Patreon
I am now a ‘creator’ on Patreon.
If you don’t know, Patreon is a website for creators to keep in touch with their fans, and the fans can support artists by offering money. There’s a variety of ways this can work, with flat monthly charges, per-piece of work done, etc. This is meant as something of a ‘grass-roots’ version of the art patronage system that existed through much of history in Western civilization; though today it might be easier to see as a variation of the Kickstarter idea. Two of my roommates, Smudge and Baron, are currently partially earning a living through Patreon.
What am I doing on Patreon? I’ve been aware for a while that I have a few people following my various detailed game AARs. Which is very heartening; it’s always nice to be appreciated. But, doing those reports isn’t easy or quick. Not only do I spend a good amount of time writing up the description (I’m not a very fast writer), but I’m stepping through the entire set of Vassal logs to generate that description, and I’m going into Photoshop to create all the maps that show how everything went each turn. It takes a few hours to put together one of those AARs for a short game.
So, I am hoping that a few people like my writing enough to compensate me for my time and give me a buck or two every time I post one of the big, detailed ones.
What does this mean for this blog, and BGG (where I also post these)? Nothing.
Nothing will change. Nothing will be held back, or held behind a pay wall, or delayed. Game posts will still be here, and be cross-posted to BGG, and to Patreon. I am just hoping for some purely voluntary encouragement for me to keep doing this (and possibly do it more) by means of a financial ‘thank you’. Consider this: if you bought a magazine with an article like one of my AARs in it, would you think that was a good buy? If so, then consider funding my posts.
My hope would have been that I could charge people by category, so the ASL fans could just pay for the ASL reports, and the SFB fans for SFB, but Patreon isn’t set up for that. So, if you decide to subscribe, keep in mind that the bulk of the reports will be for ASL, with occasional charges for SFB, and Up Front (and hopefully a few other games), and set your rate accordingly (which I believe can go as low as $0.05 per post).
Finally, I will note that if you have a login at Patreon, you can just ‘Follow’ me for no money, and still get an email every time I post there (from what I’ve seen, the images don’t come through in the email, but at least there’ll be a link to follow, and you’ll know there’s something to see). I will be putting my face-to-face and other adventures in there, so they’ll be part of the email feed though no one will get charged money for them.
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