Would You Like To Give Ken Whitman's d20 Entertainment $5 In Return For Nothing?

Ken Whitman is a man who has been discussed at length across the RPG community in recent months. With a history of undelivered products and unfulfilled Kickstarters, his name has become synonymous with broken promises. After going radio silent for a while as his most recent failure-to-launch raged across the community, his d20 Entertainment website popped back up on Black Friday asking people to pay him $5 in return for nothing, in a move inspired by Cards Against Humanity.

Of course, when Cards Against Humanity did it, they were trading on goodwill. The first time they did it, they offered some "crap" - and then literally shipped manure to those who bought it. This year, they asked for money for "nothing". Folks paid it. But CaH has a lot of trust and goodwill in the tabletop gaming community.

Whitman's website had been offline until last week. I'm not going to link to it, because you absolutely should not go there and give Ken Whitman $5. Some rumours went around that he had packed up and moved to Atlanta with the intention of beginning an acting career; I don't know how accurate that is. I reported recently on Noble Knight Games' generous offer to fulfill Kickstarter pledges with their own stock. To be clear, Noble Knight Games is a store, unaffiliated with d20 Entertainment, which had some stock of the products that d20 Entertainment's Kickstarter backers never received. A classy move on their part - they were in no way obligated to do anything like that.

You can read some updates (or non-updates) about the Knights of the Dinner Table video pilot Kickstarter here (there was also a Spinward Traveller one).

 

[Tyranthraxus]

I think you are now one step behind the move now Morrus, Whit Whitman (Who sounds more like a Comic Book character... I believe he has changed his name from Ken) is now Vegas bound.. Or was. Im not sure if it actually came to pass.

I invested in the Spinward Traveller one sadly.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I thought about backing the KotDT live action series but, thankfully, decided against it. I feel for those people that have been scammed by this guy. The $5 for nothing thing shows that he basically has no shame.

 

[Uder]

I knew it was too good to be true. I gave $5 and I didn't get nothing!

 

[Eminence_Grise]

I like the innuendo of the last sentence.

As he tried starting a new kickstarter recently? I would assume he would do so under a new company name and would obfuscate in name in the pitch to avoid the bad publicity.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

That and technically a company/person isnt allowed to have 2 Kickstarters running at the same time.

 

[Jester David]

The Cards Against Humanity is satire for Black Friday. Last year they sold manure and the year before that they raised their prices. This year they upped their game with the $5 for nothing without even promising any money would go to charity (which some did, but certainly not the majority).
They can do it because it's something their company does.

This is just scummy.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

I used to love reading his supporter posts (there was quite a lot of them at one point) over at Kenzer. Gradually they faded away. Every so often we get a 'give him a chance' post though

 

[smiteworks]

It sounds like he should have used variants of that graphic for his Kickstarter projects.

 

[Cody C. Lewis]

Pass.