Goodman Games: Our Efforts Have Been Mischaracterized

Goodman Games' CEO Joseph Goodman made a statement via YouTube over the weekend*. The video itself focused on the content of the controversial upcoming City State of the Invincible Overlord crowdfunding product, but was prefaced by a short introduction by Joseph Goodman, in which he reiterates his company's commitment to inclusivity and diversity and its opposition to bigotry, something which they say they "don't want to be associated with".

Goodman goes on to say that the company's efforts have been "mischaracterized by some folks" but does not go so far as to identify the mischaracterization, so it's not entirely clear what they consider to be untrue other than the "inaccurate" statements made by Bob Bledsaw II of Judges Guild about Goodman Games' plans, which Goodman mentioned last week.

For those who haven't been following this story, it has been covered in the articles Goodman Games Revives Relationship With Anti-Semitic Publisher For New City State Kickstarter, Goodman Games Offers Assurances About Judges Guild Royalties, and Judges Guild Makes Statement About Goodman Controversy. In short, Goodman Games is currently licensing an old property from a company with which it claimed to have cut ties in 2020 after the owner of that company made a number of bigoted comments on social media. Goodman Games has repeatedly said that this move would allow them to provide backers of an old unfulfilled Judges Guild Kickstarter with refunds, but there are many people questioning seeming contradictions in both the timelines involved and in the appropriateness of the whole endeavour.

Despite the backlash, the prospects of the crowdfunding project do not seem to have been harmed. The pre-launch page has over 3,000 followers, and many of the comments under the YouTube videos or on other social media are not only very supportive of the project, but also condemn those who question its appropriateness. In comparison, the original (failed) Judges Guild Kickstarter had only 965 backers.

The video is embedded below, followed by a transcript of the relevant section.

Hi everybody, I'm Joseph Goodman of Goodman Games. We recently announced our City State of the Invincible Overlord crowdfunding project for 5E and DCC RPG.

In the video you're about to see, some of our product development team is going to tell you about what makes the City State so amazing and why we're bringing it back to 5E and DCC audiences nearly 50 years after it was first released. It really is an amazing setting.

But we could have rolled this project out with a lot more clarity. Now, to be clear, Goodman Games absolutely opposes any sort of bigotry, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia. We don't want to support it. We don't want to be associated with it.

Our well-intentioned effort to launch this project in a way that refunds backers of a former failed Kickstarter from another publisher kind of backfired in the way we announced it. Rest assured, the funds from this crowdfunding will actually fund refunds to backers of the original City State crowdfunding for the Pathfinder edition from 2014.

Unfortunately, our efforts have been—you know, I didn’t clarify them perfectly when we rolled it out—and they've been mischaracterized by some folks since then. But please rest assured, we stand for inclusivity and diversity.

You can read a lot more detail in the post that's linked below, and there's another video linked below where we talk about this in even more detail. But for now, we hope you will sit back and enjoy as some of the product development team tells you about really what makes the City State of the Invincible Overlord so amazing, and why you might want to check it out when it comes to crowdfunding soon.

Thanks, and I'll turn it over to them now.

The statement refers to a post about this that is supposed to be linked below, but at the time of writing no post is linked below the video, so it's not clear if that refers to a new post or one of Goodman Games' previous statements on the issue.

I reached out to Joseph Goodman last week to offer a non-confrontational (although direct and candid) interview in which he could answer some ongoing questions and talk on his reasoning behind the decision; I have not yet received a response to the offer--I did, however, indicate that I was just leaving for UK Games Expo, and wouldn't be back until this week.

*Normally I would have covered this in a more timely fashion, but I was away at UK Games Expo from Thursday through to Monday.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Where do you see that? I'm looking at B2 now and in the description of Area A it says there is a 2/6 chance of 8 Kobold Archers emerging from the trees above the cave entrance and attacking when a group enters the tunnel. Not a guaranteed dozen.

Sorry, misremembered the numbers -- I ran B2 during lockdown with my family. Eight archers unloading their arrows on a group, probably by surprise, is still going to wreck a group.

One of the big problems with B2 is how many times Gary explicitly tells the DM that monsters will attack, instead of to roll Reactions.

He wrote it more like multiple Lair Assaults (a la G1 but without so many ways to sneak around) than like the "play the factions off each other and cut deals" adventure that so many modern OSR folks advise (correctly, IMO) that it should be played as. Gary's descriptions of nearly every lair (including the Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs, and Minotaur - the Ogre is arguably an exception) indicate that they immediately attack.

It never ceases to amuse me how much of classic D&D requires ignoring Gary Gygax.

 

[Artamo]

You can find that in plenty of modern OSR adventures.

The reason Milton posted the original video about DCC adventures is that the wall of text format mostly the purview of "we're so big, we don't need to innovate" publishers at this point.

I think if Goodman or WotC or Kobold Press or Paizo suddenly improved their information presentation, most of their customers would be excited by it.

Looking at the comment sections for the two Questing Beast videos, DCC fans felt like their game was being attacked by an outsider, but if you drill into them, a lot of them were tacitly agreeing. "I read all the adventures twice and then highlight all the important stuff and make notes in the margin" is the comment of someone who only thinks they're disagreeing with Milton's original criticisms.

I’m definitely not so nostalgic as to think that we’ve haven’t gotten better at writing and formatting games today. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the days of Temple of Elemental Evil, that’s for sure. I remember looking at a copy of the OAR for that one, and while I appreciate the update to 5e, I felt like they still missed the boat on making that adventure make more sense overall. There is so much dense text in some of those old modules and yet, people often struggle to explain what the point of some of those modules were. Text that doesn’t serve to clarify or provide a story is just not that worthwhile, i think. I remember Dragonsfoot used to have a several hundred page thread just dedicated to people trying to grok that one adventure alone.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I’m definitely not so nostalgic as to think that we’ve haven’t gotten better at writing and formatting games today. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the days of Temple of Elemental Evil, that’s for sure. I remember looking at a copy of the OAR for that one, and while I appreciate the update to 5e, I felt like they still missed the boat on making that adventure make more sense overall. There is so much dense text in some of those old modules and yet, people often struggle to explain what the point of some of those modules were. Text that doesn’t serve to clarify or provide a story is just not that worthwhile, i think. I remember Dragonsfoot used to have a several hundred page thread just dedicated to people trying to grok that one adventure alone.

Yeah, I was disappointed when that was announced as an OAR. I understood the appeal, but it felt like polishing -- or not polishing, as it turns out -- a turd.

I would have much preferred Palace of the Silver Princess, which is the quintessential TSR adventure where the multiple printings are worth including in an archive, along with a history of what happened and why. A modern update that reconciled the two versions would have been great.

 

[Mannahnin]

Sorry, misremembered the numbers -- I ran B2 during lockdown with my family. Eight archers unloading their arrows on a group, probably by surprise, is still going to wreck a group.

Yeah, it's scary. 8 is enough that even having only a 20% chance to hit a Fighter in plate & shield (assuming no Dex bonus) they're likely to get a couple of hits in. Assuming you have an old school party of 6-9 as the module is written for (p2), and have multiple front liners with AC2 or better, it's may be a hard fight but definitely not a guaranteed wrecking. 1/3 chance of an encounter x 1/3 chance of surprise is a 1/9 chance of being ambushed by surprise, of course.

Given the wording "as the group enters the cave", even if I played it RAW and the 2/6 came up I'd be inclined to give the PCs cover and make it a situation where they're quasi-pinned down inside the cave. With the archers above but not in direct LOS, and the PCs having to figure out how to escape OR a way to lure the archers into the cave and ambush them back, it becomes a pretty interesting encounter.

..actually, I just looked at the encounter entry again and it doesn't say anything about them being archers. It just says #AT 1, dmg 1-4, which implies daggers and/or clubs. So they have to get into melee. Unless they want to throw away their only weapons or the DM chooses to give them additional armaments not in the text.

I see that the guard room specifies those goblins have javelins, which are also d4 damage. Maybe you inferred from there that the ambush kobolds also have javelins, and that's where the missile attacks came from?

It never ceases to amuse me how much of classic D&D requires ignoring Gary Gygax.

100%

 

[Bae'zel]

There's definitely some middle ground between "endless walls of text" vs. "math textbook keywords".

Imagine if DCC had room descriptions broken up like this:

1. Big wall of text, which the fans seem to prefer
2. Some words of said text are bolded for emphasis
3. after the big wall of text, the bolded items are given presence under standard sub-headings like: monsters, treasure, secrets, traps etc...

There you go, everyone wins, the prose is there for the people who want that and the structured, cognitive-friendly, easy to scan content is there for the people who want that too.

It can be done. As I mentuioned, some modules from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, as OSR as it gets, managed to accomplish this relatively well.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, it's scary. 8 is enough that even having only a 20% chance to hit a Fighter in plate & shield (assuming no Dex bonus) they're likely to get a couple of hits in. Assuming you have an old school party of 6-9 as the module is written for (p2), and have multiple front liners with AC2 or better, it's a hard fight but definitely not a guaranteed wrecking.

Given the wording "as the group enters the cave", even if I played it RAW and the 2/6 came up I'd be inclined to give the PCs cover and make it a situation where they're quasi-pinned down inside the cave. With the archers above but not in direct LOS, and the PCs having to figure out how to escape OR a way to lure the archers into the cave and ambush them back, it becomes a pretty interesting encounter.

..actually, I just looked at the encounter entry again and it doesn't say anything about them being archers. It just says #AT 1, dmg 1-4, which implies daggers and/or clubs. So they have to get into melee. Unless they want to throw away their only weapons or the DM chooses to give them additional armaments not in the text.

I see that the guard room specifies those goblins have javelins, which are also d4 damage. Maybe you inferred from there that the ambush kobolds also have javelins, and that's where the missile attacks came from?

I ran it out of OAR 1. I need to pull that down later and see if we're looking at different printings.

 

[Mannahnin]

I ran it out of OAR 1. I need to pull that down later and see if we're looking at different printings.

Both my copies of B2 and my copy of OAR1 say the same. But I do see that in the 5E conversion they give half the eight ambushers javelins and have them rappel down to attack, and half of them slings and have them shoot from the trees.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Failures at what?

Ben Milton argues that they are failing to publish as usable and valuable game books than they would if they adopted some better practices in formatting and layout.

If their primary goal is to sell books, with little regard to how often they get played, and their market research indicates that their buyers primarily buy to read rather than to play, then they should certainly disregard his opinion.

Your bit about not everyone seeing things the same way is obvious, already explicitly stated by Milton in both of his videos, and kind of insulting for you to keep repeating as if not everyone understands that.

I am addressing @Fenris-77 , not "everyone", and they seem to be focusing on usability as a game as the more important metric, which I am refuting.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Both my copies of B2 and my copy of OAR1 say the same. But I do see that in the 5E conversion they give half the eight ambushers javelins and have them rappel down to attack, and half of them slings and have them shoot from the trees.

That must be what my mind transmuted into archers. Thanks.

 

[mamba]

I am addressing @Fenris-77 , not "everyone", and they seem to be focusing on usability as a game as the more important metric, which I am refuting.

I mean, you are disagreeing with it, refuting feels a bit strong