There are amazing things happening in the roleplaying game community right now. Real community organizing is what we need, stat, and these people are making it happen for our little world. Let me convince you that humanity is salvageable.
Thanks for the insightful article. A few thoughts on the MoSh side of things:
- While I'm happy to hear this Mothership Month concept is bearing fruit for the designers and creatives, the nonstop bombardment via email, notifications, etc. has been annoying as Hell. I understand that it's part and parcel of promoting one's work online, but the process would be drastically improved for all concerned IMO if a couple weeks prior, an Opt-In to Mothership Month
Promos communication went out via BackerKit (or wherever the mailing list is being harvested from) so that those of us who want to avoid MoSh Month Overload will be spared the nuisance of turning off notifications, muting channels, and unsubscribing from multiple lists. It's not the end of the world, but this would be a drastic improvement in customer-experience next time around. Not putting that all on you, since you're not the Boss of Mothership, but if you could pass it on to y'alls Comms Officer that would be appreciated.
- Sort of a follow-on point 1, and more of a shower-thought / rant than useful criticism. I guess? I still love MoSh, and all the indie creators (it's honestly *really* difficult to find bad MoSh content out there) like yourself who have made it the great game it is today, I'm also burned out. I honestly couldn't tell you how many MoSh adventures and pamphlets and modules I own at this point - that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it *is* a thing. I rarely get to be a Warden these days (I doubt I'll ever get to be a MoSh player) and that seems to be a common gripe amongst Forever GM's regardless of system. So while I wish you all the best and hope to be able to check out at least some of these new releases one day (and honestly, anything with "by Ian Yusem" on the cover will be among the top 5 on my wishlist) I'm sitting all of this out for now.
Why should anyone care? Well, like you said - indie game designers / creators need to eat. So what to do for the future of indie RPG's in general / MoSh in specific? How do we avoid saturation without sacrificing quality? Diversifying product output might be one way, releasing more follow-on adventures (as you've done with Inferno Trilogy) is another... it might be easier to sell players on an ongoing campaign with some continuity of setting and story rather than another string of one-shots. Ultimately I don't know the answer(s) - it's still a struggle to find players. More VTT support sure wouldn't hurt ::coughFoundrycough::
Thems my two cents. I just ran an adventure from Hull Breach last week for some friends, most of whom were new to the system, and everybody had a blast. Keep up the badass work, hope things keep getting better from here.
I very much appreciate the extensive feedback! What I can pass along I will.
1. So on email overload: Part of this is Backerkit working a bit differently from Kickstarter. Backerkit tends to be a tad more aggressive with emails in a way that creators can't necessarily help. For example, Kickstarter updates are only pushed to backers, but on Backerkit you'll generally get those even if you just follow a project. Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it probably does drive more funding in than Kickstarter's approach, but it's a quirk of the system.
The other part is just humanity. You get the same issue with sudden email influx on the first day of Zine Quest for example. I certainly fall victim of this: maybe this email would have been better served going out next week, but I JUST went to that convention, Mothership JUST launched. It's happening now, I'm energized about it now, I'm posting it now. That's the same thing all the other creators on Mothership Month are experiencing -- wanting to share what's going on with their project for people who graciously chose to support them, not intentionally bombarding everyone with updates.
I do think this could be addressed on both fronts with both feedback to Backerkit about emails and maybe some tweaks to planning events like this among the community. There's area for improvement.
2. About Mothership "saturation": I think its important to accept that Mothership is simply too big to keep up with and support everything. And that's OK! Listen, I'm here trying to convince you (general you) to support more projects just in case my words might make the difference for a tiny handful of people. I don't expect you personally to buy stuff.
Here's a secret: I "only" backed 6 Mothership Month projects! I backed the ones I was genuinely interested. I see a lot of Mothership projects that I let pass by because I simply can't read them all, let alone play them. You have to pick and choose. You might feel burned out today and hear about a project that's so specifically pushing all your buttons that you back it tomorrow. Or maybe you won't, but you might read some person blog about community and tell a friend about Mothership or whatever.
I don't think we need to do anything to fix the problem with saturation. Saturation happens. Look at video games, there are WAY more extremely rad looking indie video games than I can personally play. There are still plenty of pro indie video game designers, certainly more than pro RPG ones!
The best thing you can do is not beat yourself up about it and just buy things you wanna play (or even read).
Side note: Awesome to hear you've been running Hull Breach and enjoying it, thank you so much for the encouraging words!
Thanks for the insightful article. A few thoughts on the MoSh side of things:
- While I'm happy to hear this Mothership Month concept is bearing fruit for the designers and creatives, the nonstop bombardment via email, notifications, etc. has been annoying as Hell. I understand that it's part and parcel of promoting one's work online, but the process would be drastically improved for all concerned IMO if a couple weeks prior, an Opt-In to Mothership Month
Promos communication went out via BackerKit (or wherever the mailing list is being harvested from) so that those of us who want to avoid MoSh Month Overload will be spared the nuisance of turning off notifications, muting channels, and unsubscribing from multiple lists. It's not the end of the world, but this would be a drastic improvement in customer-experience next time around. Not putting that all on you, since you're not the Boss of Mothership, but if you could pass it on to y'alls Comms Officer that would be appreciated.
- Sort of a follow-on point 1, and more of a shower-thought / rant than useful criticism. I guess? I still love MoSh, and all the indie creators (it's honestly *really* difficult to find bad MoSh content out there) like yourself who have made it the great game it is today, I'm also burned out. I honestly couldn't tell you how many MoSh adventures and pamphlets and modules I own at this point - that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it *is* a thing. I rarely get to be a Warden these days (I doubt I'll ever get to be a MoSh player) and that seems to be a common gripe amongst Forever GM's regardless of system. So while I wish you all the best and hope to be able to check out at least some of these new releases one day (and honestly, anything with "by Ian Yusem" on the cover will be among the top 5 on my wishlist) I'm sitting all of this out for now.
Why should anyone care? Well, like you said - indie game designers / creators need to eat. So what to do for the future of indie RPG's in general / MoSh in specific? How do we avoid saturation without sacrificing quality? Diversifying product output might be one way, releasing more follow-on adventures (as you've done with Inferno Trilogy) is another... it might be easier to sell players on an ongoing campaign with some continuity of setting and story rather than another string of one-shots. Ultimately I don't know the answer(s) - it's still a struggle to find players. More VTT support sure wouldn't hurt ::coughFoundrycough::
Thems my two cents. I just ran an adventure from Hull Breach last week for some friends, most of whom were new to the system, and everybody had a blast. Keep up the badass work, hope things keep getting better from here.
I very much appreciate the extensive feedback! What I can pass along I will.
1. So on email overload: Part of this is Backerkit working a bit differently from Kickstarter. Backerkit tends to be a tad more aggressive with emails in a way that creators can't necessarily help. For example, Kickstarter updates are only pushed to backers, but on Backerkit you'll generally get those even if you just follow a project. Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it probably does drive more funding in than Kickstarter's approach, but it's a quirk of the system.
The other part is just humanity. You get the same issue with sudden email influx on the first day of Zine Quest for example. I certainly fall victim of this: maybe this email would have been better served going out next week, but I JUST went to that convention, Mothership JUST launched. It's happening now, I'm energized about it now, I'm posting it now. That's the same thing all the other creators on Mothership Month are experiencing -- wanting to share what's going on with their project for people who graciously chose to support them, not intentionally bombarding everyone with updates.
I do think this could be addressed on both fronts with both feedback to Backerkit about emails and maybe some tweaks to planning events like this among the community. There's area for improvement.
2. About Mothership "saturation": I think its important to accept that Mothership is simply too big to keep up with and support everything. And that's OK! Listen, I'm here trying to convince you (general you) to support more projects just in case my words might make the difference for a tiny handful of people. I don't expect you personally to buy stuff.
Here's a secret: I "only" backed 6 Mothership Month projects! I backed the ones I was genuinely interested. I see a lot of Mothership projects that I let pass by because I simply can't read them all, let alone play them. You have to pick and choose. You might feel burned out today and hear about a project that's so specifically pushing all your buttons that you back it tomorrow. Or maybe you won't, but you might read some person blog about community and tell a friend about Mothership or whatever.
I don't think we need to do anything to fix the problem with saturation. Saturation happens. Look at video games, there are WAY more extremely rad looking indie video games than I can personally play. There are still plenty of pro indie video game designers, certainly more than pro RPG ones!
The best thing you can do is not beat yourself up about it and just buy things you wanna play (or even read).
Side note: Awesome to hear you've been running Hull Breach and enjoying it, thank you so much for the encouraging words!
Inspiring Ian, thank you for sharing and boosting so many great things happening in our community!
this is probably what I need to help me take it up notch.