Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Planning ahead

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If you have an idea or get inspired: how far ahead to you plan your projects or do you just start?

What’s this planning you talk about?
Jump in, get all enthusiastic, expect to give up and find something more interesting, anywhere between 50% and 75% done.

If there is an event coming (tournament, show, convention) and you’ll be participating as player or giving demos how much work do you put in and how far ahead do you plan?

As a player, the absolute minimum; if models need painting, paint them. If everything is provided, just turn up and play. Don’t take it seriously! If giving a demo, the opposite extreme – try to get as much in place as possible, try to cover every angle, make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to just turn up and play. Especially at shows, I like to see people having a good time. Whether that’s providing an opponent they can beat and take a whooping in good humour, or running a demo that is as easy and as fun as possible to join in with.

Sudden announcements of things happening a year in advance: when do you start saving up?

Advertising Orktober 2024 during Orktober 2023 just feels wrong to me.
I certainly wouldn’t start saving up now! If it’s more than a month or two of saving, it’s too expensive for a hobby whim.

I’m watching the video releases in reverse order this week – just watched the chat show, now onto the weekender.
Interesting to see the disillusionment with Kickstarter finally kicking in. Just amazed it’s taken this long for it to be said out loud: Kickstarter has been little more than a pre-order system for years and years now. And the tabletop/gaming industry seems to have pushed it in that direction more than just about any other. And over the last few years, Ontabletop has helped push and promote this kind of “vapourware” at lot (one of my biggest issues with the current post-covid format is less that the guys are no longer in the studio, but more that it’s become a discussion show about pre-release PR for shiny new things found on websites – much of which doesn’t actually exist at the time it’s being discussed!)

So it’s interesting to see even the crew recognise that Kickstarter is a shadow of its former self and nothing like its originally intended purpose – to help new projects raise funds to get to production – and is little more than a pre-order system that takes a 30% cut of revenue (which is factored into the selling price when new products are launched). I’m just a little confused as to “why now?”. Because it’s been this way for years and years.

I also suspect that many who buy their tabletop games from Kickstarter are “collectors of games” rather than players of games (in the same way many of us collect many more miniatures than we ever actually paint or play games with). I do wonder how many of these releases are actually out of favour by the time they are delivered, as everyone has already moved on to the next new shiny thing – it’s not the games themselves that are exciting, but the promise of the next one being ever more awesome than the last one you bought and put on your shelf, unopened?

I’m quite enjoying the “back to the 90s” theme of the weekender.
Here’s your music.

I sometimes feel for Shay. Not only does he get grief from the guys about being such a young ‘un.
But he also missed out on an incredible time of excitement and revolution – it turns out the 90s were actually a pretty good time to be alive!