MCDM's New Tactical TTRPG Hits $1M Crowdfunding On First Day!

Matt Colville's MCDM is no stranger to crowdfunding, with three million dollar Kickstarters already under its belt. With the launch of The MCDM RPG, that makes four!

This new game is not a D&D variant or a supplement for D&D, which is what MCDM has focussed on so far. This is an all-new game which concentrates on tactical play, with a fulfilment goal of July 2025. It comes in two books--a 400-page 'Heroes' book and a 'Monsters' book which is an adaption of the existing Flee, Mortals!

The MCDM RPG: Draw Steel

Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.

www.backerkit.com

The game takes aim at traditional d20 fantasy gaming, referring to the burden of 'sacred cows from the 1970s', but point out that it's not a dungeon crawling or exploration game--its core activity is fighting monsters. The system is geared towards tactical combat--you roll 2d6, add an attribute, and do that damage; there's no separate attack roll.

At $40 for the base Heroes PDF and $70 for the hardcover (though there are discounts for both books if you buy them together), it's not a cheap buy-in, but with over 4,000 backers already that's not deterring anybody!

Even more ambitiously, one of the stretch goals is a Virtual Tabletop (VTT). There's already a working prototype of it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This is a very silly opinion to have.

Mod Note:

Can we just NOT with the personal attacks? Even if mild and in jest between buddies, it sets a bad example.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm really happy to see someone take on the D&D beast and MCDM seem to be the ones with enough audience to do it.

Very surprised to see how much support this essentially untested RPG is getting with no play content and rules that just don't seem that innovative. Very surprised. So many restrictions on players - classes and kits etc, sticking with a very D&Desque world etc.

They have obviously done an amazing job at establishing an audience who trusts them!

MCDM uses paid playtesters and they discuss their success and failure with design in their Patreon, and they have been even to this point for their unfinished product.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

actually that is an interesting thought to think about, social media subs to actual consumers of your product ratio. (I am sure some media/marketing person has figured it out).
Side note, at least for me, despite the numbers, i do not see a large media presence of Avatar RPG sessions, or people talking about it, like i do other systems.

I think with any merchandised property, that's based on an existing media, so Dune, Terminator, Avatar, Alien, etc. etc. you are inevitably selling some significant proportion of your copies to people who are into that media, and will want to read the book, especially the "lore" parts of it, but who don't necessarily have any real intention of running it as an RPG, and indeed who in some cases might want it more as a collector's object or conversation piece.

I imagine the actual percentage varies quite considerably, but with Avatar I suspect the "no real intention of playing it" fraction is pretty large, certainly the vast majority - the same for the Blade Runner RPG - I'd be surprised if even one in ten purchasers ended up running the latter.

To be fair TT RPGs have always sold to people who are uncertain they'll actually run them. Most of the posters on this forum probably have quite a few RPGs, as well as a bunch of adventures and so on that they've never actually run. But my impression is with merchandised products like these the proportion is wildly higher even than the norm for TT RPGs.

That said, apart from Avatar, most of the biggest campaigns have been for actual TT RPG products for 5E.

EDIT - Also worth noting that whilst the numbers in dollars might seem high, we're typically talking tens of thousands of customers, which obviously isn't going to move the needle compared to D&D's tens of millions. But even on general RPG discussion reddits and Discords and the like, I haven't seem much (read: any) mention of most of merchandised RPGs except around their digital and physical delivery periods. The one definite exception I've seen is the Alien RPG - but that's still discussed a lot less than the Mothership RPG from what I've seen.

 

[Staffan]

actually that is an interesting thought to think about, social media subs to actual consumers of your product ratio. (I am sure some media/marketing person has figured it out).
Side note, at least for me, despite the numbers, i do not see a large media presence of Avatar RPG sessions, or people talking about it, like i do other systems.

As @Ruin Explorer mentioned, major licenses attract quite a few people who buy the thing without playing it. In addition. Avatar in particular uses Powered by the Apocalypse for its engine, and that's... an acquired taste. I mean, there are people who swear by it, but it's not exactly traditional.

 

[Reef]

This is definitely something I’ll take a long hard look at when it’s released. But 2025 is way too far for me to even consider Kickstarting. That’s far enough out that I’m at the age now where I have to at least consider if I’ll even still be here then…heh.

(Odds are still in my favour, but still )

 

[Nikosandros]

Agreed. Not sure I heard that right

I've just watched the video and you heard right. Of course, it is likely to be a somewhat hyperbolic statements to the effect that the art budget will be huge compared to many other RPG products with the same budget.

 

[R_J_K75]

There simply is a difference between what you think you expect the conditions to be 6-9 months down the

My POV is, wait until your KS is finished then make a better estimate on shipping.

In addition, as was mentioned, the print run ended up much larger than anticipated,

Again if you wait until your KS is finished then you'll be able to make a better estimate on shipping.

In the end these are estimates, and they can slip. If that is more than you are willing to accept, wait until the books are available or back at the PDF level, that does not mitigate all delays, but at least the ones related to printing and S&H

If someone is making estimates that are clearly well out of an accepted range of tolerance, you're not doing your job correctly. If I had to guess many of the shipping dates are based off of old models pre-COVID. Again, if you're not actively looking to update that data, you are not doing your job correctly. When I order any product and I'm told a ship date, I expect it to arrive within that time frame with a very low margin of error.

 

[R_J_K75]

This is a very silly opinion to have.

Thats your opinion

 

[darjr]

I’ve run several sessions of Avatar. I was asked to run it for money. The tables at Gen Con all sold out and as they added tables those seats would get snapped up instantly.

They had lines at thier demo area.

I hear of games locally. And out there in the nets.

Yea I see people playing Avatar.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I’ve run several sessions of Avatar. I was asked to run it for money. The tables at Gen Con all sold out and as they added tables those seats would get snapped up instantly.

They had lines at thier demo area.

I hear of games locally.

Yea I see people playing Avatar.

I've never heard of a game locally, in London, so I remain a little skeptical, because I've heard of a lot of other games being run. That's not to say they aren't being run of course. I'm hardly the oracle of London lol. Far from it.

However I am unsurprised to hear it went big at a con, it strikes me as the sort of game a lot of people would like to play at least once, but maybe not many people actually think to run. I know if I was at a con I might well sign up for it.

I guess more to the point, whether people are playing it or not, it doesn't seem like it's drastically more popular than a lot of other KS'd games which scored much, much smaller amounts of funding. That there's maybe not necessarily a close correlation between how much a TT RPG makes on KS and how much it's actually played?

Or maybe it's just about how much people feel a game is worthy of discussion? I have heard the rules for Avatar are somewhat unremarkable for a PtbA game, lacking say, the brilliance of MASKS, or the remarkable D&D emulation of Dungeon World. But maybe you can comment on that? Lancer, I would say, even in just the year or so after it came out, got a ton more discussion than Avatar has that I've seen, but is that just that Lancer was a more interesting game to discuss thematically and mechanically? I think it was doing something a lot riskier and more innovative - that's not a criticism of Avatar, per se, of course, just a potential cause of the lack of discussion.

EDIT - MCDM may well create outsize discussion impact in the other direction too - i.e. more discussion than it deserves in terms of player base, because it's muscling in on D&D territory, very intentionally and openly. Matt literally says (I'm paraphrasing slightly) "We think this game is better than D&D and its relatives at doing heroic fantasy-style D&D" in the Kickstarter video (I can find the quote if necessary, it's near the beginning), so there'll be a lot of < pantomine voice > "OH NO IT ISN'T!" and "OH YES IT IS!" type discussion back and forth until some kind of consensus forms (my guess: "It's really good [and/but] it's 'not D&D'" - delete and or but as applicable to whether you're spinning this negatively or positively!).

Avatar in particular uses Powered by the Apocalypse for its engine, and that's... an acquired taste. I mean, there are people who swear by it, but it's not exactly traditional.

Yeah though one thing I know from running PtbA is that it's not non-gamers who have a problem with it, it's not people new to RPGs who have a problem with it, it's solely people who are familiar with TT RPGs, often quite experienced D&D players, who just can't wrap their head around even Dungeon World. My main group managed it easily enough but others have struggled. So that might be a wash overall in terms of how many are playing it.