NOW LIVE! The Weather Outside is Frightful: Chilly D&D Resources! Chilling monsters, cool sublasses, dangerous encounters in the frigid wastes, and a cold-hearted adventure for DnD 5E.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8203730" data-attributes="member: 5948">Speaking purely for myself, I'm of the view that not all crowdfunding is created equal.  I'm fine with kickstarter campaigns for RPG material, but dislike patreon and subscription fundraising intensely.It's just a fact of life that putting out RPG material is expensive, and putting out PRINT rpg material involves a big up-front printing cost that you need to find before you can even remotely look forward to getting a return on your investment (which normally won't happen for months, as you wait on your shipment of books to be printed and then shipped back on the slow boat from China).  There aren't many multi-millionaires in RPG design, plus the standard of books in the industry (art, design, colour, paper quality, etc) continually get higher (and more expensive), and it gets to the point when a small-medium publisher that invests in big expensive full-colour hardback books is risking its existence every time it tries.  So it seems perfectly reasonable to me when a company tries to raise the funding first, before committing to big hit of printing costs.  The economic arguments are hard to get past.But kickstarter vs patreon?Kickstarter I pay once, and i know what I'm getting, and i can choose not to pay for something i don't want, and the developers can develop the product in a way that makes for the best product rather than having to twist it to fit the subscription model.  I've backed kickstarters from Kobold Press, Privateer Press, Onyx Path and a bunch of smaller publishers, and i do like it this way because it lets people with good ideas and presentation get started in publication - there really was nothing like this pathway back a decade or two, and it're really broadened the industry and increased the average production value quality of the stuff we get. As an example of this, check out the Good Society reprint kickstarter - <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storybrewers/good-society-a-jane-austen-rpg-reprint-and-new-deck/description" target="_blank">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storybrewers/good-society-a-jane-austen-rpg-reprint-and-new-deck/description</a>.  I backed this one.  This is the sort of thing that would never even have have been published 20 years back - a collaborative and diceless Jane Austen RPG with no combat mechanics at all? - much less in a couple of beautiful full-colour hardbacks.  But kickstarter made it possible. Patreon, though, seems to incentivise a steady stream of small releases.  And that, as i spoke about in a previous post, very much affects the nature of what goes through to the customer.  You end up with either lots of tiny little throwaway products, or a larger product made up of lots of smaller roughly-even-sized bits.  You CAN do a reasonable monsters/adversaries book structured like that, but there's many, many more book types (campaign books, core rulebooks, worldbooks) that either don't fit that model, or their quality suffers for being forced into it.I really wish Green Ronin would move more towards kickstarter rather than patreon.  It could only increase the quality and scope of what they put out.  I'm honestly not sure why they haven't already - there used to be a sort of stigma or view that kickstarters were for little companies or people just starting out rather than for established names in the industry, but people like Onyx Path and Kobold Press have been running kickstarters for years, surely we're past that now?.</blockquote>

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