Welcome New Patrons! (Patreon)

We just released the announcement video for our new RPG, really just announcing that we’re working on it, so we thought it’d be a good idea to write something up welcoming folks and sort of setting expectations.

First of all, hello! My name’s Matt Colville, and on behalf of the MCDM crew, welcome to this crazy experiment! We’re working on what we think of as a “AAA RPG” meaning a big-budget, premiere title. Whatever form the finished product takes, it’s going to have full color killer art, rigorously tested design, and a lot of support. Meaning this won’t just be a game, it’ll eventually be an entire line of products.

And because Running the Game is the “real, warts and all, behind-the-scenes process of being a Dungeon Master” it seemed reasonable to just continue that philosophy here. Let’s liveblog the process of making this game!

So if you’re here, now, that’s one of the things you’re supporting. You’re paying money to see how the sausage is made and really just “support development.” So far, it’s been going pretty well! The people who’ve signed up for this seem to be pretty happy with what they’re seeing.

We make it a point to respond to folks here on the Patreon, but especially if you’re responding to a post that’s more than a couple of days old? The best place for discussion is our Discord. Patreon’s messaging tools are better than Kickstarter’s! But still not incredibly robust.

Updates are gonna be a little thin on the ground until, I estimate, late April. We work on this game a little every week, but only between other deadline-critical projects like Flee, Mortals!, and Arcadia.

So you’re not going to get updates on anything like a regular cadence, but you WILL get updates whenever anything new happens. So if we do a playtest this week, you will probably get an update about how it went.

And as new features come online, we’ll post updates about them. You might get an update about our proposed Negotiation System soon, for instance! Exciting! I really want to make Negotiation a pillar of this game because I think it’s something sorely missing from the heroic fantasy landscape. Not required just…this is important and currently I feel we are all badly underserved in that department and MCDM can do better.

Now, just because I think that, doesn’t mean it’s true! But that’s the promise of this patreon; we’re gonna find out together.

We’ve been posting stuff now since mid-January and we’ve already learned a lot about the unique challenges this presents, so I better talk about that a little.

Open Development

I’ve never worked on a game like this before. I’ve never ever really SEEN a game made like this, at least at this scale. Where we’re hanging out in Discord with folks talking about our ideas and development. I just talked in the Discord a little about the difference between Heroic Fantasy and Grim & Gritty Fantasy for instance.

That’s one of the reasons we’re excited about this. Open development, meaning making all our mistakes in public, is a unique experience and already we’ve seen people really excited by it. Because now folks are THINKING about game design, and why things are the way they are? And how they might do it differently, maybe for the first time. And that is a lot of fun.

But it does mean we often post about something we’re excited about, and then we try it and it doesn’t work. Or! It works for a while, and then as we add more systems and the game evolves, we need to go back and revise, or even throw out, something that previously was working fine and people were excited by.

So if you read about something, like…there’s a post around here somewhere talking about how Death might work in this game. Well maybe you read that and you like it, or you don’t, but in fact we already think differently about Dying in this game. The idea we talked about is already obsolete. So don’t get too attached to anything yet, either positive or negative. Almost anything might change at this stage!

Some folks, when the design goes in a direction they’re not happy with, they give us some variation of; “Why aren’t they LISTENING to us!” Well, we are listening! But we’re not actually looking for external feedback right now.

We want to show you how the sausage is made, we’re not asking for advice on how to make sausages. :D

We LIKE explaining why we’re taking the game in this direction instead of that direction. We put a ton of thought into this stuff! But a very small number of people see our explanation as an opportunity to NEGOTIATE. To get us to make the game THEY want, instead of the one WE want. Well, you know, vote with your dollars. Go complain on the internet, that’s cool. But there’s no point in complaining here, or our discord. That’s not why we’re doing this.

If you don’t like something we’re doing, you can say why! But make your case and move on. Because if you make that objection part of your PERSONALITY, and harp on it over and over, well the mods are gonna ask you to leave. Except they're not gonna ask.

Really, it’s been a tiny number of people doing this, but if we get a bunch of new patrons that means a lot of people who want to fight old battles and I felt like we owed it to our Mod Team to make sure everyone knows our policy here.

Eventually we’ll have something we’re ready to put in front of our testers and, when they’re done with it, we’ll put it in front of you folks and you’ll be able to try this game yourselves!

One thing we’ve noticed is; folks naturally want to use this project as a chance to kvetch about 5E. Well, we sympathize, but so far that has not proven to be a productive use of anyone’s time. Those discussions tend to get kinda toxic.

What does seem to work though is folks talking about how other games, especially non-D&D related games work. Pathfinder and Kobold Press and the OSR are all D&D-related, FYI.

Those discussions tend to be a lot more fun and productive. It’s always more fun to talk about how cool this feature from this one game is, than how burned out you are on some other design you don’t like.

Anyway, I think we’re doing another playtest tomorrow and USUALLY that results in a new patreon post. Cross your fingers!

I look forward to seeing y’all in the discord! Peace out!