Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: highmax28 on May 08, 2015, 11:32:29 am

I'm out. I don't want to catch fire.

split apart from Ketchup and become the rival, GTFO before the woods are in fird

Quote from: RAM on May 08, 2015, 02:16:16 pm

Suffer through a montage of years spent sitting under waterfalls, posing on mountaintops, and attacking inanimate objects in order to gain mystical spirit powers. Channel these powers into your fish to produce fish-beams.

+1 to both

+1

I'll echo the first part of what EagleV said (or, at least, the parts before and after the first quote), but disagree with him on the idea of Kickstarter being a good idea. Because it's not. At least, not for your first time trying to publish something.

For one thing, you only have so long to try to sell your game. And in that time, you need to promote the hell out of it. I'm sure there are some people who approach Kickstarter with the philosophy of "if we build it, they will come", but I've never heard of anyone like that actually getting funded.

Also, and please don't take any offense to this, as far as the RPG industry/community/scene is concerned, you're basically nobody at this point. If you want anybody besides friends/family/a few morbidly curious strangers to invest in your game, you'll want a name involved that, at the very least, a few hundred people can recognize and trust. That, or celebrity endorsement. If you can't offer that, people are at least going to want a very good demonstration of what they're paying for, if they don't have a sample of anyone's previous work to go by or somebody they know to tell them it's good.

And even if you do manage to get funded, there are all kinds of potential pitfalls in the process of fulfillment. For one thing, you better damn well account for any potential costs you'll accrue in trying to get people's orders to them, and then be prepared for all kinds of hidden costs you never even considered to sneak up and screw you in the bum. And unless whatever publisher you plan to use is willing to handle shipping for you, consider just how much time it would take you to personally handle the shipping orders of several hundred backers (Really, if you plan to ship anything yourself, it should probably only be for Limited tiers).


Really, as someone new to the RPG publishing scene, I'd recommend going the Print-On-Demand/PDF distribution route (actually, I'd even encourage industry professionals to at least include it in their repertoire, and most of them actually do). Lulu and DriveThruRPG are the two that I can think of most readily, and, unless I'm misunderstanding something, there aren't fees to be paid so much as just that they take a cut of each sale, and you don't have to reach some arbitrary goal to actually make money (there's probably a minimum amount of money you need to make before they cut you a check, but it should be much less than you'd ask for a Kickstarter).

Alright, so looking into it, they do charge some minor fees, but that's only to cover the cost of book printing or, in Lulu's case, a very minor one to cover the cost of PDF hosting. After aforementioned fees, Lulu takes 10% for PDFs and 20% for books, while DriveThruRPG takes 30-35% for either, depending on whether or not you are an exclusive partner with them (exclusivity only applies to distributing digital formats, like PDFs and such).

So so far, Lulu looks like it's winning by pure numbers, but don't count DriveThruRPG out yet. While Lulu is just generally a PDF/print-on-demand site, DTRPG is a devoted RPG store, with categorization by things like genre and rule system, and boasting a wide selection of titles, including some from such famous publishers as Fantasy Flight Games, White Wolf, and even freaking Wizards of the Coast, just to name a few (basically, pretty much everyone who doesn't already have their own PDF store). So it's the kind of place where you're more likely to be seen by your target demographic, whereas on Lulu, as best I can tell, if you're look for RPGs you have to search through the Games section, which also contains things like guides to poker and chess, so it's less than ideal on the user end.

So I'd probably recommend going for both Lulu and DriveThruRPG, since any money you leave on the table by going for the latter is likely made up for by greater exposure. I might check into what it takes to terminate your agreement with them, just in case you feel it's not working out (in either case), and possibly look into what the Exclusive account for DTRPG entails (they mention "enhanced title rotation" and "bonus on-site promotion", but I think getting more information about that would require contacting them directly, which probably isn't a bad thing to do before you get started.

In addition to all this, I'd recommend promoting your game and yourself on other sites (probably RPG-related, though, who knows, some cooking forums might be really interested in what you have to offer). I think you know enough about salesmanship to do this with proper tack, so the last piece of advice I'm going to offer is maybe have a demo version of your product you can direct people to so they can get an idea of what it's like before they put down money. It's something that helps if you don't have a lot of hype in place already.

Alright, that's it from me. Get out there and make your game! (Or in there. You can probably just make your game where you are right now.)

Another -1 to the Cool Crab/Goombess fusing. That abomination must never see the light of day.

Oh by the way everyone, I got married on April 2nd. My wife and I are and have been living together for about two years now. Just thought ya'll would like to know.

Holy freaking crap! Congratulations Hans!

Well, I finally finished reading through this thread from start to finish (skimming through most of posts that aren't by freeformschooler, since I'm not completely insane).

And to think, I had briefly considered reading through this thread when ffs had to quit my IGYNPADCA RPG because he was too busy, and I decided to see what he was up to. I thought this "Warrens" thing he was working on looked interesting, but at nearly 200 pages (at 15ppp), it just seemed too long to read through. *laughs madly*

But, yeah, I recently decided I'd read through it, no matter how long it took, and I was not disappointed. I pretty sure TWoOtA is now my new favorite shonen anime, despite it technically being neither of those things. I'm really happy you guys eventually resurrected Slog, because this game just wouldn't be the same without it's adorable mascot.

So, anyway, I'm now posting to watch, and also submitting my Spirit Class: Battle Chef.

I went to see a friend from my improv class do stand-up tonight.

It was very interesting. When some people from our class went out to eat afterwards, he mentioned he was going to be performing that night at a place called "Cheba Hut". It was only later, after I had already agreed to go, that I learned it was a 4/20 themed restaurant. Using the bathroom was an interesting experience, as both soap dispensers where gone, and when went to look for something to dry my hands, I found the paper towel dispenser had been apparently ripped from the wall.

So, after that, I found my friend, then went to the counter and ordered something called the "Blunt", because, I figured, I can't come to a place like that, see something like that on the menu, and then not order it. As I'm waiting for my sandwich (it took a while) my friend comes up to me and asks if I want to be a judge for the stand-up competition. I say, yeah, why not, and when my sandwich is finally ready, I run up to the judges booth at, which is pretty much right up next to the mike.

A bunch of the humor was kinda like you would expect for a place like that, and there where a couple people who are obviously either under the influence of something or not quite there in general, but there were also a lot of genuinely quite funny or even hilarious people in the show. It was a really great experience, if rather odd, and I'm glad I went.

Quote from: BadLemonsXI on April 28, 2015, 08:39:55 pm

You all make'n meh feel old.

Get off my lawn.
Get a haircut.
Whippersnapper.

He's a lemon. If he got a haircut, you'd end up with zest.

I realized faygo soda is caffeine free! ah so many options!

Is this true? I tried looking for information on their website (after wikipedia revealed nothing of the sort), but it didn't bring up anything. I was surprised to find that, besides the usual social media stuff that all corporate websites have, they had links to SoundCloud and Spotify accounts. And even more surprising was the fact that neither contain any ICP.

Quote from: Orange Wizard on April 27, 2015, 11:01:37 pm

Quote

Wizards revoked the full OGL

lolwut

u srs bruh

They can revoke the OGL for certain sites, it is a part of the OGL. If you infringe on their copyright (incl 5e) they can revoke the entire OGL despire 5e not being covered under the OGL.

I'm going to have to ask for a big old [CITATION NEEDED] for this, because as far as I'm aware, the OGL cannot be revoked. What it sounds more like is that these websites violated the terms of the license, or they were hit by the DMCA, which is a big old sledgehammer of a law that tends to smash apart perfectly legal things in the process of taking down copyright infringement.