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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[Seramus]

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!

Polite request. Could you put the link to 7th Sea a little further down, and the link to the Stronghold Kickstarter further up? For an active kickstarter project, it might help him out a little to have his kickstarter link near the top instead of much further down. Anything that helps the hobby, really!

 

[Fanaelialae]

It's exciting!

<i>Numenera</i> got plenty of fanfare; but this is eclipsing that by an order of magnitude. It's mind boggling; I'm utterly fascinated.

It is really interesting. According to YouTube, he has just over 170,000 subscribers, while the Kickstarter currently has just under under 8500 pledges. In other words, if we assume that the majority of pledges are also subscribed to his channel, about 5% of his subscriber base has pledged thus far, suggesting that these folks (myself included) are the ones Matt rolled a natural 20 against with his Persuade check.

 

[Seramus]

Why is Monte Cooke controversial?

This quote was mostly meant as comedy, but it has several grains of truth.

"As a game designer, Monte Cook is known for four major things: being a genuinely brilliant and insightful setting designer who crafts fun and imaginative systems and games, having a profusion of "cool" ideas that need the assistance of partners to help filter out the good one from the bad, regularly quitting and re-joining the industry every few years over disputes with the management, and for having an insane, out of control spellcaster fetish beyond all expectation or reason. In fact, he once infamously said that the biggest tweak 3rd Ed. needed was a hard nerf to all martial classes, particularly the fighter, and an across the board buff to all spellcasters. Yes, we are talking about the same 3rd Edition in which half the classes in the game were better fighters than the fighter, and spellcasters could pull [stuff] like this. (While theoretically he has a point, since at level 1 the spellcaster classes are a bit suck, most would argue that a stabler power curve where magicals start higher and martials suck less later would be the ideal solution, rather than ensuring the wizard dominates at all levels of play.)

One thing people like to hold his feet to the fire over is the "Ivory Tower" school of game design: since he was working for a company that literally made its name with card games, why not put in systems to mimic card games? The "Ivory Tower," or "system mastery" for those that don't hate it, involves deliberately sowing weak "newb traps" into your game as character advancement options (explicitly compared to "Timmy cards"), to punish new players for the crime of inexperience and offer veterans an inflated sense of self-worth that comes from attaining a wholly artificial sense of "mastery." To his credit, he has since apologized for the whole thing and admitted it was a terrible idea from start to finish, but here we are, still scrubbing through the aftermath years after the fact."

The Ivory Tower situation and associated links can be found HERE. There is more to the context than what is written there, but it's a decent primer.

Then there were the cultural appropriation controversy HERE. He was literally warned by his own native american consultant that this was a bad idea, and went ahead with it anyway.

And the Nibovian Wife controversy HERE.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Any one of those might be forgiven, but Monte Cook has a laundry list of weird things. I don't think he's a bad guy, but when he messes up can get really stubborn and stick to his guns.

 

[Morrus]

As game designers go, Monte Cook is probably one of the most well-managed personal brands in the industry; there really aren't many famous game designers (sure, we can all name dozens, but most people can't) but he's one of the closest we have. Until the streaming/YouTube folks came along, I'd have suggested he was one of the most famous people in tabletop gaming. Obviously, the new media has eclipsed the old, but he's still up there and still storming it. He's one of a few game designers with a real personal brand which goes beyond the hardcore.

 

[mattcolville]

It is really interesting. According to YouTube, he has just over 170,000 subscribers, while the Kickstarter currently has just under under 8500 pledges. In other words, if we assume that the majority of pledges are also subscribed to his channel, about 5% of his subscriber base has pledged thus far, suggesting that these folks (myself included) are the ones Matt rolled a natural 20 against with his Persuade check.

Subscribers levels aren't super useful, look how many views the video gets, that's a better metric.

 

[77IM]

Polite request. Could you put the link to 7th Sea a little further down, and the link to the Stronghold Kickstarter further up? For an active kickstarter project, it might help him out a little to have his kickstarter link near the top instead of much further down. Anything that helps the hobby, really!

Yeah because clearly this kickstarter totally needs all the help it can get.



(Just kidding, you make a really good point, I just couldn't resist the obvious retort.)

 

[mattcolville]

Bear in mind this is *not* typical of third party Kickstarters. It'll be the only third party 5E product *ever* to have done that; and only the second RPG book *ever* to do it. It's a statistical outlier by an order of magnitude, and it's awesome, but one shouldn't model anything on it. At least not until it has happened a few times.

This, on its own, is going to be a noticeable percentage of the entire tabletop RPG market for the year.

Just remember, like 20% of that total you're seeing is just shipping. So you gotta to some math to figure out the real number.

 

[77IM]

It is really interesting. According to YouTube, he has just over 170,000 subscribers, while the Kickstarter currently has just under under 8500 pledges. In other words, if we assume that the majority of pledges are also subscribed to his channel, about 5% of his subscriber base has pledged thus far, suggesting that these folks (myself included) are the ones Matt rolled a natural 20 against with his Persuade check.

Do you know about the "1000 True Fans" theory?

 

[Morrus]

Just remember, like 20% of that total you're seeing is just shipping. So you gotta to some math to figure out the real number.

That's fairly common. It's how I've always done it. Never been a fan of the "pay shipping at the end" model.

Plus 5% failed pledges and 5% Kickstarter fees.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Do you know about the "1000 True Fans" theory?

I had read about it in the past, but it had admittedly been buried my mind until you brought it up.

In truth, however, I'd simply noticed the that the math worked out to be right around 5% (I'm a subscriber to the channel, so I'd seen that number earlier this morning while watching his latest video, and I've been following the skyrocketing of the Kickstarter so I'd also seen the number of pledges) and really wanted to make a nat 20 joke.