* Matt is adamant that the virtual table-top be done in-house because he wants it to be tied to the success of the actual game. He doesn't want the game leaning strongly on another company whose business model has nothing to do with them. That doesn't mean you won't be able to play the game on other VTTs, just that they're going to put all their effort into their own, and other people will have to port it over. The VTT will include digital tools for building characters and the like. Developing the VTT simultaneously with the game itself will help in sharpening the game's rules.
Yeah this is very smart, and having the digital tools there from the get-go, and fully functional means that some players I know will be positively predisposed towards the game from that alone!
* Survival mechanics won't be part of the core game, but might pop up in specific adventures. Matt said it doesn't make sense to have rules in your game about how long it takes to get from point A to B, and how much water you need and how likely you are to be ambushed, "unless the point of your game is how dangerous the world is." James chimes in, "We love games like that!" But their game will mostly ignore that kind of thing, because their game is "explicitly heroic". If a particular setting or adventure needs those sorts of mechanics, it'll go in there, rather than being in the core rules.
I strongly support this - in part because a lot of games have really bad rules here, including D&D, and honestly, a DM just using what they know and what makes sense for the setting, the party, their capabilities and so on, is likely to have a better result than inflexible or just clunky rules most of the time. As example with D&D, a Druid can turn into a dove/pigeon pretty easily. Doves can fly literally literally hundreds of miles in a single day (600-700 miles - this is well studied because of carrier and racing pigeons), and do this for several days in a row. This isn't in dispute or questionable or anything. But in D&D can you do that? Hell no. Not RAW, and because RAW exists, sadly, DMs are inclined follow that, rather than let Druid fly a realistic distance.
* Matt says they didn't "game the system" on crowdfunding at all. They asked for as much money as they thought it would take, rather than asking for less because that might be strategic, as many projects do. To that end, no more stretch goals will be added -- the stretch goals already listed are what the goals actually are.
Yeah I was interested that they went with $800k rather than going for some insane lowball in the hopes of getting a bazillion backers anyway. I thought that was kind of a classy move.
* Discussion about the importance of choosing a good game license, because "we want people to make cool stuff with our system." Matt says there's been some public pressure to choose a certain license from people who have an agenda, but he'll make that decision with his lawyer, who is a gamer.
Oh my gossip! Total tea leaf speculation but the only one I could see people trying to apply pressure towards would be ORC, and I don't know if that's the right licence for this game.
Chiming in because this tickled my argument buttons, but it can also be because your game is about being heroic that you have to face those sorts of challenges.
I'd kind be inclined to ask you to name even a single RPG that really makes facing those sort of challenges feel "heroic"
in the MCDM sense (defined on the KS page in a screenshot, note) in this sense rather than "survival"-y. I mean that in a friendly way, it's fine if you can't. It's just I can't think of a single one off hand. Certainly no edition of D&D or Pathfinder does (particularly as magic makes a joke of most these problems after above level 5 to 8). I feel like you're maybe on the precipice of just starting to use "heroic" to mean real-world "heroism" (i.e. 127 Hours, climbing Everest without oxygen, etc.) not what's meant here by "heroic". Which would be a bit off in this case. That's the sort of stuff that leads to 10ft pole-ery being called "heroic"!
I'd actually love to see an RPG which had these kind of challenges evoke action-adventure movies like Indiana Jones or Romancing the Stone or videogames like Uncharted or the like, but I genuinely cannot think of one that does. Maybe some PtbA one? I could believe that.
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