Kickstarter

[deer_buster]

Surprising. I thought D&D was more popular than ever.

Once you're saturated in the community, you can have only so much growth. They'll get surges around new products being released for DnD, but unless one of the other VTTs has another gaffe (e.g. Roll20, et.al.), they're unlikely to see significant growth in DnD

[ddavison]

Surprising. I thought D&D was more popular than ever.

It still might be more popular than ever -- just not on Fantasy Grounds. I believe it is also lagging at other VTTs, but this could mean that people are just consolidating around D&D Beyond.

[Griogre]

It probably is still popular, but new sales are lagging possibly because of the bad PR from those proposed changes to the SRD they walked back on; and maybe, One D&D. I mean would you buy a new PH or DMG right now, unless you *really* needed one, knowing that they are about 7/12ths through their approximate one year playtest.

They are tightening stuff up in the playtest which means they are starting to get serious about the end of playtesting. I would guess that would affect new sales of PHs and DMGs.

[Myrdin Potter]

I don't play that system and never have, but I was happy to see Smiteworks use Kickstarter this way. At worse it advertises Fantasy Grounds. At best it makes enough to make the effort of adding a ruleset more than worth it and pulls in a bunch of new people to the VTT.

I am more concerned about Roll20 strangling access to IP (which they actively do by forcing Roll20 to be the only VTT if you want to best payment for your pdf) and Foundry being messy but using a web browser as the client and javescript plus associated web tools as the way to script.

[vegaserik]

Surprising. I thought D&D was more popular than ever.

Wizards also hasn't helped themselves much this year lol

[HywelPhillips]

I really like the idea of supporting ruleset releases via Kickstarter. I'm not going to back Werewolf because I don't really play WoD games any more - and that's a bit of data for SmiteWorks right there.

There are several rulesets that I would back immediately and be willing to chip in higher-level supporter amounts towards - Forbidden Lands, Dragonbane, Blade Runner, Mutant Year Zero and pretty much all the Free League games that aren't already on here. But also RuneQuest, which a developer was working on but which seems to have disappeared again.

What's popular with the Roll20 set (somewhat younger, more casual gamer crowd than typical for FGU in my experience) or Foundry (techies) may not go down well for FGU's customer base whereas older style games or crunchier stuff like RoleMaster (and RuneQuest) might do really well on here. And stuff that benefits from a lot of automation might break through on here in a way it might not break through elsewhere. I think Savage Worlds has always done well on FG because of the very high level of system support, even though it is a relatively streamlined system.

I've stopped buying D&D for the moment because of the factors everyone else has mentioned: 1) WOTC shooting themselves in the foot with the SRD debacle earlier in the year 2) poor quality of recent releases from WOTC (Spelljammer was the last straw for me - if ever a setting needed a sandbox approach it's surely this, but it was a TERRIBLE linear railroad scenario along with a very shallow and desultory campaign setting) 3) One D&D doesn't look like it's going to be my cup of tea, but I'll take a look at it when it comes out 4) Frankly I've got a bit bored with D&D having played little else since COVID lockdowns started. (Which is why my own next campaigns are all in other systems).

I'm sorry Dune bombed for you guys. I bought it, played it (not on FGU), didn't think the system really clicked for my normal groups so I've not actually run so much as a single game using it on here.

I'll just finish with a repeat plea to support the other Free League systems. Most of them share something of the core game system MYZ engine, so I've always hoped that it won't take too much to build on the foundations of the existing absolutely excellent Vaesen and Alien rulesets. Maybe try kickstarting some of those next and see if there are enough of us to be worth supporting!

Cheers, Hywel

[Egheal]

Concerning Runequest it is in test phase but the recent FGU updates have broken a lot of the coding. So @MadBeardMan is still working on it. I can't wait for the final product, it will be awsome (source: talking with the dev on tweeter).
I hope we will see all Free League games on FGU, I played Blade Runner and it was has good if not better than Alien, so I'm all in for a Free League FGU Kickstarter! I would like to see Candela Obscura and DaggerHeart too, not sure if I would get those but it could attract some critters to FGU.

[Ryuson]

Use of Kickstarter is a something I support as well, for many of the reasons already stated. If this will encourage SW to produce more rulesets and sourcebooks, I'm all for it. I also backed this one (Werewolf 5e) more for its support of Vampire 5e than Werewolf (which I only have a passing interest).

As for other Kickstarters I'd be interested in:

1) Cortex. I think it's a great ruleset but it's stuck in limbo with Fandom [correction: Dire Wolf] AFAICT. Cortex doesn't really need a robust program like FG to work, but there are a lot of "dice tricks" that could be automated that would speed up play. If/when Cortex takes off, it could be a popular system -- again, stuck in limbo atm.

2) 2d20. There's already most of the Modiphius games supported by FG. The implementations of both STA and Fallout rulesets are fantastic and seem like they are supported by continued content. Too bad about Dune, but that's been my experience as well - none of my players care to play it. Modiphius also has a new system out (not on VTT AFAIK), Dreams & Machines, which also looks interesting. We'll see if it's popular (and more importantly, would be popular on FG).

3) Indie games. There's a bunch of indie games that I'd be interested in but I don't know if the market is there - at least on FG. Like Fiasco and Zombie World (both already implemented on R20 IIRC). I know I can create it myself - but if the price was right, I'd prefer just buying it.

[battling1]

The Delta Green writers talk a lot about how there is this idea that there is a ton of money in TTRPGs but actually profit is really thin other than for big companies like Wizards so I get the Kickstarter. Tts a ton of work, risk, and cost thats easier if you have a guarantee that it at least has costs covered at the start. Hopefully it does lead to more systems too

[Griogre]

I just wanted to mention that I think where FGU shines is its support for many different systems. So general support to CoreRPG to so a user could build a extremely simple and lightweight ruleset extension off of CoreRPG in less than an hour is potentially game changing.

Something like an easy character and NPC sheets where certain attributes / rolls / card values could be generated and compared against each other in a combat tracker and simple over / under / miss / hit / critical fail / critical success outputs would be sent to chat. IE the user uploads a CSV spreadsheet for the character sheet, another CSV spreadsheet for the NPC sheet, and the last CSV spreadsheet for how to compare attributes for characters and npcs on the combat tracker. And while I used CSV spreadsheets as an example, something more sophisticated like the 5E character wizard could be used as well.

There are thousands of RPGs out there and only a tiny fraction of will ever support commercial rulesets.