RPGaDay: Trust

If you want to see trust in the RPG sphere, take a look at Kickstarter.  It's also a great place to see trust being broken.

When Free League put up a kickstarter, and it's for something I want, there's no hesitation.  It's a pre-order, effectively.  It'll show up, when it says it will.  The only exception has been the Tales from the Loop board game, but given that board games have had even bigger pandemic-related manufacture and distribution problems than RPGs, I'm not surprised it's been pushed back, and it's still on track to show up this year.

But then there's the companies who went too far on the stretch goals.  John Harper springs to mind; the actual Blades in the Dark book was delivered within a reasonable timeframe, as far as I know, but the stretch goals are another matter.  Scum and Villainy is sitting on my bookshelf right now, but the one I was really excited about, Null Vector?  Well, I've given up being excited about it.  I'll buy it, if and when it ever appears, but I certainly won't be trusting anyone - especially not John Harper - to deliver a list of stretch goals like that again.

Zinequest also affected my level of trust in kickstarters.  I back three zines during Zinequest 2020.

• The Black Pyramid, an adventure for Mothership.  The PDF was in my inbox on 9th April, barely a month from the end of the Kickstarter, and physical copies were going out not long afterwards.
  
• Mycelium and Other Horrors, a set of incursions for Trophy Dark.  This took literally a year to deliver the PDF; 16th February, the anniversary of it funding.  Physical copies took even longer.  The nine months they'd allowed for delays was nowhere near enough.
• Space Seeds, a set of encounter ideas for sci-fi games.  The PDF was due in June 2020.  In May, a few pages were released.  I'm still waiting for the rest.

These three radically different experiences have made me a lot more cautious in my Zinequest 2021.  I backed...checks notes...no zines.

And then there's Leviathan Rising, which ran a kickstarter in 2019, and have only just sent out the books.  Not that that's made anyone happy.

What I've learned from this is that trust on Kickstarter is a fragile thing and easily broken.  I plan to run a kickstarter myself for my game Matrons of Mystery, so I need to make sure I hold onto that trust.  Accordingly, when the kickstarter launches it will be after I've finished writing the book, and I'll have a basic PDF copy ready to send out immediately, even if it is the unedited version.  And if there are any stretch goals, it'll be for things like art, not physical things like dice.  I've got to give people every reason to believe they can trust me to deliver.  And then prove them right.