Someone pledged $6000 on that new Monte Cook game.
Someone pledged $6000 on that new Monte Cook game. Twelve people have pledged $1500. No judgement here, spend your money where you want, but I sure hope it's fun.
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Which game is that?
ReplyDeleteInvisible Sun.
ReplyDeleteI have immediate feels which amount to seething contention, but yeah I guess I hope it's fun.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/montecookgames/invisible-sun
ReplyDeleteCan I judge them instead for backing a Monte Cook game in general?
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, the bonus for the $6K pledge is to play in an MCG design team game run by Monte. The $2K level is to become a playtester and get some one-to-one Skype time with Monte. It's still a lot of money, though!
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a game that rewards you for doing stuff away from the table is interesting. The "what the game is about and how it works" stuff makes it sound like it's totally not my kind of thing. That's okay, though.
ReplyDelete$2000 to playtest! What a scheme.
ReplyDeleteI gotta start charging for playtesting, invert the paradigm.
Holy frickin' crow. $200 minimum pledge!?
ReplyDeleteI pledged a few kickstarters where I didn't get my money's worth in fun, but those were no more than $30, except Domains at War, which I'd say I've gotten $100 out of my $200 back in fun.
ReplyDeleteI hope to return to this thread after I've finished going "what the what?"
ReplyDeleteI may be some time.
Everyone at MCG is good people and I'm still a fan, although I'm not playing any of the games these days. I was such a fanboy I ran an Arcana Unearthed campaign.
ReplyDeleteI loved everything that came out of Malhavoc Press. All the Books of Eldritch Might. All the 3.x D&D options. Bruce Cordell wrote some of the best 3.x D&D books, especially Psionics.
ReplyDeleteI don't doubt their skill, or the quality of the products. It just saddens me that the gateway to entry into the hobby these days are immense, expensive products like these. It helped that the D&D Starter Set was only $20.
Casey G. They are all good people and I am sure they are not running a scam. Monte Cook as a rules designer, though, boy oh boy,
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler I guess this isn't intended to be a gateway product. This is pretty clearly for people who put a lot of stock into their identity as gamers. And when I say "a lot" I mean "fuckloads". And when I say "stock" I mean "money".
ReplyDeleteI should make clear that my love of Ptolus know no limit. I paid a stack of cash for it and it turned out to be a total bargain.
But what the what?
I would never call this a gateway game though. No one pledging this hasn't played hundreds/thousands of hours of RPGs. This game is more like some super intense videogame that requires an expensive top of the line system to even run it.
ReplyDeleteThe gateways to RPGs are free or nearly so anyway.
Yeah, I know it's not a gateway product, but still. I feel like it could go a long way to be respectful of the financial constraints of the people this is targeted at.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Invisible Sun is meant as an entry to the hobby, Craig. Monte's said more than once that he wants to explore the idea of high-end deluxe gaming products—he did it with Ptolus and the Numenera boxed set, this is just him pushing it even farther.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.montecookgames.com/monte-says-ptolus-10-years-later/
I suppose gateway was a poor choice of words.
ReplyDeleteI won't be backing this, but they do explain the price point: "The very essence of the product is a box filled with all sorts of wonders: handouts, cards, hidden clues spread across multiple books, and physical props. The nature of Invisible Sun, at its core, is deluxe. The Black Cube is a part of the very idea we’re Kickstarting here. It’s not an extraneous upgrade to a conventional game. This is a new kind of product." from https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/montecookgames/invisible-sun
ReplyDeleteCover price for the three D&D books is $150, so once you think about it, this isn't that bad. It's just all at once.
ReplyDeleteWhy are we annoyed that there are high-end products we can't afford? Isn't that true about pretty much everything?
ReplyDeleteJoshua Blackketter You'd just expect the Wealthy RPG-Player to have better taste, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad they are trying a different funding model, if nothing else it is a super interesting case study. This will totally fund, and they are very clear it isn't for everyone (in fact that seems to be part of their marketing). Love what you love.
ReplyDeleteStephen Holowczyk Yes, let's insult other people's taste in stuff, that's a great conversation.
ReplyDeleteI didn't even buy the 5e D&D books with my own money. I got a 5-year anniversary gift card of my choice from my old job, and I chose Amazon. (And since that means I didn't buy them from an FLGS I guess that makes me a bad RPGer, but at the time I really didn't have one I was patronizing regularly.)
ReplyDeleteJoshua Blackketter Maybe it's just inflation and/or rising prices in general, but a core RPG book never cost $50 or more before Dark Heresy came out to my recollection.
Craig Hatler OD&D was $10 in 1974, for basically three zines in a box, $51.20 in 2016 dollars: http://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=10&year=1974
ReplyDeleteJoshua Blackketter I'm sorry, I was just being abrasive.
ReplyDeleteA serious answer regarding your post: I don't think there's anything wrong number with high-end products we can't afford per se without it breaking into some in-depth discussion. I think asking for $200 for a Kickstarter instead of $200 for a finished product is a different beast.
I am not interested in the game and I am certainly not going to shell out thousands for an experience with it, but I will be the contrarian and say this:
ReplyDeleteGaming is a boutique market that tries to pretend it's mass market. This pricing scheme and value add is just accepting the truth of what RPGs are. Especially if you're not WotC or Paizo.
That's another discussion. I don't know what the value breakdown of people's time is, honestly. I don't know how much it costs to keep a full-time writer and pay for their health insurance, I really don't.
ReplyDeleteDark Heresy was beautifully illustrated and combined all three standard books onto one. Worth $50 bucks easily.
Player's Handbook 5E: Why was this book with shitty binding $40
Editors note: This only applies to DH1, DH2 also had a problem with binding.
Stephen Holowczyk I appreciate the serious answer. Monte Cook Games seems to have pretty good track record with completing their kickstarters, don't they? Do you have any reason to believe they won't deliver on this one?
ReplyDeleteAbout the price point: it's a lot of stuff, people. There's like four game books and an app and a card game and a board game and some pregens and a little pewter occult statue thing, and a year's worth of adventures and more props. All apparently high quality.
I feel like we're staring through the dealership window at a sports car with a shiny paint job and spinning rims and LED undercarriage and a sound system that can fell a moose at 300 yards, and people are going "But a Volvo doesn't cost this much!"
It's not a thing I would ever buy, but I kind of like that our weird hobby is starting to get the high end deluxe expensive options that literally every other hobby already has.
People pay crazy money for Kingdom Death. There is clearly a market for fancy-ass boardgames. Doing a fancy-ass D&D doesn't seem that crazy.
ReplyDeleteI spent 90$ on Pandemic Legacy at some local game store. That's for a board game I can play 24 times—and only if I lose every single time.
People spend money in all sorts of ways.
People spend money in all sorts of ways, I have no idea what the situation is of the folks buying this thing or how they spend their money, it's not my circus, not my monkeys.
ReplyDeleteI'm repeating this very fervently but I can't shut off the part of my mind that's going "Holy crap, dropping $6000 on an RPG? You ain't got nothin' better to spend that cash on?"
But I have no idea who the heck is backing this and it's not my place to judge how folks are spending their cash. That...just takes a bit of repeating. Loudly.
Humza K
ReplyDeleteYeah, it shocks me down to my parsimonious core. But ... if it works for them and it works for their fans, more power to them.
The beautiful thing about RPGs is that the genie is never going back into the bottle. Even if every mainstream game starts catering exclusively to the 1% and selling their games in the forms of golden tablets and diamond dice that would make Joseph Smith green with envy, there will be just as many people putting out inexpensive or free games on the web.
You have to pay for a Van Gogh, but your own particular point of view and an impressionist Prisma filter are virtually free. ;)
people prepaying for special eds of computer games with bonus stuff sets in pretty bih figures
ReplyDeleteWorth remembering that Monte Cook has been successfully crowdfunding (and delivering) prestige game products since before the dinosaurs invented Kickstarter.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting me about this isn't the price point (although a bottom tier of $200 is a hell of a surprise in an RPG kickstarter) - it's what you're buying.
The (impressive) contents of the box are secondary in the KS write-up to the mystery, the novelty, the hidden story. $152 for access to the playtesting materials isn't how you get a big flood of people testing your game. But it is how you establish exclusivity and mystique. The prestige backer levels literally bestow secret gospels and handcrafted guidance along unseen paths.
(I'm not being snarky, here. This is fascinating to me.)
The usual Kickstarter language of "let's make this cool thing together" is absent, here. Because that's not what this is about, right? You wouldn't pay these sums for something Dave the Random Kickstarter Spod could get his questionable fingers on - this shit is artisan. Its occult. It's peeking through a crack in the wall around the Garden of Eden.
That's why they're not worried about QuickStart rules or extensive examples of play. You can't offer a revelatory gaming experience and then say "that uses a die pool, keep high." You need, like, tailored tarot cards (round ones! Not boring oblongs!) and medallions inscribed with dread secrets determined by the time you backed and stuff. The Kickstarter's like apprenticeship for the game's fiction.
I've seen plenty of Kickstarters selling a dream, but this is the first one I've seen selling a mystery. I have no idea if the game itself is a New Thing, but the Kickstarter feels like it is.