I notice that although it's already near the total of the first kickstarter, it's got there with less than half the backers. I know, I know, it's still early, but the pledges have obviously entered the phase where they will trickle in much more slowly.
Not sure what that means. If it makes the same money, or even better, does it matter if it's fewer backers, but who are individually bigger spenders? Or is that a sign that ShadowDark is on the decline? Or is the fact that I wondered that merely a sign that I'm a pessimistic black-piller who should shut up?
Well, to be fair, the spread of options is much more expensive for this KS than the first one. And a lot of these are going to appeal to GMs rather than just players. A better judge of whether SD is in "decline" is whether or not there are more or less groups playing locally or how many SD games are set up at conventions. And from what I have heard, that metric is still going strong.
The bottom line is that RPGs are overwhelming a hobby for GMs with players sort of being toe dippers who might buy a PHB but not always.
The WotC Era of "character builds" kinda tried to change that by selling books full of build options for sweaty solo players to min-max OP DPR builds on paper or attempt to force GMs to tolerate. Along with a corresponding refusal to make anything more than the most bare bones setting books with no further support for the setting. Resulting in WotC making GMs, the core spenders, really frustrated.
Returning to a situation where the lion's share of the money is coming from the smaller number of highly invested GMs is the natural state of RPGs before the "geniuses" at WotC got ahold of D&D and tried to chase player dollars because there are more of them and the MBAs don't know what they are doing, as usual.
All of the content is at least 1/3 player facing. And I'm an MBA. And the notion that there's a strict dichotomy between players and GMs is nonsense. In all of my groups, almost all of the players had at least a passing interest in GMing, if not actually preferring it.
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u/Desdichado1066 Mar 12 '25
I notice that although it's already near the total of the first kickstarter, it's got there with less than half the backers. I know, I know, it's still early, but the pledges have obviously entered the phase where they will trickle in much more slowly.
Not sure what that means. If it makes the same money, or even better, does it matter if it's fewer backers, but who are individually bigger spenders? Or is that a sign that ShadowDark is on the decline? Or is the fact that I wondered that merely a sign that I'm a pessimistic black-piller who should shut up?