Friday, June 4, 2021

Random Links for 6/4/21

- I'm more than a little surprised at the relatively small number of backers of Doug's latest Kickstarter. He discusses it here. It feels like the main complaint about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy / GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is that they aren't zero-to-hero, and don't sufficiently support lower-point play. Yet when support is out there - like Doug's Kickstarter - a relatively small group of people jump in on it. So maybe it's a vocal minority that feel like the line needs more low-point support but there isn't a lot of monetary support for it overall.

- When I was younger this is what I visualized my basement having - a big table to play minis battles on, like this:

Shakos and Bayonets

- Am I missing any GURPS blogs? I periodically look around for GURPS-centric blogs to (possibly) add to my blogroll. Are there any not on the sidebar of my page that I need to know about?

14 comments:

  1. "So maybe it's a vocal minority that feel like the line needs more low-point support but there isn't a lot of monetary support for it overall."

    There is a lot of 'vocal minority' when it comes to online discourses, but GURPS especially I've noticed. Also, Doug kinda jumped on a thing that a few blogs have already tackled and already had //official// support in the form of DF 15 Henchmen.

    I have no idea what the other vocal minorities want out of a "zero-hero" supplement, but that's not what I want, I wanted better modular building blocks and I suspect that Delver's To Go will give me very close to what I want, so I backed it.

    I mean I've already half made my own 'modular building blocks' templates, so if I wasn't so lazy DTG wouldn't be offering me anything, and there's the other rub. Most GURPS GMs worth their salt have no use for this supplement, because they'll do the work themselves over a long weekend.

    I'm not worth my salt, I get distracted and instead of sitting down and pounding out ten-15 templates in an afternoon, I end up doing 1 template, three new race rewrites, half a dozen cultural lenses, two new geographical maps, an inventory listing tweak, and a history overhaul for the campaign. Or I'll go on a google wikipedia hunt looking for one thing but sidetracking into youtube videos for a few hours. I suffer a bad lack of focus sometimes.

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    1. I don't know about "Most GURPS GMs worth their salt" - these kind of things take thought, and production time, and review to work. You could spend a long weekend doing it, if you do nothing but write, and know what you want to have come out of it. It's non-trivial work, as your own example shows. Writing a useable system you can hand off to your players to use is tough. At that point, you may as well publish it. DF15 came out of me needing something, and even so it took not-insignificant time to get it done even with Sean Punch doing half of it.

      I just feel like that if people

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    2. I didn't realize my comment was cut off. Let's finish that thought.

      I just feel like that if people asking for a simple, intro-level zero-to-hero system were a sizeable portion of the purchasing public, more of them would have gone in on the Kickstarter. It's non-trivial work to do one, and yet here we are, with a relatively small group of people who bought zero-to-hero DFRPG stuff compared to the total number of people who bought start-at-250 stuff.

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    3. Unless you are very steeped in GURPS lore you would never know 250pt DFRPG characters aren't zeroes. So the subset of people who could want such things has to include people who have 100-150pt etc GURPS 4e characters in mind in their comparison set

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  2. Is it the main complaint? I admit before this KS occurred I had never really thought of this as something DFRPG needed (I backed it despite this as Doug, Kevin and you all three have a strong track record of fabulosity).

    To me the most obvious compelling lack for the Nordlond setting is rules for pet dragons to allow DFRPG How to Train Your Dragon since it is Viking focused.

    My most recent in game issue is the lack of armor divisor on spells. A guy swinging a penetrating sword might hit 5d+11 AD 2, but even allowing Weapon Master for jet spells you can only roll 6d+12 or so on a flame jet so critters with higher DR can shrug it off. I've really been musing about that. Maybe the solution is not to use critters with higher DR?

    But since I want to emphasize the party is no longer low level losers in DFRPG (most of them solidly North of 500, some of them closer to 600 than 500) I really want them fighting stuff that would just roll their eyes at a low level scrub smacking it for 3d+6 or so, so I've encouraged 'hit like a truck, hit with penetrating, or hit a weakness . . . Pick at least 2 of 3'



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    1. It feels like a main complaint. The whole "zero to hero" thing is embedded in hobby and it comes up often enough. The idea that DF is overpowered led to an "On the cheap" home-grown approach and informed a bit of the zero-to-hero advice in DF15, too.

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    2. Could be. I admit I have always felt 250pt starting DFRPG characters felt plenty enough like starting level losers, and several of the published adventures feel distinctly non epic and suitable for random scrubs

      Hall of Judgment feels pretty epic. You All Meet in an Inn, I Smell a Rat, Grave of the Pirate Queen or Hydra Island don't feel very epic and much removed from starting level.

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  3. I wanted to back his KS very much. The idea is exactly what I've been looking for. Unfortunately, the timing meant that I simply didn't have the money in the budget (and probably won't for a couple of months at least). Nothing that could be done about it. However, I am surprised that it didn't do better than it did. I have some thoughts on the matter, but your blog's comment section is probably not the best venue to present them. They're pretty pessimistic, but with room for alternative interpretations.

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    1. There will be another opportunity for picking up DtG in an upcoming Bestiary and Ready to Raid project. I have to finish up this one, but after that, my attention very much goes to figuring out what folks actually will buy, and seeing about delivering a series of rapid-fire projects, at a faster rate than what I've been doing recently.

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    2. My financial footing is also a large part of why I haven't backed anything GURPS related for about a year now. Knowing Doug's usual level of candor, it will be interesting to see his thoughts in a year once he has hindsight to aid in the autopsy of the Delvers Kickstarter.

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  4. faoladh has the right idea: the Kickstarter wasn't priced to draw a large number of backers, but rather to make sure it funded. From Doug's standpoint, it has to be that way. However, there was no low buy-in option (which would be just Delvers to Grow without all the pregen character PDFs), which minimized the number of backers. Doug told me on Discord that he crunched the math and couldn't do the project with a low buy-in point so I don't doubt he made the right decision, but this is the flip side of it.

    In terms of number of backers, this Delvers to Grow isn't at all out of line with the other similar DFRPG Kickstarters. Dungeon Fantasy Companion 2 got 536 backers, and it had a print book with a $20 pledge. Nordlond Sagas got 420 backers and it required $60 to get a physical product (as opposed to D2G's $70). Dungeon Fantasy Magic Items 2 got 555 backers with a print book at $18. Hall of Judgment got 525 with a print book at $30, Citadel at Norðvorn got 600 with a print book at $35. So the Kickstarter market size for one of these books is about 400-600, depending on pricing, book desirability, and other factors. I assume the economic problems owing to COVID-19 and an overdue recession don't help right now.

    I do presume the market for more monsters is higher since Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2 got 1,019 backers. Part of the draw there was the reprinted DFRPG boxed set, but 79% (802) of the pledges didn't involve folks buying the boxed set, leaving the printed book at $20 as the main draw.

    For reference, the 2020 PDF Kickstarter got 2,781 backers and the 2021 Pyramid Kickstarter got 1,569 backers, which had PDF-only pledges starting at $3 and $6 respectively. If you want those numbers, you need those prices.

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  5. I backed all of them at print level.

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    1. I'm a 24th century digital boy... so I don;t have bookshelf space anymore for things like this. I have no 4e books in anything other than digital except DFRPG, because there was no digital option for the Kickstarter.

      And had I known then what I know now, I never would have backed DFRPG at all. I'd have waited for the digital release since they updated DFRPG and have //refused to errata it//.

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