falstius

Actually, from the way the FGG license is written, I would guess that CSM was broke and needed the artwork and legitimacy that FGG had in order to run another Kickstarter. Getting that much artwork commissioned would have cost more than CSM probably had (but much less than the 15% licensing fee in the long run). The fact that it is 15% of gross and not 30 or 40% of net is what bothers me. Basically, with that large upfront cost, there was no way the KS could have been successful and I have a hard time believing that neither FGG nor CSM could see that. As a counterexample, take the recent Earthdawn Fantasy miniatures KS. It didn't raise a ton of money, $3400, but the licensing fee was only $250 (about 7.5%) for miniatures actually produced for a game and not public domain (and even that fee was donated to a charity that supports emerging miniatures makers).

I finally got some painting done! Figures are finished except I'll probably see some things to fix in the morning and do the last bit of basing. Hopefully mail it tomorrow, weather permitting (if the weather is nice, I'll have to take the family outdoors somewhere all day).

I was going to go to PAX East ... but I really only want to go to see the Reaper booth and I don't know if there even will be one, or which day it will be. So I will wait and see if I can pick up a pass at the last minute from a friend. Small kid, wife who doesn't game, and a busy job makes travel for a con hard.

So close to 2 Dactyls! Come on, you know you want one. I want to use them in a Numenera game.

I had a dream last night that Reaper acquired all of the greens for this and sent us all a bunch of minis (honest!). Of course, this makes no sense, but it was a dream.

Lawyers ... a good friend of mine is a lawyer (I can overlook flaws in friends), and she once completely unironically complained about only making 100k / year to a room full of people with advanced degrees making under 50k / year. A few days later she message me with "I can't believe I did that" which makes her better than most other lawyers I know. This situation seems similar to me, except without the mea culpa.

Ok, I'll put in $64 then, and hopefully the mechapedes unlock and if not I can choose some of the others instead.

Is there a way to add-on any of the miniatures that are "Free" with the core pledge? I am considering a $61 (CAD) pledge to get the dactyl, two mechapedes, and the $30 in excisting stock. I'd like the Peeler #2 as well if I could add it on.

I like two of the RAFM sculpts, but couldn't find a way to pledge for just those two ... so I didn't do any. Similar to the story here, except with DSM I know I'm not able to pledge for only the ones I want.

The one who dies, twice? To be an interesting character in a story, you need conflict. Conflict that tends to make for an unpleasant life. I have enough troubles of my own.

The IP, according to the contract FGG posted, is the name Tome of Horrors, the name of the monsters, and the ability to make minis that look like the descriptions. The actual artwork used is explicitly excluded. So CSM could make a mini that resembled a blahblah beast but not one just like whatever art FGG used in the book. Edit: FGG contradicts what I just said in the post above mine, saying it was the artwork, but I wouldn't read the contract that way. I guess they're walking a fine line since they paid for the artwork without the right to re-license it to a third party.

I assume the idea was to cover most of the creation costs with the KS itself, and then make money with later (post-KS) sales to maintain the business. I don't think that's a bad plan, per se, but it definitely involves having your numbers right. It is a terrible plan. Unless you have the financial resources to recover from your 1% margin turning into a negative margin, any tiny upset is going to make your broke and land a mob with pitchforks at your door. Even if you have the ability to recover from a loss, it is a bad idea, just not disastrous.

So I work in an industry where we make and sell stuff. For a small company, a 30% margin would be razor thin. How could Matt possibly expect to make money selling discounted minis after paying 25% of the pledge dollars to Kickstarter and FGG? There could not possibly have been any margin there. Really the licensing agreement seems terrible to me. Why would you base your main product line on a 1 year license agreement? Also, I am not a lawyer, but I think that since that year expired, they can't sell any toh1 minis unless there was a new agreement.

I meant I wish I had spent less on DF so that I could've spent more on the latest red-box games.

I've never bought anything from FGG and I don't see what they offer as a good value so ... I don't really care if FGG are good guys and I don't worry about it.

And a lot of bakers.

SprialBridge, take this as a well intentioned critique, I can see you put a lot of thought and effort into this. I skimmed the rules last night and it looks like there are just too many fiddly bits. The character creation looks as complicated as for a full-blown RPG and the play rules are close behind. The campaign system means you have to have a regular group of players (which is hard to do when you and most of your friends are in their 30s with kids). Plus, asking someone to be the "herald" and not play doesn't really work. In the end, this reads like a regular RPG where you skip the role-playing parts and focus on combat, kind of like Nethack. I really want something I can pick up on a random rainy day with whoever is free, and just play. I think the idea of using whatever miniatures, building them up with some quick stats, and having fast dungeon crawl type games is great, but this implementation needs to be trimmed down a lot.

So right now Matt is sitting at even worse than the people behind Drake (who are pretty terrible), but hey he's not Tony Reidy! I didn't back ToH1, so abandoning ToH2 would suck, but I would certainly be willing to take whatever my pledge should actually be able to buy with real world prices instead of the fantasy we were promised. Also, I'd really like to know why Frog God Games doesn't want to work with Mortal Arrow. Is it that they don't want to deal with miniatures period, or they think something about the deal is fishy?

Sigil, I think I would trade my set for $200 of your minis if I could do it over again. Of course I don't have my set yet.

What really annoys me about that update aside from the lack of admission that he has done anything wrong, is that there is no word at all the backers of tome of horrors 2. I don't know that the problem is that Matt wants MA to take responsibility for backer rewards. It sounds more like Matt still expects to have a company after this, which isn't going to happen if MA makes and sells these models.

I am two sets, plus lizard men

Still no notice :(

Yeah, definitely new england. You'll feel right at home here, the food is terrible.

Other hobbies I spend time on are baking, biking, running and hiking. I also read a lot and occasionally play roleplaying games. In truth, I spend far too much time working. Someone once asked me why if I like electronics so much, I don't do more at home. And I say I really like electronics, but 12 hours a day is enough. I want some other stuff in my life too.

Stared and will look into it more. Kind of sounds like how our 4e games tend to go without all the overhead.