Are We Looking At A New RPG Kickstarter Record?

The current record for an RPG Kickstarter is John Wick's 7th Sea 2nd Edition, which made just over $1.3 million in about a month. Matt Colville looks like he might leave that in the dust with Strongholds & Streaming, however, having raised nearly half a million dollars in about 5 hours at the time of posting this, with a month to go!

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Strongholds & Streaming is a dual Kickstarter - first to produce a 128-page hardcover book about building strongholds and attracting followers for D&D 5th Edition; and then with stretch goals related to Colville's streaming channel.

You can build four stronghold types - keeps, towers, temples, and establishments; these roughly correlate to warriors, arcane casters, divine casters, and rogue-types. The stronghold improves your class abilities, and attracts followers.

Stretch goals include miniatures, more pages, an an adventure (so far - he's blown through all those on there right now already).

You can see this epic Kickstarter here. I've never seen an RPG Kickstarter blow up quite so fast in so short a time!

Matt Colville writes the Critical Role comic, and has worked on various tabletop gaming projects, including the recent Star Trek RPG. He has worked on various mass-combat and starship combat rulesets. In addition, he runs a big YouTube channel about tabletop RPGs (D&D especially).

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[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I find it kinda sad that kids today seem to prefer corporate media to independent websites. This is not how the Internet was supposed to be.

 

[Morrus]

I find it kinda sad that kids today seem to prefer corporate media to independent websites. This is not how the Internet was supposed to be.

Don't worry, we're doing OK. I can't compete with the megacorporations but I don't think I need to.

Our tech is a little bit behind the times (though we have some work going on with that in the background) but this community is strong. The "rising tide" has benefited little places like this, not harmed them. Monthly readership here is the highest it has been since the site launched 20 years ago. It's all good.

This place has a different function to most social media. It does what it does well. It doesn't do quick replies well (and that's a technology thing), but it does in-depth conversations better than anywhere. And it kicks Twitter and Facebook's asses on inclusivity. Different tools for different jobs. I'm pretty happy with things at the moment.

We're the little corner shop around the corner from Walmart; the local pub. There will always be room for that.

 

[schnee]

I think that it is quite fun to retroactively come up with reasons for the success of the kickstarter because who would have guessed that a book/mini/streaming combo would have done so well.

I'm backing up the opinion of the one who actually made the $2+ million

Who's been in the business for 20+ years and knows where his audience comes from

 

[Shasarak]

I'm backing up the opinion of the one who actually made the $2+ million

Who's been in the business for 20+ years and knows where his audience comes from

Yeah sure why not. His guess is as good as anyone else.

 

[darjr]

Uhh even Matt Coleville didn’t know. So you can say you are on his side but his opinion was that he was shocked at the success of the Kickstarter.

 

[Motorskills]

Uhh even Matt Coleville didn’t know. So you can say you are on his side but his opinion was that he was shocked at the success of the Kickstarter.

It depends what you mean by shocked. Matt's "magic number" was 300K, which he later realised should have been 500K.

Was he shocked to hit his magic number? Maybe, maybe not. Hopefully not. He had gathered 8000 emails of interested people well in advance. Making several hundred thousand dollars was always highly probable IMO.

The (correct) magic number was the important one.
Was he shocked to hit a million? Probably. If I was him I wouldn't even have been entertaining that kind of number, gets your brain in the wrong place.
Shocked to hit two million? Definitely.
But by that point, you are in different territory anyway. Those are nice problems to have.

 

[darjr]

300k? I didn’t know that, why set the goal so low then? Anyway I agree I think he was caught in the headlights by how fast and high it was going.

 

[Hussar]

He probably set it at 300k because that's what the project needed. Getting 7 times more than you needed is likely something of a shock.

 

[Motorskills]

300k? I didn’t know that, why set the goal so low then? Anyway I agree I think he was caught in the headlights by how fast and high it was going.

He probably set it at 300k because that's what the project needed. Getting 7 times more than you needed is likely something of a shock.

Read this, you won't regret it.

TLDR: the number required to make the project viable = / = Matt's Magic Number.

 

[SkidAce]

Read this, you won't regret it.

TLDR: the number required to make the project viable = / = Matt's Magic Number.

Thanks [MENTION=15921]Motorskills[/MENTION] , that was a good read and an interesting perspective from Matt.