The Power Of The Stick
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 8:10AM As some of you may have seen, Rich Burlew’s Kickstarter for reprinting some of his Order Of The Stick books is just about to break 1.2 million dollars in its final hours, putting it in the top three earning Kickstarters of all time as of this date. He started out asking for $57,750 to do some reprints, and is now in a position where the postage alone to mail out the rewards will cost over two hundred thousand dollars.
Heck — just in the time it took me to write this blog post the OOTS Kickstarter accumulated over six thousand dollars in additional pledges. Phenomenal.
I think this is great. I’ve been a fan of OOTS since its earliest days. I own every one of the books of collected strips, and I became a backer of the OOTS Kickstarter the minute I heard about it. Mister Burlew (whom I unfortunately have never had the chance to meet personally, outside of buying a book from him one GenCon) is a highly talented storyteller. He deserves every single, solitary iota of success he’s had with his Kickstarter and his other endeavors. Everyone who’s backed his project should be proud to be involved. I hope this success ensures the future of OOTS for a long time to come and that Mister Burlew gets to publish new OOTS books even sooner than he otherwise would. I want to know what happens next! ;)
(Yes, I’m aware I could read the strips one at a time online. That’s not nearly as much fun, though, and it’s a distraction from work. I wait for the collections.)
Let me repeat, the success of the OOTS Kickstarter is awesome. Congratulations to Rich Burlew; he deserves it, and more.
That being said... I think it’s also kind of a shame.
It saddens me a little that the most successful RPG-related Kickstarter of all time (by many, many orders of magnitude) isn’t actually an RPG — it’s a comic strip about an RPG. Sure it’s an incredibly funny and clever comic strip (see all those “he deserves this awesome success” statements above :) ). But wouldn’t it be nice if gamers were just as enthusiastic about backing actual roleplaying game projects on Kickstarter as they are about backing an RPG-related comic?
I haven’t counted, but I’d imagine there are at least a dozen or two RPGs, RPG supplements, and RPG-related Kickstarters currently running. (Full disclosure time: one of them, Mythic Hero, is mine. ;) ) The OOTS Kickstarter drive has over fourteen thousand backers. If each of them pledged the same amount he pledged for OOTS to an actual RPG project, I bet every single one of those projects would succeed. Heck, if even half of them pledged half of what they pledged to OOTS, you’d probably see all of them succeed, and I suspect most by a wide margin. Heck #2, we don’t even have to go that far most likely — if each of them pledged $1, $5, or $10 that’d probably see most (if not all) of those RPG Kickstarters over the finish line.
Undoubtedly the people who’ve backed the OOTS reprint project are now aware of just how amazing Kickstarter can be (if they weren’t already). I hope at least a few of them will take the opportunity to look around the KS website for some RPG books and products being Kickstarted and support them as generously and enthusiastically as they’ve supported OOTS. For the most part RPGs are a little niche industry, and if that industry’s going to survive at some tolerable level for those of us who work in it, I think the direct support of the fans through amazing new tools like Kickstarter is vital.
Reader Comments (9)
Thee have been some great successes in the area of Kickstarter funded RPG project, including my own. I think Kickstarter and sites like it is going to be one of the most transformative things to happen in the RPG industry since the creation of RPGNow.com
I definitely agree with both points, Louis! :)
My initial reaction to the runaway success of the OOTS Kickstarter (especially compared to Kickstarters for actual RPG products) was to think, "I guess there are a lot more people who used to play RPGs, and remember the experiences fondly, than there are people who currently play RPGs." And I still think that's definitely a true statement (unfortunately).
But thinking about it more, I don't know that that's the main factor, necessarily, because I think we can see similar things when we look at the success of a game like Munchkin (which, to some extent, is a game about gaming). Namely, the gaming community is very splintered in terms of which games gamers play, like, and buy products for (especially once you get outside the xD&D/Pathfinder circle, though there are many splits even within that large group), but is unanimously agreed that gaming is good.
So any particular product for gaming will usually only appeal to those who play and/or like that game, but a product about gaming -- whether humor like OOTS or KotDT, or a game about gaming like Munchkin -- will often have at least some appeal to nearly all gamers.
Maybe a good HERO System supplement would be a book about how to build various other RPGs in the HERO System. (Or maybe better yet, how to build various gamer types... ;-)
I think you're right in a lot of ways, Derek. There may be a lot of people out there who used to game and can still relate to humor about it, but don't actually game anymore or buy gaming products. It'd be nice if they'd toss a buck at an RPG Kickstarter just for old time's sake, though. ;) And I also agree that to some extent OOTS, KODT, Munchkin, etc. have a "universal" appeal among gamers, rather than a single-system appeal.
Yup. For instance, I've never played any of the versions of the D&D rules that OotS has actually made fun of. I probably miss at least some of the jokes, and others I only get because I've heard other people talking about versions of D&D that I've never played. But despite that I still greatly enjoy the comic.
And as the strip has gone on it's evolved from a comic making a lot of game rules-related jokes to one that's essentially an independent story. I've been really impressed with Mr. Burlew's storytelling skills.
Steven, I definitely agree with your last comment about the strip becoming an independent story. Order of the Stick has appeal beyond its niche audience, which contributed (possibly heavily) to this Kickstarter drive's broad reach and subsequent success. I've never played an RPG but have followed the strip for years now, already own all the books, and was a backer of this drive.
I have played several RPGs over the years. Despite differences in systems and backgrounds they all come down to creating characters and imagining a story with a likeminded group of people. I could pay for another, or I could pay for a new joke. And if the joke is good enough, I will read it again. And in the case of OOTS, I know the kind of jokes to expect because I've seen most of them online.
One thing I've seen other kickstarters fail to do well is show me what I might be paying for. Is there a 3rd party review? Can I preview most of the content online? It is when there remains a question of quality, or the content revealed is not to my taste, that I pass on a purchase. And besides, just how totaly awesome and inovative would an RPG have to be to do better than all I already own? Can there be an equivalent of a Nebula or Hugo award winner that supplants D&D?
With OOTS I could get lots of cool limited content at a $10 level. I can splurge for that, even if I did not already love OOTS. But if you have some product that wants $20, or $50 before I get goodies, well, that is not a splurge anymore, or at least not very often.
So, show me most of the content, get a review, give me bonus content, and don't charge me a lot for the lowest level, and maybe if it meets my taste I'll splurge and so might hundreds of others.
dB -- unfortunately what you're asking for simply isn't possible for most Kickstarters. For RPGs, most of them aren't for books that are already written, for which reviews and previews/samples might be possible. They're for books the person/company running the project *wants* to create. Until it's funded to the point where they can afford to create it, there are no samples to show, or for reviewers to review.
I get that you don't want to spend a lot of money on something you haven't seen, but that's the nature of most Kickstarters. You have to take 'em a little on faith, to some degree, based on the sort of project that's described and the reputation of the people who want to create it for you. It's certainly your prerogative to pass on that opportunity, but I think doing so means you're likely to miss out on a lot of cool stuff. ;)