lumpley games' 2010

[Chris_Chinn]

Hey Vincent,

I remember you saying that you priced DitV so that you'd get $10 profit per sale.  Is that still true, and is that something you've mostly followed with your games?

Chris

[lumpley]

Not exactly.

What I've done until recently is set my physical book price to my pdf price plus my production costs, so that I make the same profit whether you buy the book or the pdf. I've thought of this as the actual price of the game, "and you can have me bind and print it for you if you want, for just the cost of doing so." I'm rethinking that now - it turns out that it reflects my side of the transaction just fine, but misunderstands important considerations on my customers' side.

One of them is "iTunes pricing," where there comes to be an accepted price for something regardless of its qualities or quality - a song costs $.99, a TV episode costs $1.99, no matter what song, no matter what episode. I'll be damned if I'm going to accept "an rpg pdf costs $5," but standardizing my pdf prices to $5, $10 and $15 seems like a realistic thing to do, even if in my heart I think that Apocalypse World is worth 20% more than Dogs in the Vineyard, so ought to be $18 instead of $15.

For Apocalypse World in print, I'm more free to charge Dogs' value + 20% + production costs.

-Vincent

[lumpley]

In a Wicked Age, 2008

Early in 2006, Clinton R. Nixon unearthed the first game I ever made public, pre-kill puppies for satan, which was called the Cheap & Cheesy Fantasy Game. He took a cool feature of it and made it into a cooler web database & query, now offline, but much like this, which I based on it. Playing around with Clinton's oracle inspired me to design In a Wicked Age. You can see its inception here, and here is a fun rpg theory post that followed it.

Everything about In a Wicked Age's design was there from the beginning, pretty much, except its resolution rules. They went through at least a couple of revisions, with long periods between where I just wasn't satisfied. By publication, the game had been in playtest for a year and a half, probably close to a hundred sessions' worth, but the final resolution rules had been in the game for only the last 10%.

I gave it its debut, unusually, at Dreamation 2008, because that's when it was ready. I paid for its initial print run of 250 with preorders.

-Vincent