RPGaDay Question #29

Question #29: What has been the best-run RPG Kickstarter you have backed?

Far and away that has been the FATE Core Kickstarter by Evil Hat Productions.  Quite honestly, Fred Hicks could teach a class on how to properly run a professional Kickstarter campaign.  Not only is he transparent about where things are, he's been savvy enough to avoid over-extending Evil Hat's ability to fulfill the various goals.

A close runner-up are the various Maps of Mastery campaigns run by cartographer Christopher West.  While I may not use maps quite as much as I used to these days, I still back every single one of his Kickstarters, and he's got the process more or less down to a science.  He doesn't go crazy with stretch goals, though a part of that may be due the fairly short length of some of his more recent Kickstarters, as he's only got so many days to reach the intended goal.  And since he's created the maps ahead of time, there's generally not a huge delay on getting the maps either, which is always a plus.

While it's had some hiccups and delays, the Kickstarter run by John Wick for the 7th Sea 2nd edition was handled pretty well.  I figured from the get-go that their proposed production schedule was very aggressive and required that nothing go wrong to cause delays, something that veteran gamers know almost never happens as something hiccup or another occurs that causes delays and products to be rescheduled.  Still, they've been very good about producing the supplements in roughly the order proposed, with the only switch-up being they released Heroes & Villains prior to Pirate Nations.

Now to be fair, I don't tend to back a lot of Kickstarters, mostly as I've become adverse to pledging money for RPGs that I may very well never get to play.  Thus far, I've only gotten burned twice, one was due to the backer suffering some catastrophic real life issues regarding his mental health that were beyond his control, and I don't begrudge the man for not being able to follow through given that by the time he was able to resume working on it, all interest on both the part of him and the backers had passed.  Which is a shame, as it looked like it had a lot of potential.

The other "burn" thus far has been the Mekton Zero Kickstarter by R. Talsorian.  Honestly, I really should have known better for a company that's become increasingly infamous for not being able to follow through on a timely manner.  There's still periodic updates, but the last few that I've seen have been more about their woes with the minis line, which I frankly don't really care about as I'm more keen on the RPG.  Hopefully they'll get things sorted out and have an actual rulebook put together, but I've kind of given up on having it anytime in the near future.  Which is a shame as the few times I was able to play Mekton Zeta, it was quite fun even if the rules could be horribly abused by savvy players that knew what they were doing.

Only two more days in this marathon of questions, so check up here tomorrow for what won't quite be my final answer.