[Sorcerer Kickstart] Money over, work starts

[Troy_Costisick]

Congrats on getting over 700 backers, Ron.  Was that more than what you were expecting?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Troy,

I had no expectations. I'd not only never backed a Kickstart, I'd never signed in or followed any ... in fact, hard as this may be to believe, I had never even visited the site. I had not even seen a kickstart project, any project, until the day I clicked on "New project" myself.

On the plus side, maybe I was able to enjoy the process more this way. On the minus, there were details of how to manage the interface from my side, and of what backers can and cannot do, which tripped me up more than once.

I still can't say one way or the other whether the kickstart made a "lot" or a "little." It met my needs for art as far as I can tell, and yet since it was also a pre-order project, isn't going to make me a lot of (or maybe any) money. If it's not obvious, a pre-order project does not make more money because the total is high. If I'm not mistaken, neither Flying Buffalo nor Evil Hat will realize much more profit than me, despite their projects grossing so much higher. We're all pre-order projects, so every backer's pledge is eaten by piranhas the minute the backer hits the button.

What matters more is promotion, and on that basis, I can say this project was an incredible success so far. The dashboard feature available to me showed the internet location from which any backer arrived at the project, which revealed just how broad and diverse the internet penetration of "Ron's running a Kickstart" went - and here I mean consequential penetration, i.e., people in that spot went "ooh!" and came over to back it. It lets me know that my work isn't irrelevant, "old," or "dead." Aside from making me feel good, it's also crucial information affecting what I want to do with Adept Press.

I say "so far" above, because the promotion and general recognition (or re-recognition) of my work are only going to become concrete when people see that I'm making good with the rewards.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

So let's run down the tasks I'm looking at. The main one is simply waiting for the art, finalizing edits and layout, and getting all the files and destination addresses squared away for the printer. But there's not much I can do about that day to day, until it hits.

In the meantime ...

1. Make more drinks. I have a bunch of pretty good ones so far and am staying on the job. As a minor point, last night's attempts ended up too watery. Time to investigate why that is. I'm thinking maybe I should start posting a couple showpiece recipes at the Adept site right away.

2. Working on the one-sheets. This document is shaping up fast. One fun aspect of it is making up a character of my own for each one, which is very helpful in the analysis. For example, at first glance the Toon Town Confidential one seemed all over the place, but making a character for it was easy and fast.

3. Getting to Finland. Yeah, I could use Skype or something, but as it happens, travel to the Nordic countries is something I often do anyway, and this time, I think I'll see what the eastern side of the Baltic looks like. So James and I are at least tentatively planning on hanging out in person! (And no, I didn't make enough slush money in the Kickstart to pay for the trip. As if.)

4. The balking document - this is going to be easy to write after the preparation stage, but that preparation is a bit laborious. As it turns out, the more input I get from anyone, the better, so if you think you've run into this problem, go right ahead and email me all about it. Ideally, I'd like to have several short pieces to include almost verbatim, like the testimonies in Sex & Sorcery.

5. The Ed Heil art project is going full blast, with many people divided into groups, each group settling on the two key statements as if we were going to play, and then they make characters. More than one is done already! I thought Ed would be a little horrified at how many people ended up choosing this (via stacking) but apparently he's excited about it.

6. The instructional videos are easy to set up for content, but I'm no technical wiz and am still figuring out how to edit the footage effectively (you know, the part that all those vidcasters out there seem to do effortlessly), as well as digging out my old digital camera to shoot stuff a webcam can't, like rolling dice. I figure I'll clear the desk of a couple of the other awards and then get to this one in earnest.

7. Play-group get-togethers with me seem well enough in hand; people are apparently putting together groups before nailing down dates, so I'm waiting on that.

8. And last, I'm waiting on those playtest games to arrive.

So overall, it looks fun. It's weird to have both the Sorcerer annotations and Shahida written and generally in hand as far as production goes. None of the tasks above are so overwhelming, and therefore my working-game-in-progress mind is much freer than it's been for about five years.

Best, Ron

[Christoph]

Thanks for this update, it's interesting to learn what a post-kickstarter might look like. Just to motivate your fans out there who spread the news, you mentioned you could see from where people arrived at the site: could you give us an example of news posted somewhere and how that led people to come and pledge for your project? I'm trying to get an idea of how effective such kinds of news are, and what the popular networks are (if there are any).

[Ron Edwards]

If I were competent with this thing on my lap,* I'd be able to make a little GIF out of the dashboard feature for Kickstart projects. It's a table showing what site people clicked to your Kickstart from when they pledged, whether that site was Kickstart or external, how many people pledged when arriving from there, how much money you made from those pledges in total, and what percent of your total that money represents. This feature is active throughout the project, too.

For example, I know that 6 pledgers had clicked from forums.somethingawful.com, totally $183 in pledges, accounting for 0.68% of my total. That may sound trivial, but it's not - I'd never heard of somethingawful.com, and now I know that people not only recognize my work there, but are interested enough that they treat the site as a source of news about it. The dashboard may play a big role in my plans for promotion over the next year.

The dashboard also showed me that social media are on my side - I don't use Facebook or Twitter or anything else like them, but a lot of people who like my work do, and a lot of the people who follow them came over and pledged.

Again, I'd love to go click-click and simply show you what the final dashboard looks like, but I don't know how.

Best, Ron

* Heh.

[Christoph]

On your keyboard you might have a key labeled "PrtSc", or "Print Scrn" or something. If the kickstarter charts fit on one screen, you can press that key, then open your favourite image programme (say, Gimp) and then "paste". You'll get an image with the state of the screen at the time of hitting the magic key. Then you can trim it (usually a rectangular selection tool to select the relevant area, then copying and pasting into a new file will do the trick) and save it in the desired format, upload and bask in the crowd's fanatical cheering as you impart your hard-earned wisdom upon them (that'd be me, at least).

[Ron Edwards]

OK, it got a little distorted in Paint, but I think it might be readable:

[lumpley]

Neat!

[Ron Edwards]

Clearly breadth matters. Some sources are obviously more directly rewarding than others, but no single source was the be-all and end-all of the Kickstart's return. In fact, I suggest that currently invisible second-order effects are probably occurring, whereby someone might (for instance) see it on Facebook, then go by Story Games, see it again, and then say "Oooh, let me click on that." Which is all the more reason to consider as wide a net as possible ... of course, that wasn't a strategy on my part. My single strategic pre-Kickstart move, as recommended to me by someone here, was to put it up as a preview and float it at Story Games, which was extremely successful. Not only did it make simply for a better Kickstart project, it also got the word out about what kind of project it was, i.e., the crucial phrase "a Sorcerer Kickstart, not the Sorcerer Kickstart," which probably led people to say the right things when they went on to tweet and whatever.

It so turns out that Allen Turner, whose Ehdrigor Kickstart just concluded, and I are both profs at the same university, and we finally got around to meeting through the coincidence of running our projects at the same time. We've been freely sharing our concerns and experiences with the whole thing, and a number of really interesting points have arisen ... or at least I think so, at least for those people I'm most concerned with, the genuine grass-roots I-gotta-game people. What can crowdfunding really do for them? What important points can be staked out to help?

I know there are already some great analyses and thoughts about this available, including a good Forge thread just before the site closed, a good RPG.net thread and associated articles, as well as some that were linked in my earlier threads here. But I can add a little, I think, in part because what I have in mind will be pretty focused. I'll toss out some of the thoughts involved right here over the next few days.

Best, Ron

[Miskatonic]

Ron,

FYI, this seems to be the point that Sorcerer gets mentioned on somethingawful.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3492577&pagenumber=52&perpage=40#post411158269

[Ron Edwards]

What's your interpretation of that, Larry?
Best, Ron

[Miskatonic]

Heh.

Something Awful is a long running, uh, "comedy" website with an active, paying (!) user base. They're one of the leading promulgators of stupid/amusing memes which circulate on the Web. The pioneer of that sort of thing, really. (Here's one undergraduate's essay on the subject.) It's the sort of thing Ron Edwards might go running and screaming in the opposite direction from.

While they aren't an RPG site, per se, they have a series of articles called WTF D&D!? which lovingly goes through old RPG texts and makes fun of them. And they have a popular sub-forum dedicated to tabletop RPGs. I don't really follow it, but from time to time I've followed links to it for interesting actual play posts.

So the bit in question is some kind of long megathread covering the latest in interesting crowdfunded RPG projects. Presumably, everyone participating has self-selected for interest in throwing money at cool Kickstarter projects.  A user named "Evil Mastermind" comes in on Jan. 4 and reports the Sorcerer Kickstarter, and comes back a few times to update on the status of the project. The resulting comments are not necessarily flattering, which probably goes to show that any publicity is good publicity.

The discussion is quickly drowned out by an unrelated heated discussion of whether misogyny in miniatures gaming is cool or not, but a bit of discussion of Sorcerer manages to get in anyway, like this lovely endorsement:

From what I can tell, Sorcerer is a landmark in storygaming, which hasn't been available in PDF previously. That's why I've backed it. Also, on another forum I frequent Chris Gardiner (who's been writing for Failbetter Games and is behind Below) wrote the following:
quote:

    I need to jump in on this. Sorcerer is an amazing game, and it'll benefit from the commentary the new edition adds.

    One of its supplements, Sorcerer & Sword, is not only a great expansion, but is a brilliant examination of the Sword & Sorcery genre. It talks about the different phases of S&S writing, illustrating each with short, punchy discussions of the genre's best examples (many of which are all-but forgotten, like David Mason's entirely perfect The Sorcerer's Skull). It's like a map of a lost country. Without one it's hard to find the good stuff amongst the dross, but Sorcerer & Sword showed me how to navigate it and kindled my love of the genre.

A lot of pairs of eyeballs were following that thread, and six of them who clicked through decided Sorcerer sounded interesting enough to pay for. So, in sales, it always behooves to cast as wide a net as possible, as the places you'll find potential customers will always surprise you. Also, yay for organic word-of-mouth sales.

[Ron Edwards]

Thanks! My take is that the "swine" term in the initial post is sarcastic toward the user of that term regarding me or the Forge, and that the post should be understood as what it is: an announcement of significance. I agree about the eyeballs and about Chris' post - people are impressed when someone represents without any bullshit, and also when they click through and see something that looks rational, or in my case, like a damned good deal.

The point that really interests me is that no one had to explain who I was or what the game is in the announcement, at a site notable for wide & various participation.

(Thought: a movie based on Sorcerer could use that for a title quite well, "A Damned Good Deal." Or at least a catch-phrase in it.)

For the record, I thought the few things I clicked on at somethingawful were both intelligent and hilarious, and I thought their rules & regulations were surprisingly close to those of the Forge. I fled fast from the site because I saw serious danger of getting sucked in.

Best, Ron

[PhilKalata]

Ron,

Most likely, given the sense of humor that pervades SomethingAwful, the term swine was directed at the forum users themselves. The community's most commonly used self-decriptor is "goon" and the community tends to take perverse delight in self-identifying as "terrible people" or whatever.

-Phil

[KarlM]

I read Swine as a reference to RPGPundit's use of the term on theRPGsite.  Term invented circa 2007: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=4771

I read the use of it in that specific post on somethingawful as proud adoption/inversion. Cos the Pundit is not taken too seriously outside his own lair.