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

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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 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.

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it’s baked in by what the game cares about (has rules for) vs what it ignores. As Matt says in the video, they are not tracking ammo, rations, torches, or how much every items weighs

Which as argued I don't believe has anything to do with any notion of "heroic".

This has already been gone over why are we restarting the argument
 

As I've said, it seems like you're going wildly out of your way to critique terms that they've defined and are using by their definitions, because you wish they used different definitions. That's beyond pointless mate.
Yup. Matt even accounted for people wanting to use different definitions of the terms they are using than what MCDM is defining. “Knock yourself out”, he said.

It feels uncharitable bad faith to just keep on going past what Matt said.
 

Absolutely it does, and the fact that you're not engaging with that shows the problem you're having in understanding the problem here.

This is about themes and styles and tone, and you just don't seem to be seeing those or engaging with those concept at all.

Engaging with a concept is not the same thing as agreeing with you.

In other words, that I disagree doesn't mean I'm not engaging the subject.

You said it would be a major gameplay loop.

You should check again. I never said the word "major" nor implied it.

The jump from what I actually said, "smithing could be a part of the game", to that is wild.

You were the one who said it would be important.

Again, no I did not. What you appear to be conflating together is the statement that a game, by virtue of being interactive, fundamentally necessitates the presence of things that would be superflous in a film, with the statement that smithing could be a part of a LOTR game.

These are separate statements, and the points being made by both are only tangentially related. The former is pointing out that games are about doing things, not passively observing things happen, and the latter is relating that LOTR isn't somehow compromised thematically by smithing as an activity.

I maintain that in 3rd Age-set LotR game, it would be entirely inappropriate to make smithing any kind of major part of gameplay. It's completely tonally and thematically inappropriate.

You can keep saying this louder and louder all you want, but that doesn't make you more right. If you want to keep asserting this you'll need an argument thats more substantial than just escalating the tone of your writing voice.

An argument, mind, that we can actually discuss the merits of; I can't imagine you find yelling your opinion at me to be all that productive, and you decided to ignore my attempt at providing more substance.

To reiterate, one of the core themes, arguably the core theme of LOTR is the impact even the smallest of things has on the tides of history. Thats the thematic appeal of Bilbo's and Frodo's pity on Gollum, and why Tolkien spends so much time building up not just the Hobbits themselves but the world they're ushered into.

They practically don't exist in the great scheme of Middle Earth, and yet after the great Isildur falls, its three Hobbits that ultimately shape the entire destiny of that world.

The way in which Tolkien portrays is this is precisely by focusing on those things that you insist are antithetical to what he was writing. Smithing is just one small thing amongst many that'd be representative of that. The kinds of Heroes Tolkien celebrated were nothing more than your humble blacksmith, and many were even lesser than that.

After all, one has to remember that Tolkien and Christopher didn't believe LOTR was filmable, and it makes sense why when you actually read the books. So much time is dedicated to things that do precisely diddly and squat to serve a plot, but do everything to convey the emotions and message of the story.

A film simply couldn't spend the time deep diving into the lore about a random hill in the middle of nowhere, and we see that when Weathertop is reduced to a vague reference in Fellowship.

Do you want to take a guess which artistic medium could spend the time doing things like that?

Games, again, are about doing. You are Frodo Baggins. If Frodo's story, his journey from the Shire to Mordor to the Crack of Doom and back again, covers things that would waste the audiences time in a movie theater, we can't look at that story as depicted in a game and assume the same things. Games are about doing.

You're not doing if you're skipping over half the struggle Frodo went through.

But, this whole diatribe is kind of pointless to begin with, as MCDMRPG isn't a Lord of the Rings adaptation. We know what its about, and its about being a fantasy action RPG.

And there's nothing wrong with that, and I should know, because I never criticized the game.
Because you factually cannot implement something like that in tabletop game.

If you believe that then I'm going to need for you to precisely, and calmly, elaborate on what you believe the concept of "multiplayer crafting" entails.

I suspect you're using words I ostensibly understand to mean something entirely different from what I understand those words to mean.

It hasn't been done, and asserting that it should be done for the first time in some entirely inappropriate RPG is bizarre, frankly.

Its bizarre to try doing new things for a change?

The idea that it's a fallacy for me to point out that you're engaging in a fantasy about a system that doesn't, and where you only example couldn't be implemented in tabletop is pretty funny

Oh, you think you couldn't do Space Engineers in tabletop? Sure, in the strictest sense of copying exactly what Space Engineers does yeah thats not possible on tabletop.

But in the sense of cooperatively building a ship together? Absolutely possible, if you're willing to iterate on existing mechanics.

The board game Galaxy Truckers for example provides a foundation for ship building, and would be pretty trivial to iterate into a cooperative rather than competitive experience, especially if it was then combined with Chvátil's other game Space Cadets, which covers the players cooperatively running the ship.

As an aside, this is actually my base theory crafting for what my take on a scifi RPG would be like mechanically, insofar as what customizing and running ships together would be like.

Also kind weird to be complaining about the lack of innovators in this space, whilst attempting to complain about a game that's actually innovating, and innovating enough to upset some people. Maybe attitudes like your own are part of why get fewer innovators?

I'm not complaining about anything, least of which the game.

And lets not confuse them saying this game is "Heroic", the thing I was actually talking about, as "innovation".

It's not about the literal minutiae.

Not according to what they wrote. Has to be said, but you and others have consistently tried to accuse me of not reading the game's own words...

And yet you and others pay no heed to the fact that the game's own words spends much more time on the minutia it isn't about than the themes. 6 paragraphs to 2, respectively.

That's beyond pointless mate.

Well yeah I've been telling you that, and yet you have seen fit to turn it into a massive argument.
 



Which as argued I don't believe has anything to do with any notion of "heroic".
not with your interpretation, you made that clear

This has already been gone over why are we restarting the argument
I considered it ongoing rather than settled, also it was not about whether you think it is heroic or not, but whether this is reflected in the game mechanics, which you thought was not possible
 

not with your interpretation, you made that clear


I considered it ongoing rather than settled, also it was not about whether you think it is heroic or not, but whether this is reflected in the game mechanics, which you thought was not possible

Words mean things, and bespoke definitions will induce cognitive dissonances, especially when they're being applied to very ephemeral things. Heroic necessarily implies heroism, and heroism has nothing to do with whether or not the game has pooping mechanics, to be hyperbolic.

But ultimately, people should go back and read what I originally posted more carefully. I was offering an alternative interpretation of the term, and related that how they were using it isn't a maxim.

That was it.

What about that original post could be called criticism is milder than unseasoned chicken, and neither it nor what I went on to clarify about my thoughts touched on the game itself, just this label of "heroic" and what I felt was a bit too dissonant given what they intend for it to mean in relation to their game.

The game isn't "bad" for this, its just a weird way to categorize it and that was the sum point if my OP.

Hence the baffling response where people act like I'm calling the game garbage or something, in spite of multiple repeated statements to the contrary and favorable comparisons to my own game.

I literally don't know how to express to you people any more clearly than I already have that I don't have an issue with the game.
 


yes


it kinda does, the more you focus on these details, the more you dilute the heroic part, until it becomes predominantly about something else and the heroism is at best optional

Its not a zero sum, and this speaks to why innovation in these kinds of areas is important, and why I brought up TLOU as an example done right.

The logic that these mechanics merely existing is problematic doesn't follow from any seeming criteria other than not liking all those other creatively bankrupt games that mindlessly copy/pasted the same mechanics that got stale decades ago.

Its important to acknowledge what people would expect of such things, but that doesn't mean staying away from them unless your goal is just broad appeal (re: blandness).

It just means you have to temper what you create with specific constraints that you follow through on.

F
or example if one examined my own games development, it'd be easy to throw around tired buzzphrases like scope creep, but it'd be doing my process a disservice to not acknowledge that the constraints I put in place are explicitly meant to temper the drawbacks.

My game has gotten substantially larger in scope over time, but the constraints I use are fixed constants; my game must be efficient and every element and gameplay loop must be well integrated with each other.

These constraints carry the load on ensuring what I design and introduce all ultimately serve the overall gameloop, even if some would take aesthetic issue with their inclusion, like having mechanics for Smell and Taste, for example, which in isolation as vague references are sure to provoke similarly hostile reactions to what I saw earlier (its happened before), but in context make perfect sense, not just in terms of how they mechanically serve the gameloop but also in the meta sense of organizing a rule book and developing a richer solution space for players to engage with through improv.

But anyway, getting back to the issue:

Heroic as defined by them is basically a word thats defining two different things simultaneously.

On the one hand you have expected character motivations, which is fine, and on the other a gaggle of mechanics that the game otherizes as antithetical, justifying it by pointing to cinema.

This is why felt they'd have been better off just calling this cinematic and leaving it at that, as the 6 paragraphs they spend on this latter part is clearly more of what they're concerned about.

And as related in my OP, the parts that are more intuitive to the Heroic label aren't a maxim. The alternative interpretation is one possible way to approach the idea, and there are others we could find if we cared to brainstorm.

What we intuitively call Heroic or Heroism has a lot more variety than their definition gives, and my intent in calling this out was just to highlight that, and thats where the only real criticism was; against the idea of Heroic being an absolute thing, which is being perpetuated by this game regardless of whether or not you like it (and i do like it, as I keep having to repeat).

I often times pitch my own game as being a "legend shaping" game, and I put a pretty big qualifier on what I mean by "legend" in that I don't mean anything in particular by that word other than a vague end goal.

What you as a player make of your characters overall legend is up to you, whether thats being a really great Baker, a great King, or a terrible Necromancer bent on death and bedlam, and the game gives you the tools to realize all of that, and more.

Where this game does go right though is in deliberately deemphasizing the sandbox, as that at least makes the prescriptive nature more acceptable. Even so, I don't see that deemphasis surviving contact with players, but thats a different topic altogether.
 

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