Black Gate

So a bit over a month ago I started my first every Kickstarter, a retro-fantasy book launch with Jeff Easley that ended earlier this week. It was a very interesting month and as people seem interested in Kickstarter’s and the possibilities that the Kickstarter site provides, I thought I’d continue blogging about it on Saturdays as long as I find out new and applicable facts concerning the program.

That being said, I’ll take you into the process once more and even append some of the numbers I initially reported during my first discourse into this topic.

This post will be about percentages, and how they can affect your project.

When I started my Kickstarter, my pledge numbers [which is to say those who became backers of the project and gave money] were mostly rolling in from feeds on Facebook. This was a cool fact, and showed that viral marketing through your social network does pay off. The percentage was roughly 70% Facebook and 30% Kickstarter internal marketing, and I was happy with that. As the month continued, however, the numbers started to realign with less and less Facebook traffic and more and more Kickstarter original pledging taking place.

Why is this, you might ask? Well, it’s an interesting thing. You see, Kickstarter has a tag it calls ‘Discover’ on its Home Page, and from that tag you can find various categories that might interest you as a possible backer. There are a bevy of them including Art, Music, Photography, Publishing, etc. One of these categories is ‘Recently Launched’ which is a nice way for Kickstarter to promote new projects and give them a bit of a boost when they start out. Still, as a Kickstarter page is laid out, a viewer can see only three projects across the top of their screen per category and perhaps another three below those before the ‘cut’. These first three projects featured at the top of the page are called ‘Staff Picks’ which are prime real estate for any project looking to draw the eye of a backer.

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Ok, so I don’t get to game as much as I like, and that’s a shame, but there are still times when I do get to have fun with RPGs. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 28 years, and during that period the bulk of what I’ve run as a Dungeon Master has been all home brew, which in gamer terms means I made it up. There is something to be said for the creativity of doing so, and as an imagination centered guy I get a great kick out of creating adventures, timelines, histories, legends, and anything else you can name.

That being said, I’ve also had the opportunity to sit back and use someone else’s creative spark to frame my adventures when I DM. In Old School terms this means using a module, and many and many again famed ones exist from the 1980s when D&D was new to the mass populace and DMs were raw and could use a little help when driving their business.

I’d like to say in my time within the genre ‘I’ve played them all’, which of course isn’t true, but I will debate the concept that I’ve played all the ones that truly matter… Yet for all their old school wonder, I was always on the lookout for something, anything, in today’s market that could rival the simple genius that were those original supplements.

Enter Paizo’s Pathfinder Adventure Paths. With ‘Edition Wars’ in full swing and Wizards of the Coast trying to rally a bloodied banner with 5th Edition, I’m not going to disparage any game that helps creative people gather around a table and share face time for fun, but I will hold up Paizo’s Pathfinder as an example of what ‘good’ really is in today’s RPG market.

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