What PURCHASES are you RESISTING?

Not judging just trying to understand. Are you all cancelling because of another project, unrelated to Torchbearer, that he tried to hide his cancelled friends involvement in? Or did Luke do something else too?

Just speaking for myself, not Charlie. Crane’s inclusion of Koebel was more tone-deaf IMO. If he was really trying to be sneaky, he would have put Koebel in under a pseudonym, or not even listed his name on the Kickstarter page. I was much more disappointed with his petulant and indignant not-pology, which came across much more as “how dare you crybabies criticize my decisions?” than any real regret.

There was also a report from someone who Crane inadvertently let into a Zoom call:

I was an early backer of Torchbearer 2nd at the $195 level, I signed into the 1st weekly backer Zoom call about 30 min early, already in the "room" was Luke and another writer on the project eating Chinese food and discussing tactics for the upcoming meeting. I listened in for about 10 min (while playing WoW on another monitor so I wasn't super attentive) before they noticed I was on the call and kicked me out. During that time I heard him say that he intend to conceal the fact that one of the physical rewards was going to be less than expected until the campaign was over (one of the sets of cards would be 1/2 sized mini-cards) and "our focus needs to be get that money, get that money, get that money", and not saying anything that would get someone to go "whine on Twitter". The whole tone of disdain for the backers broke the parasocial relationship that is the main reason I back things on Kickstarter and I dropped my pledge to the PDF only level the next day. I requested and received a refund when this debacle came to light.

Now I don’t know the person who reported that, but even if it’s exaggerated then it’s skeevy.

So that’s four red flags for me: inclusion of Koebel, weird apology, possible deception of backers around the rewards they pledged for, and my current surplus of dungeon crawling RPGs.

If it was only one of those flags, or even two, I could probably shrug and move on. I really like Crane’s design aesthetic and pretty much everything about his designs. But all four of them … it was just too much for me.

I’m not saying anyone else should arrive at the same conclusion and if others are fine with backing TB, then more power to them and I hope they have fun with the game.

All of that, but the chances Crane was hiding Koebel's name is higher than zero in my opinion.

He didn't tell the other creators in the project (some big names like Vincent Baker and Sage Latorra who collaborated with Adam Koebel on Dungeon World), and he listed the creator names on the Kickstarter in reverse alphabetical order so that Koebel would be last.

Latorra dropped out of the project (along with many others) as soon as they found out.

I think what Koebel did was pretty wrong. If you watch the video and you look at some of the background of the woman, it's pretty abhorrent.

But then there's also this that recently came up:
jecreane.medium.com/words-that-have-been...o-years-f1f5780a7c92

A lot of maybe not enormous things on their own, but multiple issues. Luke has also always been kind of in your face and a bit cocky from my impression of forum interactions. I followed his work/contributions for years at the Forge and later the Burning Wheel HQ forums.

Kickstarter is the reality TV of boardgames.

Kind of hoping someone else puts together a Kickstarter with lots of tiny RPGs from well-known designers.

Successfully resisted PUZZLE STRIKE 2.

Looked fun, but it had one of my issues with Kickstarters, which is the inclusion of “expansions” as part of the initial release. I think this is garbage design and garbage marketing, or (more charitably) a massive turnoff to me.

If your expansions are well-designed, then they should be part of the core experience. If they can’t be seamlessly integrated into the core experience, then release them later if the game is popular. I want a tight game out of the box, not some big sprawling thing that makes me choose what parts not to play, before I even get a feel for the game.

If your expansions aren’t well-designed, then, well, don’t release them.

To be fair, the PS2 expansion is in the "more of the same" category - more characters to play, many more banks chips, etc - but the way everything is distributed between the two boxes is odd. Original Puzzle Strike had two standalone boxes with 10 different characters and different bank chips in each box. If the new expansion for PS2 isn't playable on its own, that stuff should definitely all be in one box at a higher MSRP.

Yeah, I can appreciate that, especially from the standpoint of not really requiring extra rules.

It’s still off putting to me though. These days I want a simple, core experience, not a ton of options I have to choose from out of the box. Save options for the expansion.

Dinosaur Gauge is a pick-up-and-devour game about dino shipping magnates and dino industrialists and dino railroad tycoons and dino airline operators adapting to the shrinking of the Western Interior Seaway while manipulating the stomp market.

I mean, I have no business purchasing this, because I don't care for train games very much. But I mean come on! How can you turn that down? She gets all visceral passion with the "devour" and the "dino industrialists" (you can picture the top hats) and then completely nerds out by throwing in "Western Interior Seaway". I almost want to buy it just to encourage the behavior.

I'm resisting buying a refurbished iPad Pro 12.9". There's a handful of games that would work on it, and I could grade student papers easily outside of the office and my home. Unlike past purchases of this ilk, I've been more aware of my brain chemistry and realize that the desire to get this thing correlates strongly with my depression levels.

ymmv, I find ipads surprisingly useless for productivity tasks.

I have considered an ipad pro + pencil to attempt to create some digital art. Would I stick with it? History says no, but maybe THIS TIME will be different...

I was super good at resisting the renewal of my car registration during COVID, which lead to a very expensive ($1500) and decidedly un-romantic trip to the DMV on Valentine's Day.

Gary Sax wrote: ymmv, I find ipads surprisingly useless for productivity tasks.

The real trick to talking yourself into a purchase is to go the Reddit iPad forums where the die hard fans are using them as laptop replacements, and extoll their virtues endlessly. I already have an 8th gen regular iPad, and in all honesty I am too lazy to learn all the new stuff you can do in the latest version of the operating system, like split screens and multitasking. I do find that it makes a really nice PDF annotation device, and having a little more screen real estate for that function seems like it would be nice. But that raises the very real question of

"Why don't I just develop a workflow for taking notes from articles that doesn't require a $675 electronic slab?"

My other justification is that my body in general has the resilience of an old, cracked rubber band that you find on the ground in late March, surrounded by cigarette butts and cough drop wrappers. Using my laptop as an actual laptop (as opposed to the current desktop arrangement) leads to neck pain after about four minutes.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I simply cannot imagine doing even 10% of my job on my iPad. Truly an outbound-only device.