[Circle of Hands] Kickstart begins March 15

[Ron Edwards]

Here's the preview. I'll upload the playtest draft and a layout sample right before the launch date, and with any luck Ralph and Matt will set up teaser pages too. All comments are welcome!

[Ron Edwards]

So ... feedback at G+ includes some interesting suggestions from a perspective I do not share. My current inclination is mostly NO on every one. But that doesn't mean they're not right. So I want your feedback on all of these. If you think any of them is right, try to convince me.

1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.

2. Same thing for the page - all about me and then the game, why they should play it, first thing. At the very least, don't talk about heartbreakers at the opening.

3. Add a $1 level and make that the entry point for getting the playtest PDF. The person making this suggestion admitted that their kickstart had gone with this only due to a minor gut feeling that the buy-in mattered, but they did note that nearly everyone who did it upgraded by the end of the campaign.

4. Don't limit it to a single stretch goal at the outset. I am disgusted by stretch goals in general and especially the way that people use sequential stretch goals to whip people into a frenzy of pledging.

5. Put in a caveat about the Inner Circle pledge, so it's not a guarantee. Also make it a higher pledge level.

6. Include an add-on of a bundle of all my games, priced with an odd number. As a cool thing, that's not a bad idea. However, the Sorcerer kickstart soured me on add-ons, which are incredibly hard to manage when it's all done.

7. Add a super-limited edition, signed by me. Which means I have to receive it from the printer, paying for that packing and shipping, then sign the thing, then pack and ship it myself. Good-bye all money gained from the pledge.

8. Other suggestions include making all the copies hardcover, making the system OGL, and adding setting material and maps. I don't see the point of the first considering that all it does is drop my profit margin to nothing (I need this money for the art, God damn it), the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place, and whatever setting material I have or will have added by August 1, is going into the game anyway.

9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.

[Adams Tower]

As to 1 and 2, I can tell you that I will be contributing to this Kickstarter, not because of the bullet points describing your game (they make it sound interesting, but they don't sell it for me.), nor because it's a fixed fantasy heartbreaker, but because it's Ron Edwards's fantasy heartbreaker. That matters to me because Ron Edwards is the guy who wrote System Does Matter, and started me down the path to playing decent games way back when. Also, because he wrote S/Lay w/Me, one of my favorite games.

As to number 9, I can tell you that I absolutely would have contributed to the S/Lay w/Me Kickstarter had I been aware of it, but I wasn't. For someone to pledge money, they have to be aware the Kickstarter's happening, and word of mouth is only one part of advertising.

The others I have no opinion on, though I think the OGL does cover the names for game mechanics, which can be copyrighted, and some of the text describing them, which can also, doesn't it? Not that it matters much. If I wanted to write a game that used Bangs, I'd ask your permission to call them that, and I'd be very surprised if I didn't get it.

[Dragon Master]

To my mind the video should be about the project, and on that front I think it does a good job of serving it's purpose.

On 2, I think that the game should be dealt with upfront, but it might be a good idea to add a brief "who the heck am I" section to it towards the bottom of the description (maybe just above the section about the imprint). While we all know who you are, and while your name still is able to conjure a firestorm on some gaming forums, I run into a surprisingly large number of gamers who've never heard of you, the forge, or TBM.

I definitely disagree with suggestion 3.

6, I'm not a fan of add-ons either, even though I made use of them on the Sorcerer kickstarter. If you were to add a gaming bundle, I'd say you're better off making a pledge level of it.

[Moreno R.]

1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.

You being the "weaker part" is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy,,,  when you do these video you tend to do them without a lot of care about lighting, background, image quality, etc, if you could improve on that they could be stronger....

Said that, can you use more that one video? If you can, this one could be the video at the start of the reclamation project description part (where is important to say that this is your old heartbreaker and there are others), and use instead a video concentrating on the game for the top spot.

2. Same thing for the page - all about me and then the game, why they should play it, first thing. At the very least, don't talk about heartbreakers at the opening.

See above. If you recall, I had a similar reaction at fist:
before: "Ron's old heartbreaker, dusted up and published? Mmmm... no, not really interested..."
After reading the game's description: "Wow, I must play this right now!"

The game description should be on the page, not in a link to a pdf...

Add to this that heartbreaker is used on the net in a negative way (OK, it was not like that in your essays, but a lot of people use it without having read your essays at all...)

3. Add a $1 level and make that the entry point for getting the playtest PDF. The person making this suggestion admitted that their kickstart had gone with this only due to a minor gut feeling that the buy-in mattered, but they did note that nearly everyone who did it upgraded by the end of the campaign.

The only way to see if this is useful or not would be having read data for similar projects done one way or the other, but as a gut feeling, I don't like very much the "pay 1 dollar to see the playtest draft". Has the "people are more willing to playtest a game if the pay for it" idea ever been corroborated with real data? I know that I never, ever did playtest any of the ashcan I brought (it was not calculated, it simply happened. A couple I did not want to play after reading them, other I simply did not understand how to play, others simply I did not find the group or the time) and I ended up playtesting only the ones I got for free....

4. Don't limit it to a single stretch goal at the outset. I am disgusted by stretch goals in general and especially the way that people use sequential stretch goals to whip people into a frenzy of pledging.

About this, it's simply your choice: it's something that works, yes, but if you don't like it, you don't like it.

5. Put in a caveat about the Inner Circle pledge, so it's not a guarantee. Also make it a higher pledge level.

I think that the whole process of turning a hangout conversation into game text could be problematic: how do you think to do it?

6. Include an add-on of a bundle of all my games, priced with an odd number. As a cool thing, that's not a bad idea. However, the Sorcerer kickstart soured me on add-ons, which are incredibly hard to manage when it's all done.

Well, in this case, you already have the pdfs, there is nothing to create or print or ship. If people buy the game they will have a forge bookshelf account in any case, so you will not even have to create it.  I don't know how much work is to authorize a download, but you could even avoid the hassle of doing that game by game by having a separate bundle needing a single authorization.

7. Add a super-limited edition, signed by me. Which means I have to receive it from the printer, paying for that packing and shipping, then sign the thing, then pack and ship it myself. Good-bye all money gained from the pledge.

Maybe you could simply sign a number of numbered cards, ship them to the printer, and have them glued to the frontispiece (I think Bud Plant did this with many books, creating store-exclusive "signer numbered editions". Kitchen Sink did it with their signer hardcover editions).

8. Other suggestions include making all the copies hardcover, making the system OGL, and adding setting material and maps. I don't see the point of the first considering that all it does is drop my profit margin to nothing (I need this money for the art, God damn it), the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place, and whatever setting material I have or will have added by August 1, is going into the game anyway.

The point of the "all hardcovers" goal is that turns everybody who pledged for a softcover into a rabid evangelist for the game, hoping to convince enough people to pledge. And then, if the goal is reached, you get the people who would not have brought a softcover (that they could print themselves with the pdf) but now jump at the only chance they will ever have to have a hardcover for a relatively small price.

It works, I have seen it work, I have seen it work on me on a couple of occasion (I am a sucker for getting a hardcover for the price of a softcover), but
1) See reply to point 4: if you don't like it, don't do it.
2) The weight and bulk of an hardcover would increase the postal expenses too, so the amount needed to reach this goal will have to be high enough to cover that, too.

9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.

Some promotions that would not cost a lot of time (or at least I think so):
- do interviews with gaming podcasts about the game (and don't forget to talk about Dragon genitals, it will get the OSR crowds attention...)
- organize (after the podcasts) a public Google hangout question & answers session answering questions about the game, and then link it into the kickstarter page.

[Dan Maruschak]

1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.

Right now, for me, the most powerful part of the video is from 2:00 to 2:21, from "It's a Fantasy Roleplaying game" to "but everyone one of them is knocked askew in one fashion or another". To me that seems like the cleanest explanation you've given as to what the game is about, and I get a sense of what I'd be getting into if I bought the game. But I always prefer videos where people are trying to be simple and straightforward rather than trying to emulate slick production values, so maybe I'm weird.

9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.

Personally I find standard promotional tactics kind of off-putting. I hate "I'm here to talk about my new game!" interviews, for example. But if there were things you'd be inclined to do anyway, e.g. go on a podcast to talk about a particular topic, there's little downside to timing that sort of activity so you do it concurrently with a crowdfunding campaign to maximize the "get the word out" effect.

[Ron Edwards]

Thanks to everyone! I'll be doing a makeover for the text of the page over the next couple of days.

[Rafu]

the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place,

It's true that lots of people in hobby gaming don't have a clue how copyright laws actually work, and for a time the impact of OGL was probably to muddle up things even worse (though I, for one, was only motivated to learn about how copyright actually works as a consequence of struggling to understand OGL as a 20-yrs old). Also, "OGL" works like a buzzword or logo amongst gamers, while the actual license is a clunky, cumbersome, impractical horror when compared to something like, say, the Creative Commons ones (I'm speaking from the viewpoint of someone releasing most of my works as Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike).

But let's get over the technicalities and try to guess at the point of the (formally incorrect) suggestion...

The point is: people are suggesting you make an open, public invitation to other people to release and circulate their own additions to your game. This is something that was never particularly front-and-center in Forge culture, I think, for a number of quite obvious reasons (such as that a close-knit circle of people who all know each other don't need a public invitation, such as the centrality of the fight for recognition of RPGs as the work of one individual auteur, and for author-owned copyright, feeling somewhat at odds with "the commons" before the fight was indeed won, etc.) but is very healthy and worthwhile on its own rights.
The correct technical way to go is probably not to adopt OGL, sure. I personally believe Dungeon World did it quite right, with the CC-BY text dumped on GitHub. But also look at what Vincent did with AW: literally a public invitation to people to remix and share, with no added formalities, and it worked like a charm.

[Dragon Master]

Rafu: You mean an open public invitation like the one in the Sorcerer text? Because that book was my introduction to the philosophy behind the Forge, and it's pretty up front about encouraging you to create your own mini-supplements for the game.

[Ron Edwards]

I appreciate that! I wonder if anyone else remembers who opened that door. Clinton also deserves credit for doing the same with The Shadow of Yesterday, hence Lady Blackbird and so on.

No one is going to believe me probably, but unless you are lifting blocks of text or using a recognizable depiction (logo style) of a title, all this Open License and GNU and whatnot is totally not necessary. Go ahead and use any components of Sorcerer you want, even use the rules as written, and as long as you aren't straightforwardly plagiarizing or as long as a customer can't mistake your product for Sorcerer/Adept Press itself, then you don't need legal text or license of any kind.

When people finally admit that they want to use (e.g.) TSR D&D stuff or Apocalypse World or whatever as a form of marketing, not influence or inspiration, then we can actually have an honest conversation about all of this. Until then, blah.

... but I do need to face facts, one of which is that people are not going to get this. So do I offer these mechanics as "open license," redundant as that might be? Which only makes me complicit with both ignorance and marketing-centric logic? Fuck.

[lumpley]

Well, the Apocalypse World crowd is overall savvy about copyright & licensing and is already having honest conversations about it. If you compare how Dungeon World vs Monsterhearts vs Monster of the Week vs tremulus treat the "Powered by the Apocalypse" graphic in their book design, for instance, what you'll see is the result of intentional marketing decisions, not superstitions about licensing.

I think you can just continue to be clear about it, people will believe you, and you won't have to be complicit in stupidity.

-Vincent

[Eero Tuovinen]

Wouldn't it be a simple and pleasing compromise to literally promise an "open license" without actually using one of the popular standard licenses? I mean, "license" just means a contract to grant some rights, and an "open license" is a contract open to the public without the need for separate negotiations each time somebody wants to sign up. So you could promise an open license in your Kickstarter, and then just have that license be like a paragraph of text in your copyright statement, and that's that. Something like: "I welcome any interested parties to build upon the work in this book, using the rules or setting concepts to further their own work, all according to best publishing practice and amity among practitioners of this fine art. Specifically, you may consider this an open license for the creation of supplements, expansions or hacks of the game, commercial or otherwise." That's already an "open license" in a sense, even if it doesn't actually grant much in the way of rights that you wouldn't have anyway :D

Of course you would get questions during the funding drive about which license you're planning to use, but those are easy to answer: you're promising an original license, not any specific pre-existing one such as OGL or CC. You could even publish your proposed licensing text for critique in advance, if you felt like it. The point here would be to get to use the magic words "open license" for marketing purposes, but without using unnecessarily vague (CC) or limiting (OGL) standard licenses.

Overall, though, I would myself expect this to be a minor point - won't cause the funding drive to either succeed or fail. There are no doubt a few vocal people for whom an open license is a most significant selling point, but I'd expect most people to either not care or know enough to not care.

[Ron Edwards]

I like the way the Powered by the Apocalypse seems to be working out, and I agree it doesn't seem to have foundered in illusions. Vincent, did you set it up to be explicitly available from the outset, or did it emerge from people doing hacks and thus became a thing which needed some (little) organization from there?

I mean, at this point, hardly anyone knows what the dice engine of Circle of Hands is like, and similar to Apocalypse World, it's very very good for a specific way to play, but not by any means a "universal mechanic." So I don't see much point in billing it as a skinnable or usable or even desirable system without evidence that anyone wants to.

On reflection, I think that's what puzzles me most about the suggestion.

Best, Ron

[Rafu]

Hey, everybody, sure: Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday was my very first rabbit hole into "free culture" (a.k.a. copyleft), in all possible ways, and after going down there I elected to stay. If anybody wants to have a deeper conversation about the history of complicated relationships between Forge culture and free culture, count me in, but I don't think it belongs here and now.

And, sure, "free culture" these days is totally messed up (and probably compromised) with branding, and marketing stunts and stuff. Just like everything else. No big surprise.

And, finally, I agree with Eero this is not going to be a big deal for the crowdfunding campaign. I guess I would love it if such things were key to success, because of what it would imply about the world. But no, that's not the world we're living in.

But a point I really want to address right now...

but unless you are lifting blocks of text or

Ron, since we're talking books... Since RPG design as we know it is distributed through a text medium, and of course this particular project of yours is no exception... THE WHOLE POINT OF FREE LICENSING, the only concrete thing it actually does, is allowing people to re-use your text. Whole blocks of text, probably the whole book, depending on the specific license. Since text is what copyright covers in a game, the only concrete action you can take to make it more "free" by the law is, of course, release the text for other people to use.
If that isn't something you want to deal with, don't.

[Ron Edwards]

Now you're being obnoxious, Rafu. I don't need instruction on licensing. My point is that you could use all the Sorcerer mechanics you wanted without lifting my text - in fact, probably by writing better explanatory text or shifted in some way that's relevant to the vision of your game. Therefore using blocks of my text is a separate decision, e.g., I might want to offer it as a form of promotion, and you might want to do it as a form of association. These are marketing decisions and I see nothing wrong with doing it or not doing it. But in terms of actual game design there's no other point that I can see.

Don't read this as an attack on open licensing. I'm aware that all dialogue about these things is framed as attack/defense, approval/disapproval, endorsement/condemnation. That's not what I'm doing. If I don't make an open license for Sorcerer stuff, it's not because I hate the very idea and disapprove of anyone doing it. The question is what's best for the crowdfunding campaign for Circle of Hands.