Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 12/11/2021
- The One Ring Core Rules
- The Third Imperium
- Trinity Continuum: Assassins (Pre-Order)
- WFRP: Empire in Ruins Companion
- Sabbat: The Black Hand
Top News Stories
Kickstarter will ‘move its crowdfunding platform to blockchain’: In a confounding press release, Kickstarter announced that it is ‘hatching a standalone company to build a crowdfunding system’ built around blockchain tech provided by Celo, and then begin to employ the company’s tech ‘when it’s ready’. While RPG Twitter utterly blew up over this announcement, the announcement itself means little, and Kickstarter’s own, longer press release has almost as little information. Whatever venture Kickstarter is funding will be initially separate from the site, and the marketing language is already distancing the company from any commitment to use the tech (‘When it’s ready’). Beyond that, the claim that the change will take place ‘completely behind the scenes’ belies more apocalyptic projections like a Kickstarter token or that the site will start tokenizing projects (though the Kickstarter release and its talk of ‘rewarding’ creators and users is somewhat contradictory to this). Blockchain is a buzzword more than a viable data technology right now, so announcements such as this one are likely 50/50 between a move of substance and juicing the company’s valuation for an IPO (which would admittedly be worse for small projects than a blockchain). While we don’t think this announcement is as bad as some would say, and we would recommend not bailing on live projects (it’s really the small creators that would get hurt), it’s a real stretch to call something so information-free and so nakedly intended to appeal to investors ‘good’.
Discussion of the Week
Your Expectations Are Too High: In addition to being one of the top threads on /r/RPG this week, this thread also takes direct aim at us when we were GMing games in high school. The OP is talking mostly about railroading; when a novice GM sees the game going a way they don’t want, they often try to tighten the reins. The discussion, though, expands a bit more into expectations versus reality, how players actually prep for and behave at sessions, and what are actually fair expectations, like consistent attendance and learning the rules of the game being played.
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