There is no try! Only do!
The story of Castle Greyhawk is one of the things I'd love to see Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary unravel.
I’m curious as to how many of those who are concerned about the progress of this project have actually built a megadungeon?
1 Like
And is among the reasons I increased my sponsorship from $25 to $150 today.
Allan, I think the question to ask here is how many people paid money to receive a megadungeon and thought they were getting their hardbacks in August.
(Thanks for the reply, Tavis. Onward.)
Econobus, I’m not debating when we were promised hardbacks, and yes I was expecting a hardback last month too, but delays are sometimes inevitable. I am merely saying that when building a megadungeon it takes time to write hundreds of room descriptions, not to mention miscellaneous information.
Sure. It’s a lot of work and over 1,000 gamers contributed a lot of money to help it happen. I just failed to see how questioning their experience helps address their concerns. If anything, I’d almost read it as an attempt to direct blame on them for expecting the product to be ready when it was promised. But I know you didn’t mean that.
Maybe nobody who contributed any of that $48,000 had ever worked on a megadungeon before. But I bet you matching funds each and every one of them had purchased a game and gotten it when they expected it. They lived up to their end of the bargain. They’ve already paid. Responsibility is elsewhere now.
And it’s OK to try to figure out what’s going on with the parties who are responsible now. That’s what I’m doing, after all! But I’m not sure what it buys us to challenge the backers. They did their job.
I’ll start off by saying I didn’t contribute to this project. I discovered ACKs and Autarch well after all of these kickstarters had closed. However, I have kicked a number of projects, including some for which I’ve received the final product.
There’s two things going on here: backers absolutely should be asking hard questions about what is going on with the product they backed, overseeing the process, and trying to suss out how things are going. That is the role of the funder of a project: to ensure that they are getting the work they paid for.
However, there is something very different which is buying a finished product. By the time you see a finished product on a bookshelf, or even an amazon product listing (including pre-orders), a lot of OTHER people have assumed a risk. They have attempted to predict market interest and have put their money up front in an attempt to produce a product which they can sell at a markup. In turn, the buy has the opportunity to look at this finished product, either in-store or on-line, and can simply walk away if it doesn’t appeal to them, meaning the risk the producer of that product took has not paid off.
You, as the kickstarter backer, have become that producer, and in a perfect world the risk becomes almost 0 because crowdfunding helps people connect with products that they want instead of settling for a product that somebody made because it will sell well. However, every time you put money into kickstarter you are taking a risk that it will not pan out. Either it won’t be done the way you like or something will have been over-promised or deadlines will be missed. The people who can nail this sort of stuff don’t need kickstarter, the traditional outlets already work for them.
In a round-about way, what I am suggesting is that the backers posting in this thread should use the language of a backer, someone who has put money UP FRONT in an attempt to see a project TO COMPLETION, rather than somebody who has tendered funds in exchange for a finished product. We are not talking simply about the vagaries of a seller on e-bay not properly describing their product, and it seems that using that kind of verbiage is just getting some people worked up into a froth when it isn’t entirely appropriate to be THAT angry. Absolutely, be angry about a project that is missing milestones, but not angry like someone leaving a 1-star review for an e-bay seller.
I’m not blaming other contributors, merely trying to get people to look at the issue from the other side. Sure it’s easy to blame James for trying to kickstart an unfinished product. If it was a finished product he could have just slapped a price tag on it and sold it at what ever price he wanted.
I have a stake in this product too, I was one of the people who shelled out the money for the Wilderness Philosopher Level, but guess what I’m not, worried because progress is still being made.
It’s an unavoidable fact that the original release date has come and gone and that for a while there were no updates, but Tavis has been doing a great job of updating us since he realized people were upset with the lack of communication.
Sure it would be great if James would chime in more than he has; either here, on his blog, or on the kickstarter page, but you know what, I can forgive him his silence so long as the drafts, and layouts keep coming.
The point is that this was a kickstarter, not a finished product, anyone who contributed money and thought that the product was finished or even publish ready (nowhere I looked could I find any mention of publish ready of any implication of such) was very naive. even if we treat kickstarter as a “prepay service” release dates get pushed back all the time. Look at the video game industry.
All I’m saying is as long as there is progress is being made and Dwimmermount is produced (albeit a bit later that we’d like) we shouldn’t be throwing unfounded accusations.
Have to disagree, Jard. By shouldering risk, producers get to share in the profits. Backers don’t get to share in the profits – all they get is their promised rewards OR a refund – so the only risk I can see them taking on is that of being led to delay asking for that refund.
eBay has created surprisingly draconian rules to punish those inaccurate product descriptions, but in theory anyone who complains within the dispute window can get a refund. I hope the community can police itself so that kind of thing isn’t required on Kickstarter, but that’s on my optimist days.
I admire what Tavis has done to allow the backers to own their concerns and make a rational, adult decision to wait for the product or ask for a refund.
He didn’t shrug and wrap this $48,000 project in the flag of previous game company delays. Sure, the gaming “business” is a disaster of broken promises, blown deadlines and outright failure. He isn’t willing to settle for that. He wants to do better.
As far as I know, he hasn’t even entertained the possibility of failure. The only people who seem willing to take a loss here are the project’s self-avowed fans – and that kind of self-sacrificing attitude is noble in some situations and disturbing when they suggest that others should adopt it or that “that’s just how Kickstarter works, you don’t get it.”
Under Kickstarter rules, no backer takes on one cent of financial risk except by voluntarily renouncing his or her legal rights. You are ENTITLED to either the rewards you were promised or a refund.
And Tavis hasn’t ever tried to push responsibility for this project onto the backers or even to insist that the backers sympathize with the hard work of creating a 100,000-word dungeon in however many months it takes to work it up from the notes. The more we know about what all sides are doing, the smoother the process goes.
But building the megadungeon is not in the backer’s job description and the backer’s understanding of how that job works is really irrelevant to whether the backer feels cheated or not. The backers did their job. They coughed up the cash and have held off on demanding a refund. Everything else is gravy.
Wow, note to self, editing in “markdown lite” mode eats carriage returns and makes you look a little stream-of-conscious. Word wall not intended.
I don’t think I’m sacrificing myself/my money, nor willing to take a loss, if I believe that the project is being abandoned I will be quick to call foul and demand a refund. I questioning the progress, blown deadlines, and even the progress that the author is making is perfectly fine, what I have a problem with isn’t so much what you’re doing econobus, it’s more with people who scream scam, and regurgitate angry statements laden with foul language and unfounded accusations of fraud.
Just to clarify, Allan, when you wrote "Tavis has been doing a great job of updating us since he realized people were upset with the lack of communication" - it's not like that was a lightbulb moment. The issue previously was that we had let communication become tied to having updates, so that when things were late there was also no word from us. The realization was that, by splitting those apart and posting updates whether there was something to show or not, we could at least address the lack of communication. Happily it's helped with both problems.
I didn’t mean to make it sound like a light bulb went off, sorry if it sounded that way, was probably a poor way of wording it. I meant that when people really started to voice concern over the lack of progress, you jumped right in and offered up a schedule of when we could expect drafts and when pages were to be turned over to you. In short you offered transparency to what was occurring.
I have to disagree with a central point expressed here that has also been addressed elsewhere:
that since this is a kickstarter, the whole point of kickstarter is that there is some risk of an RPG project not finishing
Note that I said “RPG Project”. We’re not talking about a movie, or manufacturing a widget, or making an album.
We’re talking about something that costs about $20 in materials, and free time, to make. All you need is some dice, some graph paper and possibly a compass, and you can make a megadungeon (or any other RPG product/adventure).
This will not take a RPG product to production, but we’re not talking about projects that are fully written. We’re talking about projects that are being written after the kickstarter. Because if all the content is written, there is no burnout; no wrestling with a creative muse; no risk.
Well, perhaps risk that an artist doesn’t follow through, but essentially there is zero risk that something doesn’t happen, and happen very soon after a promised deadline.
Again, this is going beyond Dwimmermount.
If people want to market audience participation rpg products, that’s fine. I’m not against that. It’s very clear what that is.
But there is no inherent reason why kickstarter is necessary for an RPG product, other than a buyer realizing that kickstarter takes 10% while Lulu takes 30%. It ain’t because without upfront capital, there’s something preventing a product from being written. That’s almost insulting to DMs who’ve been doing exactly that for two or three decades with nobody “backing them”.
You know, EOTB, that’s a darn good point. I don’t know why any of these projects need capital at all, except to speed up the payout for creative. There should be no “risk” here for anyone. But as people keep telling me, I must be monumentally naive or something.
Go DMs! Live free!
Well, some RPG Kickstarters are basically just to pay for the artwork.
Blood & Treasure recently came out sans a Kickstarter, but it’s full of public domain artwork which isn’t bad, but makes it look more like a late 19th century book. Is it still a neat book? Yes, but I would have loved to have some proper artwork.
By contrast, Starships & Spacemen pretty much had the rules written, but needed new artwork, so did a Kickstarter.
I think in this case, it wasn’t made overly clear that most of Dwimmermount wasn’t written. I think many people got the impression that the place was done, at least in note form from his campaign, and he just needed to convert it from notes to a proper book, which probably shouldn’t take a year.
Yep, and that’s a perfect reason to have a kickstarter - “I’ve written a great product but can’t draw worth crap, and can’t afford to hire the artists with my money. Wanna help me make this into something really cool by crowdfunding it?”
This next point isn’t really addressing something you said specifically, but that example is essentially a pre-order. That’s what OSR publishers were using pre-orders for before KS - I’ve got the product but need art and printing costs. So when they use KS instead of a pre-order system on their own website, for convenience and social networking pizzazz, that doesn’t mean that using KS suddenly makes it not a pre-order. It just means that many RPG publishers are choosing to sell oranges at the apple market. The discussion I’ve seen about people not understanding the difference between KS and a pre-order is, itself, missing the underlying point.
I, too, think that there is good reason for backers to be annoyed at the way in which Dwimmermount has played out. That said, I have been impressed by Autarch’s (i.e., Tavis’) ‘customer relations’ in the period since the original deadline was missed.
Here are some of the facts;
- Kickstarter opened in March 2012 and closed in April
- The completed pdf was promised for June 2012
- The completed book was promised for August 2012
- In September 2012 we are getting first drafts (let’s say that again, “first drafts”) of the middle levels
- In September 2012 the lower levels are barely sketched out, and perhaps not even mapped.
What has irked me is the disconnect between facts 1-3 and facts 4 and 5. Given the state of the project now, in September, there was NO WAY that the project could have been completed by June 2012. In other words, there would have been no way for JM to 1. write first drafts of 6 levels, 2. map the lower levels, 3. conceive the lower levels, 4. write first drafts of the lower levels, 5. edit, revise, and perfect the text of ALL the levels, 6. Hire cartographers to render professional versions of all the newly completed maps; 7. commission and purchase art, especially for the things that had not even been conceived yet; 8. submit the final, laid-out ms to Autarch for publication … How could all this have been accomplished in 2 months? (April to June 2012)
Those facts seem undeniable.
Now, the question is what to make of them.
It is true that the Kickstarter invited backers to take part in the process of creation, but I imagine that given the facts outlined above most backers imagined offering comments on already-laid out drafts of the entire ms; that is, offering tweaks to an existing, almost-completed project. What they (well, what I) did not imagine was watching the process start from ground zero.
How to interpret this is another story. The more I hear from Tavis, the more charitable I become. I think that this was a case of poor communication on many levels - from JM to Autarch concerning the state of the ms, from Autarch to the potential Backers concerning publication dates, and so forth. I don’t think anyone intended a scam.
So, at this stage, my anger is mostly gone. I still think that a colossal screw-up occured. I also think that everyone knows this (JM, Autarch, backers). At this point lessons have been learned by all three parties. My personal position is now to wait and watch, hoping that the shame of the screwup doesn’t cause the product to be rushed to completion.
I’m with rebarton2 on this, I’m not as eloquent a typist/speaker, but I agree on every point. I too and hoping this project isn’t rushed to completion, as I’d hate to have waited to discover that Dwimmermount is sub par product.