So, is this a complete bust or what?

Five days left.  I believe Rients' and Baker's are the closest to funding, but I haven't checked the whole scoreboard recently.

Quote from: Gib;564951So, is this a complete bust or what?

Something will be funded so I guess not a complete bust. Still, only say 3 projects funded out of 19 suggests the structure was pretty fucked up. I would have loved to see Crawford's module funded but that appears unlikely. Hopefully he publishes it himself through Sime Nomine.

Still, at the end of the day most projects won't fund and a lot of people will get their money back so no real harm done. The only people left holding the bag are those who tipped high level pledges into the few modules that do fund and even there if only say Reints and one other gets up they will get some significant store credit.

Lessons learnt?

Scale back the ambitions of the project. The 6k mark to fund a module was on the high end of expecting reasonable success. The sheer number of projects was overwhelming. Also there were too many LotFP campaigns too close together. I thing a measure of goodwill has been exhausted.

Quote from: Fiasco;564970I thing a measure of goodwill has been exhausted.

This was kind of what I took away from it as well. I just looked at the score board, and while i think its possible that Rients and Baker will fund, I do not think it is a done deal.
As a rule I neither buy adventures nor preorder product, so this was never for me, but I feel a bit sorry for all the participants. It all seems a little embarrassing, really, and I wonder if the well has been poisoned.

Jim Raggi overshot it. Perhaps it was his intent to test the limits and up the ante all the way until things would break. I do not know for sure, but it certainly feels like it.

Wow, not a single one got funded?  I was thinking the Desborough one might go if Satine incuded art of herself.

I think people were saying "Man I like xxxxx, but I sure don't think he's worth 6k for a fricking OD&D module."

Also, 160 dollars for an exclusive 64-page Raggi module never offered anywhere else? WTF.  This seems like fishing for the Acaeum crowd, Collector Prices for things that don't have the production value to justify it.

Jeff's is so close.  We should toss in, he's one of us.  :cool:

Quote from: Gib;564974This was kind of what I took away from it as well. I just looked at the score board, and while i think its possible that Rients and Baker will fund, I do not think it is a done deal.
As a rule I neither buy adventures nor preorder product, so this was never for me, but I feel a bit sorry for all the participants. It all seems a little embarrassing, really, and I wonder if the well has been poisoned.

Cough up 5 bucks for Rients you cheap bastard.

Jeff is guaranteed to fund. Only $600 to go. The next closest is Baker and he is still 2.5k off. Possible but no sure thing. The higher funding levels resemble a ponzi scheme in that they only reward you if tons of money flows in at the bottom. If it did, everyone would be a winner but sadly we are seeing that LotFP's base is not very broad. And it's an OSR success story.

Still let's celebrate success. Jeff Rients rocks and has managed to fund his
module!  In doing so he has outperformed a pretty decent field of writers by some margin.

Kickstarter projects are going have to be careful with the "Ultimate Rich Guy Reward" levels, particularly with exclusive content that will only be available at certain levels.

A lot of video and console game pre-orders have bonus content.  For a while there, the bonus content was spread amongst all the different vendors, so even though I usually buy through Steam, I would have preferred the reward from Direct2Drive.  That has lessened and all the bonus rewards are eventually available as added content.  "Collector's Editions" usually have additional, non-game stuff that collectors are interested in, and don't have exclusive content that normal customers will never get.

I am a big fan of Necromancer Games products, I have damn near everything they ever published hardcopy and several versions of Rappan Athuk.  When I looked at the Kickstarter and saw the exclusive levels of Rappan Athuk that would only be available at the $250 level, my first reaction was...
"You know what?  Fuck you guys!"

I recovered a minute or two later, wished them well and moved on, but that initial reaction was there.

Collector Prices for Collector Bennies and Collector Production Level works, Collector Prices for actual content, that can get you the wrong sort of reaction.

The hardcopies are what, $30 a piece?  That's more than I like to spend on a good day, even if I like the author's stuff and some of the money ends up in the pocket of the layout guy, who's a pal.  

I still think if this had been a "drop $60 for a hardcover with four of these adventures in it" it would've been a different story.

Quote from: Fiasco;565003Jeff is guaranteed to fund. Only $600 to go. The next closest is Baker and he is still 2.5k off. Possible but no sure thing. The higher funding levels resemble a ponzi scheme in that they only reward you if tons of money flows in at the bottom. If it did, everyone would be a winner but sadly we are seeing that LotFP's base is not very broad. And it's an OSR success story.

Still let's celebrate success. Jeff Rients rocks and has managed to fund his
module!  In doing so he has outperformed a pretty decent field of writers by some margin.

I'm totally rooting for Rients to fund; I guess I was just thinking that everyone that was going to contribute has probably done so, which is why I remain unconvinced as to the inevitability of it all. However, I don't know shit.

Quote from: CRKrueger;564989Cough up 5 bucks for Rients you cheap bastard.

As I said, not for me. To be quite honest, this whole project and KS in general go against my personal DIY philosophy.

While driving out to the store just now, it occurred to me what I WANTED this KS to be.

Instead of a mess of very different adventures from a bunch of different authors, I would've been more enticed by a single product that was collaborative.  Not "here's an adventure each by A, B, C, D, and E" but instead: "We got A, B, C, D, and E together for a teleconference, followed by some furious email exchanges, and another teleconference.  They sketched out some awesome ideas for a hexcrawl and associated adventures.  A's going to do the overall hexcrawl; B, C, D, and E are each writing semi-linked adventures so you have the makings of a whole campaign.  It's round-robin craziness as these authors toss ideas back and forth and work on each other's adventures!  Also, F and G are on board to do illustrations and cartography, and I twisted H's arm to do the cover.  THIS JUST IN: the ever-awesome I and J have agreed to write up small adventure sites to place on the hexcrawl map in addition to everything else!"

Or to put it in musical metaphor:  Raggi offered me a compilation album.  I wanted a supergroup.

It's $20 for the print and PDF of an module, postage included. That is pretty cheap. The snag is that au given module needs 300 backers at that level to fund so most liked it won't.

@Aos

With crowdsource the bulk of the money comes at the end. Before that everyone is waiting and seeing, especially with ones structured like this where the higher pledge levels only make sense if a half dozen or more modules have already funded.

@Vectorsigma

Your idea rocks! Not sure how workable at the end of the day but less projects with bigger outputs would have been interesting.

http://www.lotfp.com/RPG/grand-adventure-campaign

Full of fail.  This is strike two for many of these projects as there was the hardback go around before.  

TY Jim for showing us how not to do things, that can be an important lesson maybe moreso than learning from success.  Rappan Attuk had an average backing level of $245 which is really silly, but hey it made 240k+!

Diversified projects, both vertical and horizontal seem to not work.  (The hardback was funded though and I suppose that was the main point of the first go round).  

Focused projects, with ever escalating and self reinforcing rewards= good times.

Now, what James can try as the third pitch is an monthly subscription using the same projects.  I wonder if that would catch on?   For a monthly to be worthwhile, he would prob need 36k I suppose.  Would be neat.   He is right at around 20k in backing as it is, but he doesn't have much monetum to go too much higher it seems.

With these projects, you gotta keep the momentum up!