January 2015 – Weird 8

4 Things I Will Do Differently in My Next Kickstarter

As I gear up for my next Kickstarter project (March 2015!), I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned over the past year as project creator. But then spending time thinking of the things I didn’t do well seemed the wrong way to go about it. Instead I want to talk about the things I will do better this time around.

Running and publishing the He Who Laughs Last was one of the greatest experiences of my life, mostly because it allowed me to truly engage with my community when I had just been an observer before. Many of my friends and associates are writers, artists and designers in the RPG space, and now I am too. Writing and publishing a book is hard, but with the help of all the great people out there, you really get the feeling of being a part of something. That was definitely my favorite part of the experience.

And certainly, publishing my scenario, having people run it and getting feedback on the book (both good and bad) was enlightening and validating. And while it’s great to get positive feedback, you really haven’t made it until you’ve had someone complain that they “expected more from this project…”

So that’s all goodness — but what am I going to do differently?

1. Prepare Stretch Goals Ahead of Time: I love the idea of engaging with your backers and getting their help in figuring out aspects of your project, but damn, stretch goals can kill you. And while my project had nowhere near the stretch goal over-commitment of some projects, I still found myself a bit over my head when it came time to finish everything up. (Actually, I haven’t finished everything for my project, as I’ve still to write up a fictionalization of the HWLL story for my backers.) This is mostly because, in the heat of battle (aka during the project), I just came up with stretch goals on the fly, without really planning how I would go about finishing them (and all the various efforts I would need to enlist others in, which is a bigger challenge). Furthermore, stretch goals should be about continuing momentum and not just a given — there’s no reason to add stretch goals in the first few days if people are still backing. Instead, wait until the momentum slows and THEN add stretch goals. This time I will plan all of my stretch goals ahead of time, some big, some small, and only publish them once momentum slows.

2. Be Very Clear About Int’l Shipping: Ah yes, international shipping, the scourge of all Kickstarter projects. I had been warned about how expensive it was to ship internationally, but holy shit! Basically it costs $25 to ship a book from the USA to pretty much anywhere else in the world (Canada is cheaper at $20), which is just a lot of money to ship a book that only costs $7 to print. Oh, sure, you can skimp and pay $10, have it take 3-4 weeks and have no guarantee that it will arrive, or you can pay the higher cost and provide better service. I think it just means you need to be very, very clear up front how you’re handling shipping, and hopefully not turn away people with the high cost. Until I can deal in high enough quantities to justify working with overseas printers and distributors, it’s all POD and hand-shipping for me. That means higher cost for my customers, unfortunately. We’ll see if this impacts my overall project…

3. Find Collaborators Ahead of Time: I did a lot of preparation for my campaign, and it showed when I funded within 36 hours. Great — now what? As I floundered around on my first project, trying to figure out what to do next, I stumbled upon something amazing: other KS project owners. During my project I had three key collaborators help me: Oscar Rios of Golden Goblin Press, Kevin Kulp of Pelgrane Press, and Shane Ivey of Arc Dream Publishing. Each of these folks helped me by spreading the word during the project, which drove noticeable traffic to my project. You can see the bumps in the Kicktraq data, there at those bumps at the end of February and beginning of March. But all of these connections were made during my campaign (except Oscar, whom I knew before), and without any preparation at all. Really, the time for getting in touch with people is right now, just about a month or so before my project starts. I already have a number of people I can reach out to, but putting those people into the plan ahead of time just reduces risk and increases the chances of success.

4. Shorten the Project Length: After all was said and done, I’m not really sure my project needed all 31 days to fund at $9k. Looking again at the Kicktraq data, the only mid-stream bumps came from other campaigns (see above) and not from general momentum. And while Wednesday is the best day to get backers, I started on a Sunday and finished on a Friday, which isn’t the best time-frame overall. This time I’m going to try just 3 weeks, starting and finishing on a Sunday, and just nip the whole thing in the bud. If I have all my reviews and collaborators setup ahead of time, then there shouldn’t be any scramble mid-project to get them in line. I should hit my funding in the first few days and then use momentum to grab a few, key stretch goals. Then I rope in the remaining folks in the final 48 hours and, BAM, done.

So, yeah, I have some work to do.

Five Short Stories

So I went and posted all my short fiction over here for you to read. Going back and reading through it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, mostly because I seem to actually have a vision for the style I was trying to develop at the time, and I more or less still like that style. It’s definitely me writing, and some of the decisions I made are very clearly made from a place of total defiance to all of the external pressures and expectations of what short fiction should be like.

Is my short fiction that much different from other short fiction? I’m not really sure, but I know that I never knew where exactly it fit. I tried, at the outset at least, to fit in with all the literary journals and styles that a young writer is supposed to. In college I took a course from Ehud Havazelet and learned two things — I still had a lot of work to do before I had control of my writing (very true) and that the writing I enjoyed did not fit in with the writing all my other classmates seemed to enjoy writing (even more true).

At the same time, I would read short Cthulhu Mythos fiction and not really care about that either. Most of it seemed so derivative and poorly written that I just had no interest in trying to be a part of that movement either. I think my story Independent Coordination, as my one attempt to write in the horror genre, shows me wanting to do something drastically different.

And I think that’s really the crux. I’ve wanted to “be a writer” since I was ten, but that was ultimately because I my head is filled with all these goddamned stories that I really have no other option. I’ve tried to keep them at bay, or even just walk away from them, but my sanity won’t let me. There is just too much to write about, too much to get onto paper.

So looking back on stories I wrote 15 years ago isn’t so bad. Yes, they need editing and I made a specific choice not to touch them in any way before posting them here. But they also show me defiant and confused and just working really hard to figure out how to get the images in my head down on paper. And that’s a pretty good way for a writer to spend his 20s.

I hope you like them.

Do you have any art you created earlier in your life that you still like?

D&D Comes Full Circle

Sometime in the winter of 1980-81, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I was in fourth grade and Ronald Reagan had just been elected to president. My friend Greg has an older brother who had started playing this crazy fantasy game, and we sat down and tried to figure out what all the Roman numerals meant in the adventure scenario as we fought monsters and collected treasure. It was so easy back then to just jump in and game — you had your character, some basic stats, a couple pieces of equipment, and you just played. Yes, there were a couple charts, but overall it was just easy and fun and you could really play with just the game book, some pencils, paper, dice, and, of course, your friends.

I was hooked for life.

My parents bought me the red dragon boxed set (the one with chits instead of dice – lame), and over the next few years I began collecting RPGs: first the AD&D books and modules, then other games (including Star Frontiers and Marvel Super Heroes), and I even wrote my first RPG: TimeLords. For these first ten years or so (including heading off to college), I played D&D off and on. I ran a short campaign in college, played the Warhammer RPG briefly there as well, and even ran a 2ed AD&D game for kids when I worked as a summer camp counselor in the early 90s.

Eventually, though, I just stopped caring about D&D. I would play it every couple of years at a convention (usually with 1st ed stalwarts), but other RPGs and genres became far more interesting. Superheroes, science fiction and of course the Cthulhu mythos all became much more intriguing worlds to game in — at some point I even hacked together a time travel campaign for GURPS using multiple sourcebooks, which I would never try these days. (Using GURPS, that is; clearly I still have a thing for time travel games.)

The last game of D&D I played was around four years ago when our high school gaming group reunited to play 4th edition. My entire experience with that trainwreck of a game system can be summed up with me attempting to read the flavor text from the spell card and being told in no uncertain terms from my fellow gamers to “shut the fuck up and just tell us what you’re doing.” The complexities and time it takes to move through 4th ed combat inspired, it seems, impatience with the actual role-playing part of the game.

So it was with slight trepidation when, 2.5 years ago (has it really been that long?) my gaming group at the time playtested D&D 5th edition (which was called D&D Prime at the time, I believe). Sure, of course I’ll play, nothing to lose here. We played through B1, the original scenario, and I sat down at the table to be handed a dwarven cleric and a beer.

I was immediately overwhelmed by how simple the game had become. It was like I had been transported 30 years into the past and suddenly I could just play. It’s like the game had circled back around and found me at 9 years old, except that now I have much higher standards to what constitutes a good and fun role-playing game. And yet, this game was good. This game was fun.

Flash forward to just a couple weeks ago and my 9 year old daughter was harassing me to play D&D. Last summer, when she had seen this video on girls playing D&D with boys, she shouted “I want to play D&D!” Since then, every couple of months she had asked to play, and I had continually put her off. Finally, realizing that a) WotC has posted the D&D rules online for free, and b) what the hell was I waiting for?, I got us playing D&D for the first time just two weeks ago.

The results could not be more amazing. Fifth edition is so easy to learn and run that I really have to give it up for WotC, who has done an amazing job at fully rebooting the game. Firstly, giving away a streamlined version of the rules online for free shows they understand how to market games and interact with their customers in the 21st century. Basically, anyone who wants to play D&D just needs the requisite pencil, paper, dice and friends (plus the free rules) to get started. This is a gateway game, folks, and they’re treating it that way.

Second, the rules have *finally* been streamlined to remove so much of the chart-referring, page number memorizing days of old that you sense a full understanding of how RPGs have changed in the last decade. All high rolls are good, all low rolls are bad (not the case with 1st-4th eds); a monster’s armor class is the number you need to roll higher than to hit them (goodbye THAC0!) — these are a couple examples of how much easier the game is to play.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the game has really made it easy for the old-school gamers (like myself), to feel right at home with a game world that can be fleshed out as you play. For starters, during character generation, the game helps build out PC backgrounds that not only provide context and history in categories such as Ideals and Flaws, but also tacks on game-world applications to these: character bonuses, special equipment and world-building opportunities (which guild do you belong to?) all help create verisimilitude out of the gate. But the game is also incredibly fun once you get into it. The ease of gameplay lets both players and DM focus on doing cool stuff and not having to refer back to the gamebook all the time.

This is incredibly important for first timers like my 9 year old, (and eventually her friends) who has never played RPGs before. If we tried to play 4th edition or some other new RPG that is more complex or awkward than it needs to be (Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, I’m looking at you), her first interaction with RPGs would just result in confusion and frustration. But with such an easy method for creating fleshed-out characters, with a fun and easy to understand game system, and with some excitement and passion for having a good time, my daughter was hooked.

Just like I was 33 years ago.

It seems far easier for a company with intellectual property, especially something as iconic and old as D&D, to lose sight of what originally made that IP special (*cough* George Lucas *cough*). Greed, ego and laziness can all get in the way of doing the hard work it takes to continually keep the IP fresh and evolving. This is what happened with 4th edition — changing the game system to hook in the “video game kids” is a good concept on paper (and I’m sure was a great pitch to the executives), but it lost sight of what the game really was about. Instead of making the game an easy way for kids to enter a world of fantasy role-playing, they made it about leveling-up your powers and reading really small text from cards.

With this new edition, though, they finally got it right. You should check it out.