Category: Uncategorized

I don’t really know what I’m doing with Sundays now that I’m shelving the whole podcast theater thing for taking too long to edit for the quality of the content it produced, so here’s something random while I figure out what to stick there: After the Notre Dame fire, Ubisoft gave Assassin’s Creed Unity away for free. I’d already bought the game on sale ages ago, but I decided to play it in order to take advantage of the fresh crop of players for multiplayer content. Unity is no longer the horrific bugfest that it was at release (and they also removed all the connections to their freemium mobile game, with all the quests and chests formerly locked behind progress in that game now auto-unlocked), but it does have noticeably more bugs than other Assassin’s Creed games (which I always wait at least a year before playing, partly so that prices can come down, partly to give Ubisoft time to fix all the bugs). The parkour system in particular is janky as Hell, with Arno doing things like perching on the top of stairs as though it were a ledge and refusing to move while he’s shot to death by enemies or getting locked into his limb-flailing falling animation while attached to a wall, rendering him completely unable to move. It doesn’t help that the revised parkour system has made it the hardest to control Assassin’s Creed game yet made, which is a real shame since they finally stopped putting a gazillion snipers on the rooftops so you can actually parkour your way across the city without being attacked.

Y’know back in 2008 blog posts of this length were perfectly typical? If I could reload my life from an earlier save I would take advantage of so many fleeting internet fads that I’d naively assumed would last forever.

When this goes live, the Kickstarter for Heroes of Ramshorn will be a mere four hours from completion. As of the writing, it’s sitting at about $2,500. Funded, and with the Pathfinder stretch goal reached, so that’s a lot of extra work for probably very little profit. I had originally hoped that putting the Pathfinder goal low would allow me to hit it sometime in the doldrums of the midpoint of my project, and thus bring in a new surge. Unfortunately, this Kickstarter proved significantly less successful than the last, so that didn’t happen.

If I can’t raise at least $3,000, preferably from at least 150 backers, then this campaign represents a significant contraction of my audience. Although I do have an outline for a third installment, I’m uncertain whether I will bother actually writing it. We’ll see how I feel after I’ve finished the Pathfinder conversion of Heroes. Certainly in this scenario making Ashes of Ramshorn will be purely to tie things off for the people who really liked Strangers and Heroes, who, regardless of whether or not there were enough of them to make this viable, did all they could reasonably be expected to in order to make these adventures a success.

If I raise between $3,000 and $5,000 from between 150-250 backers, then that represents somewhere between a minor contraction to a minor expansion of my audience. Regardless of exactly where the number lies, it’s definitely worth making a third adventure to see whether or not things are petering out, stagnating, or growing steadily.

When I first started the Kickstarter, I told myself that if I raised over $5,000 from over 250 backers, I could call that an unqualified success. It would mean that I had retained most of my existing audience and seen significant growth. I estimate that I need to make about $7,000 per Kickstarter in order to pay for expenses and, combined with the income my professional GMing makes, be able to become a fulltime creative professional. If I could get over $5,000 on this Kickstarter, that would mean my audience is still growing and strongly suggest that hitting $7,000 reliably might soon be viable.

At this point, it seems very likely that this is not the case. It is still possible, though very unlikely, that I’ll get enough Pathfinder backers at the very last minute to make this Kickstarter comparable to my last one, at which point I have to wonder if I’ve hit my ceiling or if I just need to commit more time to growing my audience and backlog.

The long term strategy runs face-first into a second issue, however: 5e won’t last forever (indeed, its expiration date is most likely sometime between 2020 and 2022), and once people move on to 6e, or if 6e sucks they move on to Routelocator or whatever, my adventure library needs to be updated to the new edition or else it becomes near-worthless. People do occasionally buy third party adventures for deprecated editions, but it definitely won’t be enough for me to draw continuous income from my backlog through those means. If writing adventures is going to make up a significant portion of my creative income, it needs to be bringing in enough money to do that based on new releases. Right now, it looks like it’s probably barely covering expenses.

On the other hand: Books. Books – particularly ebooks, which is definitely what I’d be doing – tend to make between $3-$4 per sale rather than $14-$17. On the other hand, not only do books almost never go through edition changes, books have considerably lower initial costs. I need only a single cover illustration, much lighter formatting work, and require at most one map, often none at all, and certainly require no tokens. The bigger my audience gets, the more the higher price point but higher initial costs of an adventure makes sense, but real life has terrible game balance and the audience for books is actually considerably wider, even considering the niche genres I’d be writing in.

So, writing books is probably the way to go here, even though it can’t draw anything except seed money from my professional GMing success.

Back in the first year of this blog, when I was absolutely committed to doing the blog-a-day thing once a day for an entire year, I churned out a lot of junk. Ultimately I think it was worth it. The junk fell into the archives and ultimately hurt no one, while the good articles that got squeezed out in between form a foundation of interesting posts I can show people. Back in the day, if I knew I wasn’t going to be able to post the article I planned, I’d slap something together in 30 minutes. Now, I’m already two days past when I planned my ongoing Immortal Cure posts would be out, but it occurs to me that I could probably slam out a pair of cheap better-than-nothing articles to have something to replace them (in the sense that given a choice between reading the article and staring at a wall for the same amount of time, most people would read the article). I’m told that back in, like, 2008 or something, these 300-800 word blog posts is what blogging was all about, and my 2,000-word articles would face incessant demands for tl;dr.

So here’s number one of those, and maybe I’ll figure out number two sometime, I dunno. I got this cyberpunk deck of cards from a Kickstarter I backed, though. They’re good cards and I like them. There’s a lot of good art, but my favorite might be the one that’s just labeled “your card,” so you can literally deal out cards until “your card” comes up.

I am announcing a brief intermission after it is already over instead of when it began. The reason why I’ve missed a few days of review articles is mainly because I was working on an outline for a novel and also deciding that I really don’t want to bother with this whole board game let’s play podcast thing. I liked the first one, but the overall quality trend has been downward, especially for something that takes so much time and effort to assemble, and I don’t think I’ll be saving it. Regardless, reviews will resume on Saturday.

My Kickstarter is a little over a week from completion, is 88% funded, and is quite likely to hit 100% during the final 48 hours. The trouble is, the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal – which will likely bring in considerably more backing if hit before the final 48 hours – is still $550 out. The odds I’ll hit that in time to bring Pathfinder hopefuls in are pretty slim. Worse, some of my current backers may have backed only out of the expectation that the Pathfinder stretch goal will be hit, and back out when things get close to the finish with that stretch goal still out of reach. This could lead to new pledges and cancellations dueling one another, a duel that the new pledges could ultimately lose out on, bringing the campaign to an ignominious conclusion just as it seemed on the threshold of victory.

On the other hand, 48 hours is a long time, so if the final surge quickly carries me over the $2,000 funding goal, I can start posting to Pathfinder subreddits to try and get us up to that $2,300 stretch goal, and if I’m really lucky, what would ordinarily be the final surge could carry me to the $2,300 stretch goal in the penultimate 24 hours, allowing me to advertise the campaign in its final day to Pathfinder as “this is definitely getting a conversion” rather than “please back so that it will maybe get a conversion.” It’s still hypothetically possible that tipping over the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal at the eleventh hour could lead to enough backers pouring in to count the campaign as an unqualified success (when the campaign started, I pegged that number at 250 – enough to show signs that my audience was growing, which it needs to do in order to make this gig stable), but it’s not very likely.

If the project does end up funding but not hitting the Pathfinder stretch goal, I could run a separate quickstarter specifically to try and fund that conversion. This would require me to make a new Kickstarter campaign, which would be a hassle, but it would also give me fairly solid evidence of how big the Pathfinder audience really is. One possible reason why this Kickstarter has gone poorly compared to the last is because the Pathfinder audience is holding off until the conversion is locked in, and that I’d be doing much better had I gone with a higher initial goal and baked the Pathfinder conversion into the default project. The Pathfinder conversion quickstarter would give me pretty good evidence as to how much of the campaign’s comparatively limited success is due to that particular factor.

Frostpunk, a steampunk city-builder from the guys who made This War of Mine about surviving a perpetual winter, recently went on sale to celebrate their one-year anniversary. I picked it up, and spent entirely too much time playing it the past few days (although that’s only partly why Five of Clubs was late – I also spent way too much time waffling on whether or not I wanted to shut the project down before seeking out voice actors). So, safe to say that it’s pretty good.

I’ll be digging into the mechanics in a bit, but what really sells this game is its phenomenal atmosphere. In raw graphics power, it looks good, but not great. It’s in how the smoke from your generators rises above a city clogged with snow. It’s from watching your town sprawl outwards in rings around the central generator, huddling against it for warmth. It’s in hearing the wind howling over the lip of the crater while an automaton nestles against a spoke heater to refuel, its spindly body briefly illuminated by the fires atop the steampunk pillar before it strides back into the darkness to work the coal mine and keep those generators running, while all the squishy humans have boarded themselves into their houses, desperately hoping they won’t freeze to death as the temperature drops to a Hellish triple digit negative.

It’s one of those games, like XCOM, that keeps the pressure up constantly with an expertly balanced series of static events. The first time through, I got about halfway through before my people became disillusioned with my leadership and banished me to the icy wastes. The second time through, I paid much more careful attention to the hope and discontent meters, but didn’t put much emphasis on research or economy, which led to my creating a fascist dystopia which still lost 80% of its population in the final storm. The third time through, I did what really should’ve been my default strategy, since it’s how you win like 90% of all strategy games, and focused primarily on my economy, which allowed me to swing large piles of resources at problems as they occurred.

Continue reading “Frostpunk” →

Heroes of Ramshorn’s Kickstarter will, as of the publication, be a little over halfway over. As of the writing, it has just under 15 days left and is 75% funded, needing a little under $500 to get the rest of the way, and a little $800 to hit that all-important Pathfinder conversion stretch goal, which will bring in more backers besides. If I can hit that stretch goal by the time the 48-hour reminder emails get sent out, I am reasonably likely to see a major surge at that last minute that could even carry me over the $3,000 stretch goal mark. The trouble is, $800 is a lot of money and my incoming pledges have completely stalled out. I need to find a way to get two or three more decent-sized surges out of the remaining two weeks, and while I’m still trying to post it around and see what I can scrounge up, so far I’ve not had any luck. I’ve still got a few more cards to play before this one is done for, and even the current level of success means I am reasonably likely to hit my base goal. It’s even possible that I’ll hit the Pathfinder goal and find myself suddenly turned around and seeing major success like the last one had (the last one benefited from its Pathfinder goal being a mere $800 – this sequel has to have a much higher baseline goal due to the higher production values the series got from its initial success). That said, every passing day makes it more and more clear that this one is going to be less successful than the last.

I usually only poke around Kickstarter maybe once a month, but I naturally tend to spend more time there when I have a campaign of my own going, which means it’s usually also during or immediately after a campaign that I see other Kickstarter campaigns which look fun. Here’s the ones I’ve found this time around.

Deniable Assets is a game powered by the apocalypse about being the bad guys in a cyberpunk story. What really sold me on this one are all the stretch goals that have already been unlocked. There’s stuff here for horror, aliens, a fantasy conversion, plus a whole stock of locations and NPCs that I’m hoping will be interesting enough to serve as inspiration for any cyberpunk game.

Spellcaster University is back with a lower goal and, apparently, a more effective campaign, because they’ve raised more money than last time despite a shorter time frame. Just like before, Spellcaster University is a game in which you build Hogwarts in order to train wizards to defeat Sauron. There’s only a few days left on this one and we’re about $6,000 out from the next stretch goal (the goals are all in metric money), but I’m hoping the last minute crush will get that goal unlocked, ’cause that one is orc students and I’d love to see some greenskin wizards at the academy (I’d also like to see dwarves and elves, but those stretch goals are so far out as to be pretty much guaranteed not to happen).

Lancer is a mud-and-lasers RPG that looks like it’ll be worth backing just as an artbook, from the same person who did Kill Six Billion Demons. It’s already made a squillion dollars and therefore needs no assistance from me, but if you hadn’t heard about it and you like great art or shooting lasers while standing in mud, you should probably give it a look. I have no idea how this will be as an actual game, so if you want actually good mech combat rules maybe hold out for when I post a review article at some point in the future. I’m sure they’ll be selling it in .pdf after the Kickstarter is over.

Grand Guilds is like XCOM but with deckbuilding, and I therefore had to back it under the grounds that I will back any project that starts with “like XCOM but.”

Year of the Pig deck is a standard poker deck, but themed after the year of the pig, which is this year. They’re planning to do another eleven of these, one for each year of the Chinese zodiac, and they’re off to a pretty strong start so far. I’ve been collecting cards for over half a decade now, and I’m hoping to collect the whole zodiac set.

Finally, the creator of Quackup actually asked for my help getting the word out about his Kickstarter, which is for a fantasy adventure comic starring an anthropomorphic duck. Despite the ludicrous sounding premise, it seems to take itself as seriously as any fantasy adventure comic. I assume this guy contacted me because we have somewhat relevant Kickstarters and mine is doing slightly better. If so, I have bad news for him: The primary funnel for my project is not my social media or my blog. The primary funnel for my project is my project. I already like making posts about neat-looking Kickstarters, though – they’ll hopefully net a few pledges here or there for other creators and they’re easy content for me to write – so I decided sure, I’ll toss this guy in. When this post goes up, he’ll have just a few days left, but as of the writing he’s already hit his funding goal, and now’s a pretty good time to get the first three issues at once, in digital format or, if your spite for trees is exceeded only by your hatred for money, in print.

 

The Buu arc of Dragonball Z is generally agreed to be the weakest of the bunch. The arc contains several beloved plot beats, like the relationship between Mr Satan and Fat Buu and Vegeta’s excellent character arc, and also contains many interesting concepts like fusion, Gohan’s relationship with Videl, and even Majin Buu himself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t gel together at all. Many of the most interesting additions to the story are totally extraneous, and the relentless focus on the rivalry between Goku and Vegeta undermines the conclusion of the Android/Cell arc where Gohan is supposed to be taking up the mantle of Earth’s defender from Goku, who is falling behind the rising power of his son. That passing of the torch lasted all of one fight before Goku shows up, having far exceeded Gohan once more.

Arthuriana thrived on its ability to discard or rewrite bad stories while keeping good ones word for word. I think losing this ability, in part because of copyright and in part because cinema means that cutting together films shot in different eras makes the seams extremely obvious, makes modern storytelling weaker. Given a chance to reboot Dragonball Z, I’d make only minor edits to the Saiyan/Freeza arc, and while I’d revise the early Android/Cell arc (the androids themselves are wasted as villains), I’d want the conclusion to be mostly a shot-for-shot recreation. For the Buu arc, however, I’d go with a total reconstruction with the goal of salvaging the good bits while reframing the context such that they actually matter. In the existing Buu arc, all fusions and every action taken by both Gohan and Mr Satan could both be completely excised and it would change nothing about the ultimate conclusion.

Given the opportunity to rewrite the arc, I’d implement what I call the Three Buu Solution: Having not one, but three pink demon genies, each of Buu’s three different forms being different characters altogether, who appear right alongside one another. This allows for three coterminous plots that can emphasize three different sets of characters without reducing some of them to a sideshow in which a heroic effort is made to defeat Buu and it just doesn’t work, so everyone ultimately may as well have just waited for Goku to do it. Again.

Continue reading “The Three Buu Solution” →

$1,021 is not a small amount of money and my Kickstarter is reasonably likely to succeed based on current momentum. It’s a lot less than $1,312, however, which is how much Strangers in Ramshorn had on day 5. Only a tiny fraction of my previous backers have shown up so far, with the as many people backing the current project at $25, for copies of both the original and the sequel, rather than $15, for only a copy of the new .pdf.

Now, RPG campaigns are big and unwieldy things, and it’s possible that the reason people haven’t responded well enough to Petals and Thorns to want to buy the sequel is because they haven’t actually run it. There could be delayed success here where, in a year or two when people have actually played Petals and Thorns, they find they really like it. MailChimp also indicates that two-thirds of my audience haven’t even downloaded the .pdf link I sent them for Strangers in Ramshorn, which would indicate either that they decided they didn’t want to read the adventure after already paying for it, or else that a huge proportion of my audience prefers the VTT version, which I decided not to promise for Heroes of Ramshorn on account of Roll20 having atrocious distribution capabilities. It’s even possible that people liked Petals and Thorns on first reading, and simply haven’t heard about the sequel – the email I sent out to existing backers was a Kickstarter update, which is frequently ignored once people already have their rewards. Certainly every time I’ve run the game, it’s been very popular. Plus, it’s still possible that the Kickstarter will be saved by sudden surges in popularity towards the middle – it was always impossible to predict when things would suddenly leap up several hundred dollars for the first one, and it’s possible (though not likely) that these unpredictable leaps will occur more towards the middle of this campaign than they did for the first, where they mixed with the initial surge of backers to create continuous amazing fortune in the first week.

But I must also acknowledge the possibility that the reason people like the game when I am running is because I am running it, and that I simply will not be able to scale this whole tabletop RPGs thing up at all. It can still serve as seed income for other projects, but it may not be able to serve as the seed audience for anything.