DFRPG Solo gaming?

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

Looks like its funded now but not yet at full color stretch goal.

It's well and truly funded, but just needs a little bit more to get the colour stretch goal. Great time to back it!

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

Looks like its funded now but not yet at full color stretch goal.

Correct. We're currently flirting with $19,000 with the stretch goal sitting at $21,000. The remaining $2050 would only required 50-70 more backers depending on what they wish to purchase. With luck, as folks see the DI from this morning and come into the first week of March we can accelerate again.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

Looks like its funded now but not yet at full color stretch goal.

Personally I'd rather Doug put that extra money back into Gaming Ballistic to better cushion future products and let Saethor's Bane remain B&W... but I know I'm a minority opinion on this subject.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by mburr0003

Personally I'd rather Doug put that extra money back into Gaming Ballistic to better cushion future products and let Saethor's Bane remain B&W... but I know I'm a minority opinion on this subject.

You're actually in the majority of opinions that have been vocalized, which has been nice to see. We'll see where we end up. If we come in in the same range as the adventures when they did reasonably well (500-600) the future that isn't conversions might just be black and white. I'll poll the "actually put down money" folks and see what they think. If we were to come in closer to Bestiary or even the Old-School Essentials solos (700-800) I'd probably wind up doing republishing work in color, but any new-to-DFRPG work would probably stay greyscale. 50 pieces of fresh character and illustration art is still a hefty art bill.

[restlessgriffin]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

No particular reason why not, though dungeon bashes tend to implicitly assume the availability of healing effects to balance the countless ways one can be damaged, so some kind of cleric (or commercially available healing potions) might be the best bet.

So if doing actual solo I'd need to go with Cleric or Holy Warrior. If party or side kick used I'd include one or both.

[restlessgriffin]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

You're actually in the majority of opinions that have been vocalized, which has been nice to see. We'll see where we end up. If we come in in the same range as the adventures when they did reasonably well (500-600) the future that isn't conversions might just be black and white. I'll poll the "actually put down money" folks and see what they think. If we were to come in closer to Bestiary or even the Old-School Essentials solos (700-800) I'd probably wind up doing republishing work in color, but any new-to-DFRPG work would probably stay greyscale. 50 pieces of fresh character and illustration art is still a hefty art bill.

Personally I don't care for B&W and looks old and cheap. Its 2024, presentation matters. I bought the whole in PDF. Part of the reason was it was in color. If it was B&W, I wouldn't even have looked at it.

Honestly I'd really love to see Gaming Ballistic be able to do a fully color generic DFRPG player hand book. Drop the weird fonts and nordic/viking names and such. I'd also love to see a book like Hand of Asgard but focusing on outdoor/wilderness specialists. Mainly Druids (one of the worst archetypes in DFRPG), Barbarians, and Scouts.

UPDATE: I backed at $84. This is the my first backing of ANYTHING. I like Gaming Ballistics DFRPG line. I'm backing primarily because I want to hit the color art mark. I'll be severely disappointed if it is not full color. I much prefer color. B&W for gaming to me is like b&w comics. The whole experience is different and feels cheap and lacking flavor.

I think GURPS 4E issue with color is the pulp style and AI style posser art. Good color art greatly enriches the game.

[Jpot]

B&W!
Growing up in the 80’s, I actually like the feel of B&W and would prefer the print copy to be so. I like the feel of the high quality, thick paper of HC RPGs back then. If SB goes color I wouldn’t complain about it but would simply celebrate Doug’s success, and celebrate that door opening for more solos!

I agree however, about 4e color and art inside. Feels dated now. My main complaint though is the glossy paper that creates glare on the page. Worst.
However, the logo and black HCs for 4e look FANTASTIC on your bookshelf! A treasured collection.

I’ve mentioned this before and will continue to do so, EasyGurps channel and his Rando2 Heroes guide to random generation adventures for solo or group play. Pretty fun!

[restlessgriffin]

Originally Posted by Jpot

B&W!
Growing up in the 80’s, I actually like the feel of B&W and would prefer the print copy to be so. I like the feel of the high quality, thick paper of HC RPGs back then. If SB goes color I wouldn’t complain about it but would simply celebrate Doug’s success, and celebrate that door opening for more solos!

HC = ?

As noted, I prefer full color. I'm not sure I'd continue buying GB DFRPG stuff it it goes B&W. Maybe GURPS is just locked in the past and all the players are just the old people who gamed back in the 80s. I hope not. I'd love to see GURPS get a resurrgence of new players at least a fraction of the D&D 5e increase.

I agree however, about 4e color and art inside. Feels dated now. My main complaint though is the glossy paper that creates glare on the page. Worst.
However, the logo and black HCs for 4e look FANTASTIC on your bookshelf! A treasured collection.

I’ve mentioned this before and will continue to do so, EasyGurps channel and his Rando2 Heroes guide to random generation adventures for solo or group play. Pretty fun!

I wasn't much into EasyGURPS Rando's but I do like the newer tutorial stuff with his new digital game table maps. More interesting and visually appealing.

[restlessgriffin]

Originally Posted by Farmer

It's well and truly funded, but just needs a little bit more to get the colour stretch goal. Great time to back it!

I did back it. It's currently at around $19.5K. Hopefully in the next 4 days enough people back it to push over the 21K stretch goal.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by restlessgriffin

HC = ?

As noted, I prefer full color. I'm not sure I'd continue buying GB DFRPG stuff it it goes B&W. Maybe GURPS is just locked in the past and all the players are just the old people who gamed back in the 80s. I hope not. I'd love to see GURPS get a resurrgence of new players at least a fraction of the D&D 5e increase.

This winds up being circular, unfortunately. Art costs are fixed, one-time, and with color, about 2x those of black and white. Color printing is about 1.5 more expensive than B/W printing, and that's a COGS thing that impacts every sale.

With the current backer counts/sales figures, it's very difficult for me to sustain GURPS in color. I wind up breaking even or losing money on GURPS projects, subsidizing them with TFT and OSE.

So if I do greyscale, I lose backers on an already marginal product line, and the writing and editing costs are fixed. So if I do color it's hard to sustain the line; if I do black and white it's hard to sustain the line. If I up-charge for color, folks will (have!) complain about value.

It's a corker.

Thus far, it truly looks like a hard cap on my movement of product is in the 600-700 range and most projects hit 70% of that. It's not product-line sustainable at the 400-500 backer count level unless I go for 16-32 page releases, which folks also don't like. I should note that the ONLY thing keeping the current project looking as good as it does is the fraction of folks that are getting add-ons and larger pledges. The pure product pledge (print + PDF or PDF-only of Saethor's Bane) should really average about $17-18 per pledge, and we're well over 2x that. If we only got PDF and Print+PDF, we'd struggle to hit $9K at current rate, etc).

Later this year, I'll launch Mission X, but if we only get 500 takers on it, it will fail any any price that is attractive to backers. I guess we'll see.