#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 29: Kickstarter

For the 29th of last month’s #RPGaDAY entry, the prompt was about the best-run rpg Kickstarater campaign I’ve backed. When I work on layout — and I come under contract before or duing the campaign — I always back the project for one dollar so I can see what communication goes out to the backers.

So far, I’ve only come onto two projects that funded through Kickstarter after the campaign ended: Bluebeard’s Bride and Bulldogs. It’s interesting to see how both campaigns handle communication with backers: Bluebeard’s Bride has everything done publicly — which I think makes it a marketing opportunity for post-KS sales — while Bulldogs has had several that were backer-only. Just because I can see Bulldogs, I’ll use this as an example: why not make that 2016 “Current Print Status” available for anyone to see when they can purchase the game in stores? I don’t know, but some creators like to have backer-only updates. As a person on the creative side, I’d like to see what they’re saying to backers.

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#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 6: Constant Gaming

The #RPGaDAY prompt for today — er, yesterday — is “You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!”

Nah. That’s not as interesting as how I initially misread the topic: “You can game every day in a week!” Let’s answer that question.

The base assumption is I get to play roleplaying games every single day! We’ll just pretend there’s some magic time thing that happened that lets me get my work done and I still get time to have fun with the family. And I have time to do GM prep…

So let’s see.

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#RPGaDAY 2017, Day 4: The Game Most Played Last Year

Today’s #RPGaDAY question: which RPG have I played the most this past year? Well, that’s Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. We’ve been playing through the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign setting most weeks, a few hours at a time for over a year now, but the cracks are starting to show in the product (and game system) and, well, I’m just hoping we’ll finish soon and move onto something else.

Before the new edition of D&D came out, I was done with the fantasy genre. I hated the complexity of third edition D&D (and 3.5 and Pathfinder) and fourth edition just wasn’t anything that I would have considered “fun”. The only option I was looking at for fantasy role-playing was the Dragon Age RPG, which seemed to take forever to publish set 3, the upper-level ruleset, but I know that was a significant delay due to licensing approvals. We would have been playing that if the licensor would have approved the game in a more speedy fashion. I am confident in thinking the delays in the approval process was what prompted Green Ronin to develop the IP-stripped Fantasy AGE game. However, 5th Edition came out before Dragon Age‘s last book was released and, unlike the previous iterations of the game, 5e played quickly and was actually good for what it tried to do!

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