The Business: Did You Even See If The Demand Is Already Met?

Behold a tale of a man who wasted his time trying to reinvent the wheel.

While, as of this post he's under $3K to his goal with four days to go, and thus this kid may yet get his begging goal met, I can already tell you that this is a waste of time and resources.

How can I tell that? "I have not played Pendragon."

This is the most basic-bitch thing you do when you think you want to make a product: "Does the market niche already have a product that fulfills the criteria well enough?"

I can summarize the issue: this niche is already met with Pendragon AND that game is already notorious for being so niche that it's a far more read/memed than played because this is not what most people want out of the hobby.

It would have been better had this been something done after a decade or two of very active, frequent, and obsequiously loud promotion of the literature informing the game's design and gameplay loop. That's how KAP hung on all these years, and it still is a cult title in the hobby.

You run into this a lot. Runequest, Empire of the Petal Throne, Ars Magica, Bushido/Sengoku, Talislanta and more are all falling into this Failure Mode. All of these turn out to work much better as card games (L5R), wargames (Nobunaga's Ambition), PC games (there's an upcoming Runequest game), or just writing fiction in some form. There is no liminal space in the marketplace for more than a token example, and that space is taken.

Trying to move into a niche you don't even understand leaves no excuse for not familiarising yourself with the title which owns the corner you want in on. Then there's what is going to tank this Never-Were alternative with the target audience: the card gimmicks.

No, that's irritating. None of that matters; this is the sort of thing Brian Niemeier complains about with authors. This is movie/videogame brain in action. What matters is "Did I do the thing? YES/NO"; this is also why "Fail Forward" and "Partial Sucess" and "Yes, But/No, And" designs have been repeatedly rejected in the marketplace by the hobby.

NO ONE WANTS THIS! They want the termination of liminality, which is what a gameplay mechanic is there to do: Roll the dice, get either YES or NO, and then move on to the next step in the gameplay resolution process. Furthermore, processes in successful tabletop games are SHORT. Hit (Y/N)->Hurt (Y/N)->Debilitate (Y/N) is as far as is proven practical to do; what has not been done is to maximize the efficiency of that process.

I would like for this project to fail, but he may just squeek out a success. There is nothing here that describes something that Pendragon cannot do, so why not just make a supplement for that game instead?

No, there is nothing justifying the existence of this product. It's "I wanna make my own D&D!" levels of retarded. Just play Pendragon; you've got what you need there.