that somehow my project got onto a French BBS which resulted in hundreds of dollars of support from people I'll probably never meet.

In this whole process, I have learned a few things, and I thought I'd share them here for anyone who might want to put up their own Kickstarter project.  I am by no means an expert on any of this - this is my first project, and I have just gotten lucky in a lot of ways thus far.  However, if you haven't put anything up on Kickstarter before, or maybe if you have but it wasn't successful, something here might be helpful.  If you want to add anything you have learned, please comment.

Kickstarter is awesome

I know this isn't really advice, but Kickstarter is truly awesome.  There is already a built-in community of generous people, it is only becoming more popular as time goes on, and the software you use to set your project up is easy to use and understand.

Enthusiasm is infectious

If you love your project, and you should if you want others to love it, don't hold back in talking about it.  Talk about how it came about, where the ideas came from, why you think it's awesome, and so on.  I have proven to be a terrible salesman previously in my life, but because I was excited about this project, I think I was able to communicate that enthusiasm.

Do your homework

Spend plenty of time looking at successful and unsuccessful projects in your own caregory, and look at what they do.  How often do they post updates?  What kinds of rewards are they using?  What does their video look like, and what other images are they using on their site?  Do they seem available to backers for conversation through comments?

In my case, I looked through many projects in the Games category - not just other tabletop RPGs, but also video games, board games and card games.  I looked carefully at what they did, and how, and what the result was.  I think that this homework prepared me to put together a pretty good project page at first, and that may have been part of how I got early momentum for Parsec.

Structure rewards carefully

One of the cool things the Kickstarter site gives you to track your progress is the Dashboard - basically, it is a breakdown of your backers.  How many do you have, what is the average contribution, how are they finding the project, and which rewards account for the largest percentage of your overall support.

I can already see some mistakes that I made.  My rewards should, ideally I think, fall into something like a nice bell-curve.  My curve is vaguely bell-like, but quite bumpy.  I have many times more $5 backers than I have $10 backers, and looking at the rewards I can see why.  I under-priced the PDF of the game at $5 and didn't make $10 distinctly cool enough.  (That being said, I also might have more PDFs total out there as a result of under-pricing them, which puts my game into more hands, which might be an advantage later on.)

My goal in building the rewards was to keep in mind what it would cost to produce each reward - if you spend all of your support on rewards, you won't have enough left over for the actual project.  One thing I didn't take into account was the cost of shipping internationally.  Honestly, I just didn't imagine that I would have a lot of international backers, but I later learned that on a Kickstarter project, often as much as a third of your support (as an American) comes from non-US sources.  I'd say this is the case for me as well, and I had to do some re-assessing of  how I would handle shipping costs.

Keeping an eye on cost, I did try to make each level as cool as possible.  I tried to cram them with rewards, including ones that cost us little or nothing, like thanking people by name in the final book when it is printed, or signing books before we send them out.

For each level, think "Would I read this and think it was cool?  That it was worth my money?"

Visual presentation is king

Even for a project like Parsec, which is a book, visual elements were key.  I got a friend who is skilled with video editing to put together a video using artwork from the book.  If you have art, put it all over your project page, even for a work that is not primarily visual at all.  Visuals are catchy, and can communicate a great deal very quickly, even at a glance.  If possible, team up with people for the project who are artists.  Split some of the proceeds with them in exchange for some artwork up front.  I can't over-state how important the visual elements seem to be.

It's a huge help to be known already

Whatever creative community you are part of, it is a huge advantage to be known already, to have a name and a reputation that people know and respect.  I didn't have this advantage, and had to weight other things in my favor as a result.  No one knows who I am, and I don't expect them to.

For those who are known in their given community, though, the sky is the limit.  Well-known writers and game designers continually leverage the recognition they have on Kickstarter to get new projects off the ground.  Most of the advice that I got was that the most powerful element of a successful Kickstarter project is to already have a community that supports you.  In my case, that community turned out to be my family and friends - but I know many of them are probably tapped out at this point, meaning I cannot depend on that next time.

Don't spam, but promote the crap out of it

Go on forums and boards, join groups, send emails and Twitter messages, post Facebook updates, contact friends and family, talk to people who are working in your creative field, and make sure people with an audience are aware of your project - bloggers, writers, social media types, podcasters and so on can be incredibly valuable, and a lot of them are awesome people who will help you out for nothing, or maybe just a promise to help them out sometime in the future.

That's one more thing I am continually learning - creativity and generosity often go hand-in-hand.

The Hunger Games

 

Hunger Games is an amazing movie.  I hesitate to call it "perfect", but I didn't notice any flaws at all.  The book is fantastic, and the movie is faithful to the book while still being a powerful film adaptation.  In my view, it wins both as an adaptation of a specific work, and also as a dystopian sci-fi story on it's own.

The performances are all solid and distinct, but Jennifer Lawrence is pitch-perfect throughout.  Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy is superb typecasting, and Lenny Kravitz as Cinna paralleled, for me at least, the effect that Cinna has in the books - a small breath of genuine, while still ambivalent, benevolence in the midst of an ongoing moral horror story.

It was a relief to watch a movie where everything isn't spelled out for you.  There are plenty of silent moments where the strength of the acting carries the scene, rather than being handed exposition as is so common in movies.  It has the effect on me that the same kind of storytelling does in prose - showing, instead of telling, makes the emotions and conflicts much more immediate.

I love this story because it is moving, alarming, angry, intelligent and ambivalent in all the right ways.  Dystopia - nailed.  Subtle paranoia - nailed.  Roman/Nazi pageantry of violence - nailed.  Starkly drawn characters who draw you in - nailed.  Lord of the Flies for a reality TV age - nailed.  Almost making me cry in the first ten minutes - nailed, and only Up has had a similar effect that early in the story.

Now I need to grab my wife's Kindle and read the next two books.  This movie definitely lifted Catching Fire and Mockingjay to the top of my very tall reading pile.

Overall, I give it 9.5 out of 10 Mockingjay pins.  Riveting, and it only loses the .5 because I didn't actually cry (which I did at the beginning of Up).

We Are Old

So, the plan was to have a nice long marathon game session, 8 hours or so, to finish out the GURPS Midnight campaign that we've been playing for well over a year now.

We made it for two and a half hours before everyone was in my living room, draped over the couch on on the recliner.  We mumbled about maybe making some coffee or going for a walk,and then gave up and called it a day. Luckily we will play tomorrow as well, and hopefully actually finish.  As the person running the game, I'll be really disappointed if we don't.

One of my friends made the point, and it's true - we're old now.  (All of us are in our 30s).  We can't even game for a whole day anymore (honestly, I could have, but my love for gaming is well over into obsessive territory sometimes).

It's true, though.  Ten years ago we were doing things like gaming for an entire weekend in the attic of our dorm, breaking only for maybe one sleep and a few meals consisting of pizza and Mountain Dew.  We were tired by Sunday afternoon, but dammit, we did it.  Orcs were slain. Elders were diablerized.  Quests were quested and hope was restored to the world.

Not anymore.

This makes me sad.  I know I'm supposed to be a grownup.  I have a baby now and everything.  But screw that - I want to game.  Except that I, and all of my friends, are aging.

Our Larva

Poppy is six months old now, and it seems like maybe a time to write down some observations.  A lot of this is captured in pictures or videos, but maybe these will be things I'll want to revisit someday.

Sounds
Early on Poppy was very careful with sounds.  She would coo now and then, and then we would coo back, or praise her, and she would just look at us.  Sometimes she would quietly work her lips for a while, as if about to say something, but she usually didn't.  She seemed to practice a few times before she tried to make other sounds too.  Now she has mastered a sound she repeats a lot, something like "mwa mwa mwa".  She also loves noisy raspberries.

Flying
I've never seen a baby do this, but for the past month or two, when on her tummy, Poppy will put her arms out straight to her sides, like wings on a plane, raise her head, and kick her feet back behind her.  It looks like she expects to take flight as a result of doing this.  She never gets anywhere, but seems to just do this periodically over the course of a day.

Jingle Duck
One of the first times we really connected, Poppy and I, in a specific way, was when we were in Walmart.  I hate Walmart, and she wasn't too happy with it either.  So I reached down and shook a jingle-duck that she has hanging from the handle of her carrier.  She looked right at me, reached up, and shook the duck in return.  She gave me this very clear look that said "Yeah, dad, I get Jingle Duck.  What's your point?"  She then did the same thing a few times for me, and once for Pam.

Wiggle
Usually when she sees me, especially when she wants me to pick her up, she does a full-body wiggle, from feet to head, so much that she contorts away from me for a moment.  It is very cool to watch, and is something she has been doing for a few months.

Glowing Rectangular Screens
She loves TV, XBox games, and there is an iPhone app called "Look Baby" that she can actually use herself.

GURPS: Midnight Grand Finale

Given unforeseen changes in my situation and a new job opportunity for one of my players, I'm planning on having a grand finale this coming weekend for my GURPS: Midnight campaign.  It's been a fun campaign, I think, where I've tried a number of new things.  It has survived not one but two holiday seasons, which might be unprecedented for long-term games I've run.

I had planned to have about 5 more 4-hour sessions to finish the game up, and I'll be collapsing that down into one 8-hour session with a break in the middle.  Essentially, I'll be trimming any fat that I can find, and bringing things to a climax sooner than I'd thought.

As far as the story goes, the PCs have been kicking ass all over Baden's Bluff.  They've managed to kill the head of a powerful smithing family, the Prince of the city, the High Legate, and a PC infiltrator nearly took over the Temple of Shadow, only barely being ousted by the NPC who is the new High Legate.  Another trio of PCs working together killed a colossal undead wyvern that had been plaguing the city since the very first session - written up as a 400pt monster using GURPS rules.  The PCs are now about 250pt characters, but still, they had a cool plan, took absurd chances, and my wife's character got to ride on the re-dying undead wyvern's back as it crashed into the city's governmental center.

In some ways, it's going to be hard to follow that kind of stuff up.  Fortunately, I have one more evil NPC to throw at them, and he's the worst threat they've faced yet.

In the Midnight setting, Eredane, there is only one god, Izrador, the Shadow, who rules everything through his minions and Orc hordes and enslaved Dragons and so on.  His four most powerful lieutenants are the Night Kings (like Nazgul if Sauron had gotten a hold of the ring).  One of them, Sunulael, the Priest of Shadow, has gotten word of how well the resistance is doing in Baden's Bluff, and he will be making a personal appearance there to straighten things out.

On the GURPS scale, he is a 500pt character, using the 4th Edition rules - firmly in demigod range.  The PCs are slated to be about 300pt characters by the end of the game, rising from 100pt to 200pt characters, and then having another 100pts of abilities from their Heroic Paths.  At first I wrote up Sunulael as a character just out of curiosity - what could I do, within reason, with 500pts?  Since I am adapting a D20 setting, I was looking at an ECL 32 monster in the setting sourcebook and trying to translate him into more limited GURPS terms.  Now, it turns out, I have reason to use him, since all the things the PCs have accomplished would absolutely draw his attention, and ire.

In a world run by evil, heroes are punished for success.

The PCs had a meeting with other resistance leadership (all but one of which they have overshadowed pretty thoroughly), and they ended up making the case for overthrowing the Shadow in their city and then working to inspire resistance in other places around the world.  That was one option, the other being to drastically strengthen their position in the city but continue working in secret, training and equipping resistance movements in other cities.  My players, though, they like drama.  And, honestly, this is the more fun option.

I haven't planned for an 8 hour session since college, and even then not very often.  It'll be interesting, and I want to cram the time with as much awesome as I can fit in there.  That being said, characters in GURPS are fragile things, and this Big Bad is very, very big.  Should be interesting.

My First Time Running The One Ring

Last night I got to run my first session of The One Ring for the group I usually play Savage Worlds with.  None of them had played before, but one of the players had bought a PDF of the Adventurer's book (the game includes an Adventurer's book and a Loremaster's book) and had made a character for himself and his son.

There were only three players, so I added a Loremaster character to give them a solid 4 in their party.  They started out in Dale, and I sort of let them organically check out what interested them, and one of the characters gravitated toward a Hobbit I had created before-hand (I came with 6 pre-generated characters, though only one was used) and he ultimately became their fourth.

The party consisted of a Dwarven Treasure-hunter, an Elven Scholar, and a Woodman Warden.  Their fourth, Wiseman Took, was a young Hobbit Wanderer.

I basically ran the introductory adventure in the back of the Loremaster's book - The Marsh Bell, which centers around tracking down and then rescuing Balin and Ori (yes, that Balin and that Ori) who were waylaid on their way to invite the King of the Eagles to send a delegation to Dale on the five-year anniversary of the Battle of Five Armies.  I don't normally use published adventures, but I have a sick baby and as a result much less time to plan than I usually have.

The opening bit was all just improvised with the player-characters exploring Dale and making a few basic dice-rolls.  The Dwarf Treasure-hunter ended up checking out the Toy-Market with Wiseman Took.  The Elf Scholar visited the Ravensgate District seeking a library, curious about what passes for history and lore among mortals.  He met a well-to-do retired guardsman who had spent his reward for standing with Bard to fight Smaug on a big new house and on recovering scrolls and books from the ruins of Dale.  The Woodsman Warden got pulled into an archery competition with some of the King's Guards, and won.  As a result, many of the guards who made money betting on him to win took him out for a bender.

After a scene in the court of King Bard when the PCs all meet each other, they went right into The Marsh Bell adventure, pretty much as written.  We got about halfway through, and should complete it next session.

Reference

Since this is my first time running The One Ring, and I never really understand a system until I run it a few times no matter how much I read it, during the course of the session I was doing a lot of referring back to the books.  I tried not to let it bog down the game too much, and for the most part things kept moving.  There were a couple water breaks while I searched for one rule or another.

I'd love if the index in the back of each book was rewritten.  It's kind of like the Yellow Pages back in the old days - nothing is under the heading I'd think it was under.

That being said, I don't think the session was bogged down, and considering I only did about 5 hours of preparation for a 3 hour game, including creating 6 characters for it, it was a lot smoother than most games would be.  Trying to run D&D or GURPS, Burning Wheel or Dresden Files for the first time under those conditions would be a nightmare.  With The One Ring, it was very possible.

System

I personally like the system a lot.  I like the simple dice mechanic, the easy cues for when good or bad things should happen (there is an Eye of Sauron and a G-rune for Gandalf on the Feat die, a d12 that is used for every roll).  It's easy and intuitive to see when you have a great or extraordinary success, especially with the custom dice that come with the game, but the custom dice themselves are still very simple.  I'm a big fan of the 3rd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay or the tactical board game Descent, but the custom dice with new symbols can present a bit of a learning-curve.

The only thing that threw the players off is when some of the cues for good things came up but they still failed the roll.  This wasn't a big deal, but was a bit of a mixed message.  Otherwise, they seemed to perform pretty well for new characters - a squad of four Orcs were dispatched without a ton of trouble, but still had a couple of them scared.  They still felt relatively heroic when doing things they were very good at (the Scholar using Lore, the Warden using Hunting, and so on).

My main wish is that they had extra sets of the custom dice - they aren't necessary, but they're cool and quicker to use, but the one that comes with your boxed set is all you can get for now.

Overall

I am a huge Tolkien fan, and I like this game a lot.  I can see a ton of research and care that went into the game text, the trait choices, the words used to describe things and so on.  The books are replete with quotes and references to passages from the books, and I love it.

There are aspects of the game we haven't gotten to yet - Corruption for example, and advancement, but from reading them I think they will continue to be interesting and fun.  I especially want to see how Corruption works - I can absolutely see how that system in particular was inspired by characters like the Master of Lake-Town, Thorin Oakenshield once Smaug is dead, Denethor and even Smeagol/Gollum.  Love it.

Next Time

I'm going to give the characters some Shadow and see what happens.  They're all afraid to spend their Hope, partly for that reason, so I doubt we'll see any significant incident, but I'm curious what the impact will be of making a few Shadow tests.

I'm also psyched about the Fellowship Phase, maybe for a third session.  It's something that the players have never encountered before (not having played Pendragon or Mouse Guard, or other games with this kind of "down-time" mechanic spelled out) and I'm curious if they'll be able to use it or if they'll just kind of wait for me to throw out the next challenge or situation.