Quote from: One Horse Town;583808This is turning into Desborough country.

Oh, I don't know.

Have we gotten into bastardy yet?

Quote from: FASERIP;583826Oh, I don't know.

Have we gotten into bastardy yet?

Give it time.

Quote from: _kent_;583799JMal has never been a difficult target, he is big softy who never bites back, so dragging the ass out of this pillorying is a little disgusting and the fact that a moderator here, Benoist, is effeminately trolling with passive coaxing is unprincipled and repulsive.

You misunderstand me. My aim here isn't trolling. It's originally to talk about what's happened to that kickstarter, how it fucked up and why, and how the people that funded the project feel about it - to learn some lessons of all things. As a matter of fact, before you even posted on this thread, I contacted Tavis to make him aware of the existence of this thread (he already was). It's different to be in the position of the guy behind the company hosting the forum answering questions in that capacity, and being on some third-party forum answering the same and/or different questions as one of the two parties originally involved.

The stuff about James writing alternate blogs, having very clear-cut opinions about politics he posted all over the internet, being American (I always thought he was Canadian) and the like are things I genuinely did not know so... yeah, I'm curious. Bet I am.

Quote from: Tavis;583820It's hard to tell what's fire and what's smoke on message boards, but the subset of backers who've been pissed enough to contact me personally is less than 1%. If you're in that group, though, send me an email at tavis@autarch.co or call +1 (917) 749-6938.

Nope, I am part of the 99%. I did email you this afternoon about changing my hardbound book from LL to ACKS though. This thread reminded me that I wanted to do that.

Quote from: Benoist;583715It's not EVEN an Autarch-wide pattern because Adventurer Conqueror King was kickstarted and delivered (and awesome), The ACKS companion is soon to be delivered IIRC, so ... this here is really James M's issue at this point.

And let's keep this in perspective: Despite the lying sack of shit screaming at the top of his lungs, the reality of this situation is that Dwimmermount suffered a setback, they regrouped and put together a revised plan of action, and every indication is that they are now meeting their new deadlines. Assuming that holds true, they'll be delivering later this fall after only a few months of delay.

It's not an ideal situation. But it hardly constitutes the apocalypse that the lying sack of shit is trying to make it look like.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;583835And let's keep this in perspective: Despite the lying sack of shit screaming at the top of his lungs, the reality of this situation is that Dwimmermount suffered a setback, they regrouped and put together a revised plan of action, and every indication is that they are now meeting their new deadlines. Assuming that holds true, they'll be delivering later this fall after only a few months of delay.

It's unlikely it will be a fall release according to this Kickstarter update:

QuoteSo a basis for a reasonable projection might be this post-update rate of progress, past the green line. Because that will fall somewhere between the optimistic and pessimistic guesses, it's safe to assume that you won't have the PDF this fall, but neither will you have to wait for more than a year after you backed the project. However, after doing this analysis I don't think we have enough data yet to make a more precise prediction with the degree of confidence you deserve. Although I'd promised a schedule for overall completion this in this week's update, I think it is better to break that promise than to set up expectations for another release date that might not be met.

Quote from: I run with scissors;583761Once again, Jim would have problems with that.  

IRWS

That link is just some guy going on about how marriage requires love to work.

Quote from: misterguignol;583823I'm curious: what is Autarch's role in this if all the money was turned over to James in the end anyway?

Currently it's project management, plus the original plan of handling the crowdfunding and communication with backers (related since both funds and KS updates go through the same account). In future we might handle post-Kickstarter sales and distribution, or we might leave that to Grognardia Games. That decision will depend more on our sense of the market and decisions about which sales channels we want to focus on than anything else.

Quote from: Benoist;583829My aim here isn't trolling. It's originally to talk about what's happened to that kickstarter, how it fucked up and why, and how the people that funded the project feel about it - to learn some lessons of all things. As a matter of fact, before you even posted on this thread, I contacted Tavis to make him aware of the existence of this thread (he already was).

I appreciate the extra nudge to join the thread, Benoist; you are good people and I won't rat you out if my boss wants to know why I was posting here instead of doing the departmental budget .

I've posted about some lessons learned at the Autarch forums and the backer updates. The big two are that setting an unrealistically tight release date can turn a delay into a fuckup and that posting updates whether or not there is any new content to share is annoying for a project that's going well but essential to one that's run into rough waters.

Another thing that's noteworthy is how the culture around Kickstarter has changed rapidly and is still evolving. When we did the first one for ACKS, the terms of service didn't say anything about refunds, and it was easier for a bunch of relative unknowns to use KS to build a company because we weren't competing against guys like Steve Jackson and Reaper who made all their mistakes decades ago.

I'd date the current environment for RPG stuff on KS to the Order of the Stick reprints. Lots of people learned about KS for the first time because of Rich's well-deserved success, and many of these new users came with an expectation that as a rule, backer rewards would be ready to ship as soon as the creator finished counting the money. This is a really extreme case of using KS just to fund the shipping and distribution of an existing product. Most of us also use KS as a way to build an audience, but the distributor and retailer type people I've talked to said that they'd been begging for OotS reprints for years; Rich's KS capitalized on a degree of pre-existing demand that most of us can only dream of.

Autarch's next Kickstarter will be for the Domains at War mass combat rules, which are something like 99% done, whereas the ACKS core rules were on revision 7 out of 37 when we launched their KS. That's in part a reaction to the changed expectations for Kickstarters, but it's also a reflection of the maturity of the company. Thanks to people taking a risk on us when we were just a sprout, we're now in a situation where we can afford to do more of the development before launching the KS. Partially that means having money in the bank, but more importantly it's having built a community of people who we know care about the same things and can crowdsource playtesting and feedback without having to do a new crowdfunding campaign.

Input from backers made ACKS a much better game than it would have been if it had been already written, and thus resistant to input from many-heads-better-than-one, when we did its Kickstarter. However, another lesson for me is that this approach isn't necessarily the right solution for every project. In my sig it says "James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount", which creates some resistance to backer input right upfront. For many people, there's a desire to see the dungeon he created in '09 rather than one designed by committee. In cases like this the benefits of doing the writing in tandem with backer feedback in the post-Kickstarter period often won't outweigh the drawbacks; counterexamples of getting input from readers, like the NPC rosters discussed at Grognardia this week, aren't so substantive that they couldn't have been reworked into a largely complete draft.

Why is Dwimmermount called "legendary" when he only started creating it three years ago and it isn't even finished yet? That'd be like calling a baseball player a Hall of Famer when he's still playing in college.

Quote from: Endless Flight;583847Why is Dwimmermount called "legendary" when he only started creating it three years ago and it isn't even finished yet? That'd be like calling a baseball player a Hall of Famer when he's still playing in college.

Because he's posted a lot about it on Grognardia, and the OSR crowd loved it.

Quote from: Endless Flight;583847Why is Dwimmermount called "legendary" when he only started creating it three years ago and it isn't even finished yet? That'd be like calling a baseball player a Hall of Famer when he's still playing in college.

It'd make sense if baseball was only three years old, right? On the OSR timeline Dwimmermount is ancient, and less of it had been revealed than other early talked-about dungeons like Under Xylarthen's Tower or Mines of Khunmar.

The hype on the Kickstarter page is largely mine; folks at K&K Alehouse correctly perceived that this would be very uncharacteristic for a Canadian, or even someone who's lived over there. By American standards I thought I was being relatively subdued, and it may or may not be sufficient justification that it's all stuff I believe.

Reading Grognardia was one of my main delivery routes for the old-school Kool-Aid (and I think the only one I didn't discover from hanging out at theRPGSite at the time I was a 4E playtester and this was the only place people were saying the things I knew to be true; if memory serves I got introduced to Jeff Rients' blog and Philotomy's musings by their posts here). When I was a player in the Dwimmermount PbP game at the OD&D boards in '09 it already seemed like a legendary thing to me, and when I described the dungeon as long-awaited I was speaking for myself. That seems to have been true for hundreds of other backers, although motivations for pledging to the KS evidently vary.

Quote from: Tavis;583850It'd make sense if baseball was only three years old, right?

I'm actually pretty comfortable saying that anyone talking about a Hall of Fame for a sport that's only three years old sounds pretty ridiculous to me, too.

Quote from: Tavis;583850On the OSR timeline Dwimmermount is ancient

This is, of course, why the self-appointed "OSR" is shit.  But that's for another thread.

Quote from: Tavis;583850It'd make sense if baseball was only three years old, right? On the OSR timeline Dwimmermount is ancient, and less of it had been revealed than other early talked-about dungeons like Under Xylarthen's Tower or Mines of Khunmar.

Dwimmermount doesn't actually exist yet, so why is it on any timeline? That's kind of what I'm getting at with the analogy.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;583835And let's keep this in perspective: Despite the lying sack of shit screaming at the top of his lungs, the reality of this situation is that Dwimmermount suffered a setback, they regrouped and put together a revised plan of action, and every indication is that they are now meeting their new deadlines. Assuming that holds true, they'll be delivering later this fall after only a few months of delay.

It's not an ideal situation. But it hardly constitutes the apocalypse that the lying sack of shit is trying to make it look like.

Still at it? How's your crowd funding project going? It's been a year since it closed. I bet your backers would like what they funded.

Just saying.

The more you call me a sack of shit, the more silly you look. At least I Abe not taken money under false pretenses.

IRWS