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General ACKS Forums Dwimmermount
61

Your posts attempt to explain what is happening by citing your experience managing creative people and their typical traits as well as stating your opinion that Tavis has owned up to the “face value” problem. Your other post mentions that you want the product and are fine with the schedule. My response to you is showing that the cause you cite doesn’t matter and whether or not YOU are happy to wait, others are not and are upset…with reason.

If you are happy to wait how ever long it takes then fine. No one is making you suffer. People who paid based on the expectations that were laid out in the kick-starter, however, have reason to be upset. Your explanations don’t address their valid concerns. That is my point. JM should be ashamed of taking that money and not delivering and not even being in a position to deliver, even had their been no family emergencies. People are not concerned with him being burned out by the very work he was supposed to have mostly done when HEe decided to do the kickstarter. He is NOT a victim. He chose to do something. He took the money. He has not delivered. He has not returned the money. He has not been forthcoming.

I don’t care how creative, overloaded, or whatever he is. He is simply not doing the right thing.

62

+1!

63

I think the irony is that this Kickstarter was so successful that people are expecting JM to treat it as seriously as the rest of us treat our jobs. Presumably Autarch will get a LOT of that $48,000 back in order to pay for production, printing and shipping, but we don’t know that. In the absence of any concrete information, all we know is that JM got a big check four months ago – enough to theoretically pay himself up to $11,000 a month after Kickstarter fees – and is now running one game a week while the book grinds toward completion.

Tavis, given perceptions of Kickstarter as an “investment” platform, I would suggest that future campaigns cost themselves out so people can see what the creative payout is, how much each reward tier costs, where your profit margins are. This level of transparency may not be welcome or even possible given the levels of organization in many game shops, but it would prevent notions that JM is actually earning the highest per-word rate ever awarded in the industry.

(We still have no idea how large this product will be either. We know that he can pump out 5,000 words on a good day, which would have earned him roughly $150 as a freelancer. It does look like a typical blog post “steals” 500 of those words and there’ve been 125 blog posts since the Kickstarter closed, so enough creative juice has gone to the blog to fill a 180-page book. Can we expect more or less from the Dwimmermount books? Hard to say.)

64

(Maybe there’s a synergistic element where X blog posts actually supports Y pages of Dwimmermount production, while X+1 or X-1 is better or worse. Unless any experienced JM managers want to weigh in, I doubt we’ll ever find a “sweet spot” and know for a fact it will never be practical! But if people see the amount of verbiage on Grognardia as even potentially cannibalizing Dwimmermount writing capacity, it’s at least a real potential concern. And if it comes out at the end that more effort went into Grognardia over the last four months than the finished Dwimmermount reflects, it will just make me sad.)

65

Oh man…good thing you guys aren’t video game publishers. The only threads would be about “pre-order scams”. lol

66

Man, the dude is posting levels. Yeah, it’d be nice if I had all the pretty maps and stuff I ponied up for in my hand, but if I downloaded all the sample levels and started running, I’d probably have the product delivered before my players got to the bottom.

67

I'm heartened to see the discussion is continuing to address difficult issues, proving that we can shed some hostility without sacrificing substance. There's an important dialogue going on right now around Kickstarter between creators, backers, and the larger culture, and even when I've backed a project personally and been disappointed with the results I'm still glad to have been an adventurer on this newly opened frontier.

Unfortunately it's been a busy day for me both at my day job and preparing this week's update, so I won't yet go through and address topics that have been raised above. If there's something that needs my urgent attention either call it out specifically in the thread or send me an email or private message. 

I hope the backer update will speak to some of the points that have been raised in this thread. As promised that'll have download instructions for the seventh dungeon level - so that maps and fully-fleshed-out keys for 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4, and 5 are available for backers to read and playtest - and also lay out the post-crisis schedule for overall completion, set the next few internal deadlines, and present an overall table of contents for the book that should help give a clearer picture of the progress to date and what's left to do.

At the end of the project management call James and I both shared our confidence that there's light at the end of the tunnel. There may also be more rocks, but they're unlikely to be bigger than ones other RPG products I've been part of have successfully overcome. If you feel like you've already been irrevocably burned by James or myself I respect your point of view, but if you're on the fence it may help to know that I personally don't feel like my trust in James was foolish or unjustified.

68

When you say you preordered Players Companion and didn't hear anything, what do you mean? We have had playable drafts in player's hands for months. Did you not ever get a copy of the draft?

 

69

Beragon, I don't see anything in my or Autarch's files that matches your username or the email associated with your account. Did you pre-order through Game Salute and/or with a different email? I'm not questioning your identity or trying to avoid responsibility - choosing to partner with Game Salute means that if they dropped your ball it reflects on us - but I can't help solve the problem without more info.

70

Alex and Tavis: I pre-ordered through Game Salute. The same thing happened when I ordered the ACKS rulebook… in that case, I called you guys up (or maybe it was Game Salute) and the person on the other line personally sent an e-mail and basically did what needed to be done so I could get a copy. I missed all your kickstarters, and I’ve refrained from asking for a playtest copy as it seemed that the pdf would be coming out soon… haven’t checked lately to see if the pdf is done.

I’ll check my old receipts to see if a charge was made to my CC by Game Salute. If not, I’ll try running through the process again and if I get no response, I’ll shoot an e-mail, or give you guys a call.

71

You can also call Game Salute, 1.800.459.5516. In the meantime though when I looked at your account to check your email I also gave you access to the Player's Companion download area where you can get the drafts - I just forgot to tell you this!

In our last update to the Player's Companion we predicted that backers would have the PDF this week, with pre-orders coming shortly after. I'm working to see if that can still happen or if we need to announce another delay. One problem with the pre-order system is that we don't have as well-worked-out method of sending updates and communicating with folks as we do with Kickstarter. In future I think we may only take pre-orders for the print copies at the point when the PDF is on sale (and thus at the printer's), or at least wait to open pre-orders until the release date is a lot nearer and clearer.

EDIT: Don't want to derail the thread, but did want to thank Beragon for his patience and say that we got this worked out - his original order wasn't placed at all for some reason, but he reports that "I went ahead and placed the order again. Everything went fine... I received a confirmation e-mail with the order #, as well as download instructions for the sneak preview, almost immediately. "

72

I am not a backer of Dwimmermout; I have followed it, as it is a product that I may purchase when it is finished.

As to the conversation so far, do people have a right to be upset? Yes. Unfortunately the situation is exacerbated because James has declined to directly address the valid concerns. For many people, that layers on a sense of disrespect on the part of the person they have given their money to.

The lessons here are many fold:

  1. People over promise and under deliver. It appears that much of the lower levels of dwimmermount are being created wholecloth - i.e., it is not a “fabled” or “legendary” dungeon because unlike, say, Greyhawk, it does not have legions of players who have experienced it. Note, I am not saying there is anything wrong with this, or that the final product will not be excellent; merely that if what a seller is doing is putting their abstract game theories into hard copy for the first time, present it as such.

  2. Sellers, get your act together before taking money. If part of your notes are in the hands of an old player who has moved away from town, and you don’t know exactly where he is or how to contact him, this is not the time to attempt to monetize your hobby goodwill and credentials. This is basic stuff. People will forgive unforeseen life events - we all have them. They are less likely to forgive having content unavailable because it is written, but the time has not been found to type it up. Things like that are not creative issues, or burnout issues. They are poor administrative handling.

  3. For all of us hobbyists out there who quietly, or not so quietly, hope to transition our home brewed stuff into commercial content to get some extra beer money, you get one shot. One. Your first offering had better under promise and over deliver. Or you risk torching a lot of the community good will that years were spent building.

And this is the thing, really. People have the right to be upset, but none of that should be based around the thought that James isn’t going to be negatively impacted by this. He already is, and will continue to be. You are going to get your dungeon late. It probably won’t be quite what it could be, because there is going to be more pressure now to produce hard copy as fast as possible - I’m assuming that it won’t have as much playtesting as it would otherwise. But James will have longer-term issues, because whereas previously criticism of him was limited to the anonymous corners of the hobby, that is no longer. And for someone who put five years of sweat and time into developing an audience, with assuredly a side hope of turning that audience into a more or less perpetual market, a tarnished “brand” is the fumbling of that goal. As an example, Rob Kuntz is a brilliant game designer, and I will buy almost anything of his that is finished. That is finished. He unfortunately also has a dual rep of being a “creative” who doesn’t do that very often, and almost never on time. He’s one of the true pioneers an visionaries of the hobby, and yet where he should sell thousands of copies, he sells hundreds. The market will always work, eventually. You generally can only burn their expectations once.

For all of us in the future, I think a higher standard will be applied to kickstarters. For companies like Frog God, or others who have years of track record of putting out the goods, more lee way will be given. But I suspect that bloggers who want to monetize their game theories will find that unless the content, sans art, is already in PDF form, the “donations” will be slower in coming. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

All of this said, I expect to purchase a PDF of Dwimmermount when it comes out, presuming it is for sale to non-backers. I am interested in seeing how James’ game theories translate into a large, cohesive product.

73

I’m about where EOTB is.

We (the buying public) need to start viewing the platform as Kickfinisher and not Kickstarter.

See what I did there?

74

Let me get this straight, Tavis. For the record. Other than that burst of activity in weeks 17 and 18, he didn’t lift a FINGER on this project until things hit the fan about a month ago?

75

That's definitely untrue, econobus. One of the early problems was that, instead of having specific deadlines for individual sections, we'd get reports on how work on a whole mass of dungeon levels were proceeding. In a way this makes sense because part of the early work was figuring out global approaches to presentation that affected the writing of all levels (i.e. static vs. dynamic descriptions of what a party finds in a room), but it made it harder to assess where we were on the schedule. Nevertheless I don't doubt that work was in fact proceeding on multiple dungeon keys in parallel, as evidenced by the turnover of levels 3A, 2B, and 3B all within a week of each other.

 

76

I'm in Durham for the annual Autarch meeting this weekend, and we spent some of last night planning our next Kickstarter, for Domains at War. It's really good to be in a position where the content is there and quite thoroughly developed, and we just need funding for production and creating the parts that will have backer input (like writing art orders for illustrations). 

Still, it was the successful Kickstarters for ACKS and the Player's Companion that put us in the position to take this approach, and I hope that there'll still be room in the crowdfunding universe for untested companies like Autarch was. Using a Kickstarter to test whether there is demand for a product before we created all of it was hugely valuable, as was the backer participation in its creation.

77

Well, that’s good to hear, I guess. But how come the word count line flattens out during those months? I understand a family emergency, much less the importance of figuring out a strategic approach early on…but shouldn’t even a little of those months of labor have translated into actual words on file?

Then once the initial levels suddenly materialize, there’s another long plateau. Maybe this is more parallel work, but if so, maybe this thing has the momentum it needs to be completed faster than we hope?

78

The word count line (on a graph that's in the latest backer update, for those following at home) is based only on when we got the draft. Plateaus could reflect points where several levels are being worked on all at once, then when each of them is provided for upload in rapid succession we get a spike on the graph. I've been too busy at my day job to give these data the full statistical treatment I'd thought about, but my eyeball guess is that a regression analysis would better fit the hypothesis of steady effort (with fits and starts) than of long periods of total inactivity.

I do think that we're seeing some increased momentum now; I just uploaded the level 6A draft a week and a half ahead of schedule, and James says he is on a roll and plans to ride it for all it's worth. I think that getting the PDF done in 2012 is within the realm of possibility, but even at best it seems more likely to be in the winter than the fall.

79

I just wanted to say although I won’t be pledging for another one of his KS projects in the future, I have been impressed by how Autarch and you specifically have handled this. I honestly would not be shocked if Dwimmermount still isn’t out a year from now, but at least you’ll have tried on your end.

Still, looking at the difficulty that EGG had in translating Castle Greyhawk into a gaming product form, when presumably he had the whole thing done (I’ve seen the pictures of him running it with that binder), I do want to cut the author some slack. But then reading some of his posts at his blog, it can be a bit irritating.

80

Of course, with video game pre-orders, you don’t generally pay upfront.

Except of course with KS. I imagine a few projects there will have trouble. One that I pledged for, a PC game called Haunts, the creators decided a month after the KS ended that a single player mode with a story was “no fun” and scrapped in favor of a multiplayer only game. Which wasn’t at all the focus of the KS. Only $5, but still a little irritating.

Still, WL2 and Shadowrun Returns are making solid progress, and the only other RPG related KS I’ve done is on schedule, due out in October (it had its KS in July, but he had his manuscript already done, just needed the art and layout)