[06-Jan-21 07:32 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Hi folks, My name is Louis Hoefer, I go by the handle “Luau Lou” on the podcast “This Ol’ Dungeon” and I recently ran a Kickstarter for my role playing game “The Dare-Luck Club.” A game about adolescent misfits out on neighborhood adventures.
[06-Jan-21 07:35 PM] Luau Lou#4843
One thing that might be of interest to anyone out there that is wanting to become a game publisher is that this is actually my second foray into the RPG publishing industry. I ran a company called Whole Sum Entertainment back in 2000, but it was a whole other landscape for publishing back then.
[06-Jan-21 07:40 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Sorry, for some reason my keyboard just cut out on me at the end of that sentence… Anyhow now it’s working again.
[06-Jan-21 07:42 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I was going to add that this was my first Kickstarter, and it only funded to 48%. I had a lot of advice from people like ben Burns at New Comet Games and Levi Combs from Planet X Games going it, but there were still some components that I wish I had known ahead of time that might have been useful to me.
[06-Jan-21 07:43 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Any questions at this point? Or should I give you a background on The Dare-Luck Club RPG?
[06-Jan-21 07:43 PM] saintnexan#6715
Thanks, @Luau Lou! The floor is open to questions!
[06-Jan-21 07:44 PM] saintnexan#6715
And yes, please tell us of the background! 🙂
[06-Jan-21 07:48 PM] Luau Lou#4843
So, about 2009 I ran a game at GenCon called “Night Falls at Wicklow Museum.” It was using the ubiquity system and featuring a group of “Ranger Scouts” that were trapped in a sort of “Night at the Museum” scenario. It was really popular, and at that time, there wasn’t a system that was doing that sort of “adolescents out on adventure.” Meanwhile at the school I teach at I was brewing up a simple RPG to play at the after school game club I run. It was a basic fantasy game with D6 type mechanics. I started thinking that a simple system like that was fun to play and might make a good base for a game wrapped around these kids that are part of a misfit club. Well, I started putting together the system and came across a few gaming “presumptions” that I felt I was holding that maybe needed challeneged.
[06-Jan-21 07:49 PM] Luau Lou#4843
One presumption was that the more “skills, feats, and other bobbles” a character could have in a system, the more unique it made that character -and that these bits were esssential to having a game with interesting characters.
[06-Jan-21 07:50 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I decided to push the other way a bit. How simple could you make a character and still have the player feel like they were playing individuals with something unique to offer the group.
[06-Jan-21 07:51 PM] Luau Lou#4843
So, as I played around with it, I developed a system that plays like a lot of the skills systems of the late 1990s, but is based around only 5 attributes that typically only vary from 1 to 3 dice each.
[06-Jan-21 07:53 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Doing this made it so that the characters in a group of players (which for most of us is about 3-5 people) can still have some differences, yet the focus becomes on making the character different through their personality concept and not based on some bonuses and feats and such that they have -which all to often becomes how people define a character.
[06-Jan-21 07:55 PM] Luau Lou#4843
The game also leverages “faults” a bit. Typically, when people take faults in a game it is merely for some starting points during character creation, then theya re forgotten about. In the Dare-Luck Club, when you play out your fault you can get better dice to roll with through a system called “The Toy Box.” Basically, the character
[06-Jan-21 07:56 PM] Luau Lou#4843
basically the character’s attributes are just given a die amount (1, 2 or 3 dice). During actual rolling, you have to pick which type of die you are suing from a list called the Toy Box. A starting Dare-Lucker has a meager selection
[06-Jan-21 07:57 PM] Luau Lou#4843
They have a bunch of D4s and D6s, and only a few chances to be rolling D8s and D10s (this changes as the characters gain experience). This system helps make the game flow up and down dramatically, because (other than when your fault allows for it) you can only get the higher die-types back after you’ve used all the other rolls.
[06-Jan-21 07:59 PM] saintnexan#6715
(brb — please continue)
[06-Jan-21 07:59 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I feel like I’ve gone on abit… There are a few more “presumptions” I was working against, but I want to pause for questions or clarity if needed…
[06-Jan-21 08:02 PM] saintnexan#6715
(back)
[06-Jan-21 08:02 PM] saintnexan#6715
In what time period is the game set?
[06-Jan-21 08:05 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Well, another presumption many games have is that failure has a definite consequence. “For example, when you run out of hit points you are dying, when you reach -X hit points you are dead.” For a game about adolescents, this just wouldn’t do. You can’t have dead kids every time they get hurt, and you can’t give them some crazy ability to soak damage, and I didn’t have any interest in just having a story-game where there’s not imminent danger in losing the character or somehting bad happening… So the design idea was to have “oomph and marbles points” which sort of act like hit points. However, what happens when a character runs out is purely up to the game master (we call them a Grand Poobah to fit with the club aesthetic), though the main take away is that the character loses agency for that encounter. The game master can rule they are to the breaking point of exhaustion or fear, or if narratively appropriate they could be dead -this latitude makes things much more pliable for the drama of the adventure you are on, yet still leaves the player fearful of losing these points…
[06-Jan-21 08:07 PM] Luau Lou#4843
The game book is written to be taking place between the late 70s and early 80s. Now, I was developing this before the whole Stranger Things became a craze, so the reason it was put in that time frame was that that was when my childhood was and most the movies and books I was patterning it off of were from that era. Also, in that era you don’t ahve so much technology that can easily deflate and game master’s plot (cell phones, the internet, etc).
[06-Jan-21 08:08 PM] saintnexan#6715
True, and you had “free-range” kids.
[06-Jan-21 08:10 PM] Luau Lou#4843
yes!!!! Oh heck yeah -My kids always give me what for when they hear what all I did as a Kid (bicycling across county lines) and all the restrictions I put on them! In fact, (don’t tell my parents) when I was 12 I climbed through a unguarded roof hatch and stood on the roof of the coliseum in down town Indianapolis! Childhood was a great open frontier!
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[06-Jan-21 08:11 PM] saintnexan#6715
My friends and I used to explore storm drains. 😄
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[06-Jan-21 08:13 PM] Luau Lou#4843
That’s also a staple of The Dare-Luck Club adventures, the adults just never believe any of the things the kids are dealing with and typically each game starts out with the kids pulling off the old “triangle sleep over” scheme (your staying at his house this weekend, he’s at the other kids, and that kids at yours, but you’re all really sleeping in the club house in the abandoned lot).
[06-Jan-21 08:14 PM] saintnexan#6715
Heh. Cool. 🙂
[06-Jan-21 08:14 PM] saintnexan#6715
So how “weird” is the setting? Are there paranormal elements, for example?
[06-Jan-21 08:15 PM] Luau Lou#4843
When I first sat down to design it, I tried to think about what dangers kids could get in. The book contains everything from classic horror monsters, to mobsters, to aliens, to cryptozoic creatures, to just those A-hole kids at school that always want to give the Dare-Luckers a hard time.
[06-Jan-21 08:18 PM] Luau Lou#4843
You can make the game have a “Stranger Things” vibe, and have a menace in your town that is aways producing some “weirdness” but the setting sort of covers all the tropes you could have and leaves it to the gaming group for what sort of feel they want. I suggest keeping it level for some games and then running down a weird avenue for others just as a way of punctuating the novelty of extra ordinary adversaries. The starting adventure has the kids facing a mob group that has come to town to rob the local bank through a sewer tunnel.
[06-Jan-21 08:19 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I did that to give people a neutral starting point, where you didn’t have to be dealing with transdimensional beings if you didn’t want to.
[06-Jan-21 08:19 PM] saintnexan#6715
I take it that the game has a bestiary, then? How large is it?
[06-Jan-21 08:22 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Yeah, the game is rules light, so out of 214 pages, about 30 of it is rules and starting character items. Then there is about 20 pages of vehicles and equipment, about 80 pages of Monsters and Supporting “NPCs” and then some details on a preposed starting town and the full-length adventure “Mixing It up with the Mob.” plus appendix, index, etc.
[06-Jan-21 08:23 PM] saintnexan#6715
What sorts of resources do the kids have?
[06-Jan-21 08:27 PM] Luau Lou#4843
So, each character can be designed with these things called Mischiefs and Niftinesses -basically flaws and advantages. To, again, make things simple, they each give just a slight bonus or penalty to the character or present a special narrative advantage in a given situation. So, by narrative resources, you could have a Niftiness that allots you an adult contact, an older protective sibling, or some background option that gives you certain perks (being the child of a local politician, being rich, etc.)
[06-Jan-21 08:30 PM] Luau Lou#4843
As far as physical resources, the equipment in the game is called “Swag” and is traded for using a system of “collectible cards -be they baseball, spellcraft-the-summoning, or whatever. The equipment reads like stuff out of the back of a comic book ad, with X-ray glasses, Jr. Chemcistry Labs, Red Ryder BB Guns, and stuff like that.
[06-Jan-21 08:32 PM] Luau Lou#4843
A BIG BIG part of the game is for the players to come up with uses of equipment or situational choices that grant them an bonus die. This die is handed out (at a value picked by the game master based on his/her judgement of the advantage the character has) and rolled with the character’s attribute dice to help them succeed against a target number or an adversary’s roll.
[06-Jan-21 08:33 PM] saintnexan#6715
Can you give an example of that in action? I’m curious how a group of 12-year-olds could take on mobsters, let alone monsters.
[06-Jan-21 08:33 PM] saintnexan#6715
(I mean, yeah, I know it happens in movies, but the kids have Plot Immunity, generally speaking.)
[06-Jan-21 08:37 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Sure, in one example from the run of the game at cons, one kid used a set crayons dumped out on the floor behind a mobster while the other character pushed him. So in the mechanics, the kid pushing was (and he was built to be a “stonger type”) rolling 2D for his Scrap Attribute. Now he has to beat the mobster who had 4D. They both have to select what type of roll they’re going to make from their Toy Box. The character has its Toy Box, and all the GM controlled characters work off of a single one set for the particular adventure. I can
[06-Jan-21 08:38 PM] Luau Lou#4843
not remember, but I think the Mobster was rolling 4D6 and the kid was rolling 3D8… anyhow, I loved the teamwork and the idea of using the crayons to get the guy to fall, so I gave the player a +D8 for this equipment/plan. Typically the bonuses are suggested to be between D4 and D8…
[06-Jan-21 08:39 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Obviously, the game does not go well if a kid takes on a life-threatening enemy head-on. Most of the monsters have some form of weakness that can be exploited by the players if they figure it out.
[06-Jan-21 08:40 PM] Luau Lou#4843
The use of the varying dice in the Toy Box also allows for things to not get super deadly super fast.
[06-Jan-21 08:44 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Again, one of the advantages of the rules for running out of Oomph is that the narrator doesn’t have to consider a character “dead” when they reach zero Oomph or “insane” when they reach zero Marbles. Instead, they can rule they they have given up, turned tail to run and cannot take any further, effective actions in that encounter. So instead of saying the Mobster shot your kid, the narration is the mobster’s shot rings deadly in your ear and you realize just how much is at stake. You must surrender to him…for now.
[06-Jan-21 08:44 PM] saintnexan#6715
nods
[06-Jan-21 08:44 PM] saintnexan#6715
Cool.
[06-Jan-21 08:45 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Do you have many readers/followers that would like my take on trying to get into the industry/running a Kickstarter? I can at least tell them about the mistakes I made.
[06-Jan-21 08:45 PM] saintnexan#6715
Almost certainly. 🙂
[06-Jan-21 08:50 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Well, having been writing games for a very long time, I can definitely tell people that now is the time if it is what you want to do! The industry has never be so alive and there has never been so many easy options for trying to do this stuff. Between the ability for you to network with artists and other collaborators online (there are some great artists in South America who can use the exchange rate to make US dollars go a lot farther than what they can buy here), to the availability of free online product placement/support (Discord, Facebook, Google Accounts, Youtube), to distribution sites like IndieGoGo and DriveThru RPG -this is beautiful for creaters and an amazing opportunity that wasn’t there just 5-10 years ago. Not to mention funding sites like Kickstarter and Paetron and others. If you want to do something this is definitely your time!
[06-Jan-21 08:50 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Some things I would do different are:
[06-Jan-21 08:52 PM] Luau Lou#4843
As soon as you have a playable version of your game -even if it isn’t refined start trying to get it on a stranger’s table. What I mean is, get it out to conventions, see if anyone on line wants to tinker with it. I waited to long to get the Dare-Luck Club out there and it didn’t build as much player base as it could have if I was demoing it at cons back in 2015 when I had my first real draft of it.
[06-Jan-21 08:56 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Getting the game played at cons is SUPER important! Also, having a touchstone for the players at a con to go get or walk away with is also important. I have had people go on and on about how much they enjoyed this game when they played it at cons, but until I had a prerelease version up on DriveThru RPG (The Dare-Luck Club Haunt-House adventure), I wasn’t really capturing people’s focus. With that item up for sale, I was getting over 52% of everyone who played my game at a con go buy it. And of those, almost 80% pledged my Kickstarter. Now, if I had that going earlier on (I only had it up for 2 cons before the Kickstarter when live) I would have been at a better spot.
[06-Jan-21 08:58 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Also, putting some cool items up on a site like Drive Thru RPG for “pay what you want” is a good idea, especially if you attach advertising in it for your project (I didn’t do this last part :-() I put out maps for the Haunt-House game for “pay what you want” and they were downloaded by over 50 people in the first month.
[06-Jan-21 08:59 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I would also recommend submitting writing for fanzines. These are so popular right now, and there are so many that need gaming material. Doing this gets your name out, makes networks, and can sometimes lead to free advertising.
[06-Jan-21 09:01 PM] saintnexan#6715
Good advice!
[06-Jan-21 09:03 PM] Luau Lou#4843
I would also wait to do your Kickstarter until you have a nice video for it and a well thought out ad for your game. Then, I would highly recommend doing Facebook ads the first and last weeks of your launch. I only did it for one week in the middle, and it brought in 120% of what it cost (and that was with a weak ad that I put together too hastily). If I had ran it more, it might have brought in the funding (I thought) I needed. More than that, it added lots of new subscribers to my company Facebook page.
[06-Jan-21 09:07 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Figuring out funding is another thing. You will get great advice about really thinking about how shipping and handling and dealing with high volumes might make you go bust even if you’re funded. But one thing I had bot considered is how much digital pledges I would get verses print pledges. I was thinking the numbers would be like 30% PDFs to 70% Print. I’m not sure what is average for other projects, but this number is super important. My campaign was almost 50/50, with that, I could have brought my funding goal way down and been able to probably have what I needed for art and still print and ship the physical copies… It is just so hard to “foresee” these sort of numbers and make a good guess.
[06-Jan-21 09:08 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Last bit of advice:
[06-Jan-21 09:12 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Don’t give up and always expect a long road ahead! A game takes years to develop (when done by a small team/single individual) and years more to get “legs under.” This may not be true if you are making a supplement for a preexisting game like 5e, but for those of us that have a system we just have to craft it is a long heart-breaking road. But if you are in it for the craft, making something you think is cool and others can get behind, it will be worth it in the end. For me, I still have the ability to finish The Dare-Luck Club, I just have to spend a little time getting some personal funds to finish art, and then down grade some of the art expectations I had. I still plan to have it out via Drive Thru RPG by mid Spring… Oh, and in the mean time, you got to hit every convention you can (which is easier in the world of virtual cons) and get people playing your game!
[06-Jan-21 09:13 PM] saintnexan#6715
Do you have a character sheet or sample characters that we cans see?
[06-Jan-21 09:13 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Yes… let me get the links copied…
[06-Jan-21 09:14 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Here are the sample characters that I’ve been using for conventions: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xiijJHXzPpUmelES7AM3X0Rld9MRG82G/view?usp=sharing
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xiijJHXzPpUmelES7AM3X0Rld9MRG82G/view?usp=sharing
Dare_Luck_Club_Pregens.pdf
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/t7dJ3ImpYwInXCPM2otts2hPLTd3WCTrVmN9FbOvcnWwOwdsXG6LYYQ6M2uwKlw=w1200-h630-p
[06-Jan-21 09:18 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Ok, I can’t find a copy of the base character sheet (I am on my laptop right now) but I will put one up on my Facebook Page for Dandyline Games tonight… Here are some of the back ground doodles that are part of the base character sheet…https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p180x540/132367319_163367552212411_5423748127425756406_o.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=2&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=JsoHe2b1ZFwAX_pQUIB&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&tp=6&oh=7855da18edb6a2913018f5014d8fc89a&oe=601ABDD7
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https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p180x540/132367319_163367552212411_5423748127425756406_o.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=2&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=JsoHe2b1ZFwAX_pQUIB&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&tp=6&oh=7855da18edb6a2913018f5014d8fc89a&oe=601ABDD7
[06-Jan-21 09:20 PM] Luau Lou#4843
The base sheet has these sort of watermark images in the background with the sections you write in in the foreground. This really just looks like a pile of crazy crap without it being set into the sheet’s context 🙂
[06-Jan-21 09:23 PM] saintnexan#6715
(Sorry, Discord locked up on me there.)
[06-Jan-21 09:24 PM] saintnexan#6715
You touched on this earlier, but can you recap basic task resolution?
[06-Jan-21 09:27 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Sure. So, whatever a character is doing, they use one of their 5 Attributes (Scrap, Spry, Pluck, Brains, or Shenanigans). Each one has a rating (usually) between 1-3, representing how many dice they get to role. Each character (based on their “experience”) has a “Toy Box” -which is a collection of die-types they get to use during a game. So they start the adventure with so many rolls of D4s, so many of D6s, so many of D8s, and so many of D10s (and D12s and D20s as they get further into a campaign).
[06-Jan-21 09:28 PM] Luau Lou#4843
They roll the attribute that makes the most sense for the task using a die type from their Toy Box. Once used it is not replaced until all the die types are gone from the box (then the whole thing resets)
[06-Jan-21 09:30 PM] Luau Lou#4843
So, if they are doing something requiring speed or balance, they may roll their Spry -let’s say it is a 2. This means they get to roll 2 dice, and they can pick from their Toy Box whether it is 2D4, 2D6, etc.
[06-Jan-21 09:31 PM] Luau Lou#4843
They roll these dice plus any bonus die they may have been given for equipment or situational effects -or Bonuses for a Niftiness they have (Like maybe they have the “Won a Trophy in __” Niftiness and at creation they decided it was in track, so that grants them a bonus D12 or whathave you.
[06-Jan-21 09:32 PM] Luau Lou#4843
They roll the 2D6 (let’s say) and any bonus die they might be given (let’s give them that D12 for that Niftiness I mentioned) and add it all togther.
[06-Jan-21 09:33 PM] Luau Lou#4843
This number must beat either a difficulty rating assigned by the Grand Poobah OR a roll made by another character or NPC for the action to be successful.
[06-Jan-21 09:34 PM] Luau Lou#4843
As you can see, the system itself is not hugely innovative (other than the Toy Box mechanic), but the simplicity of it and the differing results that can happen make it a fun and cinematic exchange that’s easy for everyone to get the hang of quickly.
[06-Jan-21 09:35 PM] saintnexan#6715
nodnods
[06-Jan-21 09:36 PM] saintnexan#6715
So! It’s time for what we like to call @danhunsaker’s Favorite Question(TM)! Are you there, @danhunsaker?
[06-Jan-21 09:36 PM] saintnexan#6715
(I’ll give him a sec here….)
[06-Jan-21 09:36 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Here’s a earlier version of the base character sheet I found -at least it will put that random pile of crazy sketches in perspective https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N8pj7YaFjGL-V8hOCic4HW-6CpaXMWJY/view?usp=sharing
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https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/fYVWWpFTT5Scflg1LTMl7o8mPbxfhrdtFCK_R7utp3nMsIqQTg4_BnLpKr4jI2s=w1200-h630-p
[06-Jan-21 09:36 PM] saintnexan#6715
Okay! Looks like he’s busy, so I’ll do the honors.
[06-Jan-21 09:37 PM] saintnexan#6715
What is your least favorite aspect of The Dare-Luck Club?
[06-Jan-21 09:37 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Ought oh…
[06-Jan-21 09:42 PM] Luau Lou#4843
Well, not being funded for one thing! Seriously though, the problem that I feel it suffers from is that I’m trying to give it flexibility to be a lot of things to a lot of people. That is, I wanted to make it be able to simulate Scooby and the Gang if you like that, while still being able to do The Goonies (my personal favorite take on it) and darker things like The Lost Boys or Stranger Things type stuff. Where as I like that it can handle all those flavors, it gets hard to push the game to others because the art in the book captures those feels and one bit of art might be cool to a person looking to tell certain types of stories while other pieces might turn them off. On the other hand, the adolescent adventure genre is a very small niche of the gaming industry so splintering my target audience down to just one sub genre of that seems too small of a target to hit…
[06-Jan-21 09:42 PM] saintnexan#6715
A fair point!
[06-Jan-21 09:43 PM] saintnexan#6715
Sorry to have kept you past our scheduled time, @Luau Lou! I appreciate your thoughtful answers!
[06-Jan-21 09:44 PM] Luau Lou#4843
No problem -I’ve never done a “text interview live” and I am sure I prattled on much more than I should have. Thanks for having me -this is a great thing you do here!
[06-Jan-21 09:44 PM] saintnexan#6715
That’s kind of you to say!
[06-Jan-21 09:45 PM] saintnexan#6715
Usual reminder: If you’ve enjoyed this Q&A and would like to treat me to a coffee or two, you can do so at https://www.ko-fi.com/gmshoe. Anything’s appreciated! 🙂
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[06-Jan-21 09:45 PM] Luau Lou#4843
💯
[06-Jan-21 09:45 PM] saintnexan#6715
Now, if you’ll give me just a minute, I’ll get the log posted and link you!
