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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[paintphob]

Or kept modest, and go on for a long, long time.

 

[Ancalagon]

Bravo Matt!

 

[Seramus]

Or kept modest, and go on for a long, long time.

Yeah. I wouldn't blow most of it on a single season, or it will be really jarring going from one season to the next. Instead, rent a decent recording location and buy some nice cameras, but otherwise keep a modest level of production value and use the money to make several decent seasons of content.

 

[Brodie]

The vast majority of his backers pledged at at a level that includes at least one physical item. The shipping cost I had to add for my copy of the book was $12. Taking that as a baseline, that's roughly $300k in shipping costs... At the very least.

However, he was only looking for $50k to fund publication (and some minis) and his stream... And he's gotten over $2,000,000. Even subtracting the rough estimate of shipping, publishing a book, and getting minis made, he's got quite a bit left to cover his stream. And maybe entice some of his well-known voice actor friends over for a cameo or two?

Anyway, I'm really happy for Mr. Colville. When he announced he was doing a kickstarter, I thought "Well, count me in. I'm sure he'll reach his goal, even if just barely." I didn't think he'd become the most successful RPG kickstarter in history or make it into the Top 100 Kickstarters of All Time with really only one book. He must have had a lot of good karma built up. Bravo, Mr. Colville.

 

[KahlessNestor]

Yeah. I wouldn't blow most of it on a single season, or it will be really jarring going from one season to the next. Instead, rent a decent recording location and buy some nice cameras, but otherwise keep a modest level of production value and use the money to make several decent seasons of content.

I believe he has all the equipment already. He went ten grand of his own money and they built a rig. What they needed was the space.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

He has earned the title of King of Kickstarter.

 

[Morrus]

Wow! $2.1M! That's insane! Congratulations Matt!

 

[Waller]

I don't think Matt Colville likes us very much.

https://www.mcdmproductions.com/news/2018/3/12/the-end-of-the-beginning

“On old forums where folks have been talking about D&D for 20 years, people are trying to reverse-engineer our success. None of them can fathom what’s going on. They’ve never heard of me. Is there really this much demand for a Strongholds & Followers book for 5th Edition? Have we all been doing this wrong the whole time?

I am a member of these forums. On some of them, I had tens of thousands of posts back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Back when that industry was my job. None of these people remember me, and why should they? They’re all newcomers from my point of view, and I’m a nobody from theirs.

Some people try to frame the discussion in terms of Streaming. “The Rise of the Streamer.” None of these people know who streams what, so they assume I am a popular streamer. Some of them know I’m not but in their minds, being on YouTube and being on Twitch is the same thing. I’m watching the birth of a new generation of Grognard.

I interject and try to explain. The success of the Kickstarter is the success of the YouTube channel. There’s no way to understand it otherwise. I don’t think they’re really interested in my opinion. What do I know? I’m no longer part of that world. I feel very little connection with folks in tabletop now. I realize to me, now, this hobby is something that happens at the table, but the community happens on twitch and youtube and reddit and twitter. Those are my native environments. I’m pretty sure most of the posters on these forums have no twitter account. They talk about twitter like it’s a sign of the downfall of western civilization. What would they have made of Elvis and his swiveling hips in the 1950s? Would they have been on the right side of history then?”

 

[chunkosauruswrex]

I don't think Matt Colville likes us very much.

https://www.mcdmproductions.com/news/2018/3/12/the-end-of-the-beginning

He kind of sees places like these as Old Man Yells at Cloud. He interacts through Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, and youtube. Dedicated forums are kind of an old school idea now.

 

[Morrus]

He kind of sees places like these as Old Man Yells at Cloud. He interacts through Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, and youtube. Dedicated forums are kind of an old school idea now.

I felt we were very supportive of his Kickstarter. I for one was cheering him on. Ah well, can't win 'em all!