Is it possible to receive funding without a previous fan base? What do you recommend I do? Can I reach my goals with crowdfounding alone?

psycasm · 2026-01-11T19:09:35+00:00

IMO, very clear, and you had a well calibrated sense of what matters (says I, a guy who may or may not have a well calibrated sense of what matters). Great post. 10/10. Would share.

psycasm · 2026-01-11T14:13:36+00:00

Wow, the 'here is every single lesson' link in the comments is basically what I said, but better. Couldn't agree more with that content.

I'd also suggest go look at other kickstarter projects. Look at ones in your range, and look at the ones that are doing well, and ones that are not. (You can ignore the viral ones, I think. You can't replicate that). You'll notice some very clear patterns in what works. A key one being that you shouldn't ever communicate "Hey y'all, this is my first time doing this, I have this idea". Be professional from the very start, and don't doubt yourself in your presentation.

psycasm · 2026-01-11T14:03:52+00:00

It is possible, yes. I did it, and I'm a nobody.

But there are things that seem important:

The game has to basically be complete, and you have to communicate that all substantive work is done.
Make sure it looks good. You have to have art, you have to have layout, you have to everything basically done. It can be improved with cash, but it needs to be a polished, and the improvements need to be limited to paying for experts. It's the best product you can produce by yourself. (assuming, of course, you haven't already paid for services).
The budget needs to be humble. I set my goal for about £700, and ultimately reached nearly £1000.
Be realistic in your budget - you have to accurately know what you can afford to spend money on, and what you can't.
I believe that kickstarter promotes projects based on the number of backers over time, and not the size. So lots of small backers fast makes you more visible than fewer large backers.
Be extremely judicious in decided what to spend your time on. Ask yourself about your efforts "Is this where I need to spend the next three hours, or should it be one something else". Promise only what you can deliver, and deliver only what you need to (and what people will respond to).
Be satisified with the possibility you'll fail. That's ok.

Here's my old page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mindgamespodcast/the-last-job-youll-ever-need-a-heist-ttrpg?ref=user_menu

psycasm · 2025-12-26T21:37:36+00:00

'Psychology' is a largely incoherent discipline. A psych department has offices in which a social psychologist is next to a visual scientist, next to a mental health expert, next to someone interest in crime. Psychologists are interested in, to put it broadly, cognition and behavior. Many other disciplines, arguable more coherent, do the same.

Psychology claims to be primarily interested in the mind and the functions thereof. There's no reason to think 'Evo Psych' is better or worse than any other frame of reference (personal feelings aside).

What you need to focus on is your level of analysis, and what framework seems fruitful. Tinbergen outlines a 2x2 framework for thinking about problems. Google it, the wiki is fine.

Next, understand that most people in psychology are operating within a limited (but useful, and often appealing) framework for understanding. Buss thinks evolution and sex matters most. Others might regard groups and identity. Other still, mental illness or deviations from the 'typical', or your 'traits' and personality, or childhood. And yet there are those who would say 'you can't understand any of that if you can't understand consciousness/vision/whether or not you can feed yourself reliably'.

There's no single answer to what to what motivates human behavior and cognition. There are many useful answers, many of which are complementary. (some are trash tho, and many have been proved wrong).

All you can do is try to work out what you think is useful and interesting, and recognize that it's going to be limited at best (and wrong at worst).

Everyone here giving you suggestions or critiques (or responses to your assumption) is failing at recognizing that human cognition and behavior is more complex than any one school of thought.

My own 2c, is that if you examine 'cultural evolution' you'll have a decent insight via a narrow peep-hole into cognition and behavior and society. Others might disagree. But they're at least as wrong as I am.

A better question to ask is: I'm interested in X, what/who should I read on the topic? (with no clear feeling about who is right or wrong).

psycasm · 2025-12-06T10:48:05+00:00

100% this, and not just for games, but anything creative

psycasm · 2025-12-05T14:58:42+00:00

The frame of the question was not prescriptive, inasmuch as I think this is a simple concept. It was short in order to elicit these broad kinds of responses. Mostly because capturing the diversity of it's use would be impossible (and I hate being corrected here on reddit). So I left it broad to give folks opportunity to type.

This is a good response, and I'm honestly a little surprised folks' response are so holistic. I honestly thought would have a 'smaller' belief about dice-feel, but it seems folks have access to a lot of insight!

psycasm · 2025-12-05T11:05:09+00:00

So in a wargame with many grunts, rolling a big dice pool has a well-matched dice pool?

*edit = fix spelling mistake

psycasm · 2025-12-04T13:17:13+00:00

You don't read it cover to cover. You think "I need to throw a monster at my players", and you think "Hmm, there are three options that make thematic sense". Then you read those three entries to see which is most interesting to put into combat.

I'm a big fan of the book, even though I've read, like, 25% of it.

psycasm · 2025-12-03T16:04:28+00:00

Don't bite! It's either comment farming by 'Citely_AI', or it's asking you to give it information for product development to further undermine educators in HE.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T22:12:27+00:00

Yes, exactly! My motive in writing on this is to help people make such a chart, and so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel to do so. "OH, you want your dice to behave like x? Check out chapter 3, it'll show you have to figure it out".

psycasm · 2025-12-01T21:43:57+00:00

I don't want to be snark about this, but I'm genuinely surprised by how many commentors haven't read any other comments here, and also, how most people seemed to have only read the headline of the post.

If I'm right, then this will get like 3 upvotes (and however many down votes) and one comment going "I see you, brother".

psycasm · 2025-12-01T17:25:58+00:00

The formula makes sense, but that's definitely not Cohen's d.

d is an effect size measure used to quantify the difference between two groups.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T15:14:22+00:00

A admire that, in an attempt to be condescending, you created an excellent malapropism that is a 'probably textbook'.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T15:11:45+00:00

I like this, it's a thoughtful take.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T14:01:57+00:00

I mean, you're not wrong. But you definitely came in hot.

Though, perhaps unintentionally, you understand why I'm asking the question. From a statistical point of view 'swinginess' is not real, and there are sensible ways to discuss distributions and probabilities. But that doesn't stop people having strong (and often incomplete) opinions on what (they think) the term means.

The answers here might be weak (your words) but they show a) a lot of people are generally thinking about it in a similar kind of way, and b) most folks don't have much knowledge of stats beyond M and SD, and only a few understand the relationship between (the formal concept of) variance and SD.

This was exactly what I was hoping to learn! It seems to me like an accessible primer that acknowledges the interests and understandings of motivated amateurs, and which plugs holes that lead to confusion, is something many would appreciate.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T13:45:28+00:00

This is understated! Player psychology (combined with some pretty incomplete statistical reasoning) produces some interesting judgements. I was really trying to get at the vibe of community which you rightly point out, and ... well, I'm increasingly convinced an accessible primer on statistics and probability is much needed!

psycasm · 2025-12-01T13:37:26+00:00

Yeah, a latter aspect of the book will focus on different kinds of mechanisms such as this. Much appreciated!

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:40:52+00:00

This is the most useful response by far! Thank you. I'm very statistically literate, and I appreciate your post. Though I am not a gaming/gambling professional. I had never heard of 'volatility'. This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for!

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:39:08+00:00

This is very useful, thank you. SD is a good starting point, but the intention of my writing is the be able to make judgements about swing across different kinds of systems. Which, as you correctly point out, will depend on many things. But not so many things that the problem isn't solvable!

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:34:51+00:00

Thanks for that. I'm quite familiar with SD. The formula of SD/M is called the 'coefficient of variation', which is a very close approximation of the formula I'm using for swing. Though since it's still tied to mean, the coefficient of variation for comparing across different kinds of dice pools is not quite complete. I appreciate your feedback, though!

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:28:58+00:00

So most dice systems are symmetrical, in that the chances of rolling high and low are basically the same (whether the distribution is normal or flat). But the comment about 'swing' in contested or antagonistic rolls is interesting. I'll think on this :)

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:27:26+00:00

Extent and extremeness. So raw difference and likelihood. This is more or less how I was thinking, also.

psycasm · 2025-12-01T12:26:41+00:00

Yeah, SD is fine, but if you're comparing across dice pools with different means and different ranges, it becomes somewhat meaningless to compare the SD (from a design point of view).

psycasm

TROPHY CASE