Evil Hat have quite a wide range of PWYW titles. I was also really surprised to see that they in the $000s of dollars. That is the power of brand recognition in action.
The game I referred to above is currently running at 130 downloads and has received $41.40 from 14 contributors.
That makes the value per download currently $0.31/download.
This is the game listing
The Things That Grown Ups Cannot See - PPM | DriveThruRPG.com
I have had this happen once and the characters being completely stymied in which way to go resorted to employing outside spell casters to try and learn something about how to progress. I then used that to get hints and suggestions to the party.
I will happily do this. I have even written things that were fuzzy in their locations even in the planning. Things like "In the first room the characters may be able to find x", "In the second room they search they may be able to find y" and so on. Where the searching happens is secondary. If...
Totally agree, there are systems that are set up for non-combat as a central theme.
Rules-wise, there is an argument that we only need the rules for things that we cannot role play. I cannot cast a fireball so I need rules to describe that. I cannot physically attack the monsters so I need...
One of the situations we were in, in a very low combat game, was a terrible fire sweeping through the town. The heroic action involved rescuing trapped people, being trapped in a temple as the ceiling started to come down and trying to help people across a river after the bridge started to...
I tend to put playtest versions of games I am working on out as PWYW. I have one that has been in playtest for a few months and one that went out last week. In the newest one I added the line The game is Pay What You Want,...but please pay something into the description to see if it would have...
There is a joke along the lines of RPGs are where a 3 hour journey takes 30 seconds to play but a 30 second fight takes 3hrs to play.
I find that no or little combat games fill the void left by the missing combat with far more interesting challenges for the characters. They give a chance to...
Thomas Pellow
Captured by Pirates, sold as a slave, used as a slave soldier, rose to the top of the elite units before escaping and making his way home many years later.
I am desperately trying to gather as many playtesters as possible for a new game. The playtest documents cover all the core chapters of the rules and there is a quickstart version, sample adventure and pregen characters.
The whole bundle can be downloaded from...