How Do You Plan to Use 4th Edition?

[Rainbow Six]

And since FL hasnt done polling of their own

So you don't actually know whether they've done any polling or not They may have done and have just chosen not to share their findings with you

(Yes I know they haven't and here's the proof or no I don't know will do fine if you want to reply).

As for polling on other sites, I think you should probably bear some of your own comments in mind

Keep in mind the long term FB T2K and discord groups are even more negative than that as to its reception as anyone who has been on them can attest.

FYI polling data and quality data evaluations are made with about that percentage of the overall population or less all the time and as long as they arent overly weighted one way or the other are scientifically valid.

So by your own admission these groups are even more negative, which presumably is the same as being weighted one way over the other so as such would not be scientifically valid

[Olefin]

So you don't actually know whether they've done any polling or not They may have done and have just chosen not to share their findings with you

(Yes I know they haven't and here's the proof or no I don't know will do fine if you want to reply).

As for polling on other sites, I think you should probably bear some of your own comments in mind





So by your own admission these groups are even more negative, which presumably is the same as being weighted one way over the other so as such would not be scientifically valid

The fact that I am on their email list as a buyer of the game, that no one who has bought the game has been posting that they have been asked to answer any poll and that no poll results have been mentioned anywhere by them shows they have not done such polling - i.e. between here, FB, FL's own site, the overall internet T2K community and the Discord there has been no discussion at all of any such poll being conducted.

Thus lacking any evidence at all of a poll being done shows no polls are being done. The community as a whole is pretty close knit - someone would have mentioned it by now - but there has been no mention.

And if the initial draft and Alpha and Beta leaked early than I highly doubt that a poll would be kept super secret that literally no one knows of one.

Thus using logical deduction no such poll, at this moment, exists.

As to the FB groups those groups have many more members than this group has and would offer a bigger sample for gathering data. Thus if the overall answer is negative it would show getting a bigger sample backs up the data that Raellus has gathered. Versus polling the Discord which I admit is highly negative - and thus would be better not polled.

And Tomas has his own FB group that is more positively inclined towards FL and its fans. Thus you get more data, a bigger sample and can see thru the "noise" and get a better appreciation for the actual situation.

Keep in mind for 8000 plus backers, if that is what you need to sample, then as little as 200 responses would give you a very valid sample size. For 140 or so posters here you are gathering data on what people, on this forum, think of the V4 and how they intend to use it.

What Raellus didnt ask and can ask again was of those who responded how many actually were part of the group that either backed the game or have otherwise seen it to date.

i.e. of the 45 have all of them seen it -either by backing it or otherwise seeing it If say only 30 have actually seen it and 15 are giving responses without seeing it then the sample size is much smaller.

FYI if you want to have a discussion on validity of sampling data maybe we need a thread for that - this thread is supposed to be a discussion of how you would use the V4, not about sampling methods and validity and I dont want to be accused of jumping a thread.

[Tegyrius]

According to the Kickstarter website Free League got 8,073 backers.

Not bad for what is basically a non-OSR appeal to nostalgia.

According to GDW's own production figures:

1e boxed set: 97,518 copies
2e core rulebook: 32,180 copies
2e boxed set: 5,240 copies
2.2 core rulebook: 7,757 copies

Don't quote me on this, but I want to say the print run for 2013 was 2,500 copies. PDF sales at the time 93GS closed up shop were Gold on DriveThruRPG, which put them between 501 and 1,000 copies; in the subsequent years, they've gone to Platinum, which I think is between 1,001 and 2,000 copies.

Bear in mind that those 8,073 backers are effectively pre-sales, a concept which didn't exist in the 1e/2e days - that's exclusive of the print run destined for the retail channel. We also don't know how many of those backers bought multiple copies as group purchases, gifts, or retail sales starters.

13 "ignore it completely" responses out of 42 poll responses is significant, but it's only a third of the responders here. You could also look at this as 2/3 of the responders here do plan to make some use of v4. The Discord is an echo chamber, so it's not representative of the wider T2k fanbase. Using the Discord subset to prove v4 will be a flop is like using the Free League forum membership to prove it will be a smash.

Regardless, as Rainbow Six pointed out, 13 out of over 8,000 KS backers is insignificant, statistically, so I don't know how accurate your predictive "analysis" is going to be.

Combining a statistically-insignificant sample with sampling bias is not a research method that would be defensible in my workplace. YMMV.

Some years ago, I rendered some advice to your correspondent. It seems an appropriate time to reiterate part of it:

It is an unfortunate geek tendency for individual fans or small local (or online) groups to project their own personal enthusiasm for a property onto the overall global population of potential customers, then make sweeping (and erroneous) generalizations about the commercial viability of their personal visions for said property. In some cases, this failed understanding goes so far as to drive catastrophically bad business decisions.

Intensity does not necessarily correlate to scale. In other words, being louder doesn't make anyone righter.

- C.

[unipus]

You'd have to be a pretty bad data scientist to think you could draw any truly useful conclusion from one poll on one fairly insignificant message board. It would be easy to make catastrophically bad missteps from doing so, though!

@Tegyrius - over what period of time are those sales figures Some of them are pretty damn interesting.


(I'd also say that FL games in general, this one included, do have a strong if slightly obscured OSR essence to them, but that's another topic.)

[Tegyrius]

@Tegyrius - over what period of time are those sales figures Some of them are pretty damn interesting.

I believe they're for the lifetime of the company.

(I'd also say that FL games in general, this one included, do have a strong if slightly obscured OSR essence to them, but that's another topic.)

Fair point. I can see it with some, particularly Symbaroum and Forbidden Lands.

- C.

[unipus]

They definitely leaned all the way into it with Forbidden Lands, which is a beautiful, beautiful book.

Lifetime numbers make more sense. I wonder what % of the 1st edition sales were in year one, versus up until the release of v2, or maybe even after!

[Olefin]

You'd have to be a pretty bad data scientist to think you could draw any truly useful conclusion from one poll on one fairly insignificant message board. It would be easy to make catastrophically bad missteps from doing so, though!

@Tegyrius - over what period of time are those sales figures Some of them are pretty damn interesting.


(I'd also say that FL games in general, this one included, do have a strong if slightly obscured OSR essence to them, but that's another topic.)

Dont agree with you about insignificant message board - that is not what the forum juhlin is. And you can use the poll as a data starting point - FYI keep in mind that polling company's project political trends for the entire country based on samples of a few thousand people. As I said there needs to be more polling done.

Also the kickstarter numbers only show interest in the new version of the game when it was initially pitched to raise money. The question that needs to be determined now - especially before it gets codified into book form - is did the kickstarter population get what they paid for

If the numbers here are indicative the answer is no.

That is why they need to do polling or have others do it on sites that have T2K players and fans who have seen the V4 and do it before they go to publication of the books.

PDF's are easy to change - I have done it, Raellus did it, etc. - that happens all the time on drivethrurpg.com releases - but its much harder to do it once you have printed books out there.

I know that for a fact - saw the fun one of my professors went thru in college having to send out corrections on a physics book he wrote that had three pages that had major errors on them that he had missed and another ten pages worth of minor corrections that were significant enough that they had to be fixed.

[Raellus]

Thread Creep

Dont agree with you about insignificant message board - that is not what the forum juhlin is. And you can use the poll as a data starting point - FYI keep in mind that polling company's project political trends for the entire country based on samples of a few thousand people.

And they often get it wrong (e.g. 2016 US presidential election projections, both before and even on election day).

As I said there needs to be more polling done.

Absolutely. I commend you on your efforts to collect more data.

Also the kickstarter numbers only show interest in the new version of the game when it was initially pitched to raise money. The question that needs to be determined now - especially before it gets codified into book form - is did the kickstarter population get what they paid for

Raw sales figures, and the poll here, aren't going to answer that question. To do so, you would have to specifically ask the KS backers, "did you get what you paid for"

If the numbers here are indicative the answer is no.

Not necessarily. There are a few reasons why someone might have supported the v4 KS. Some supporters clearly wanted a game they could play right out of the box. Others may have always intended just to mine it for bits to use with earlier versions. Others may be completists, who backed v4 because the want to add it to their T2k collection, regardless of whether they intend to play it or not. Some backers may have just been curious. Additionally, some backers might not have had any expectations, vis-a-vis earlier versions (i.e. they just liked what they saw). This is purely anecdotal, but I've heard each of the first three afore-mentioned reasons cited by different forum members (or former members) who backed the v4 KS.

So, to sum up, more, better (i.e. more specific) data is definitely needed if you want answers to the questions you've posed, Olefin. In all sincerity, I wish you luck in collecting it. Please let us know what you learn (preferably by sharing the raw data).

Let's moot this. The OP is about how members here plan to use v4 (or not). The thread is starting to drift OT.

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[unipus]

God help the company that bases anything they do on a poll of 50 people (who strongly exhibit a particular bias), that's the last I'll say on that.

To answer the question: I found out about FL's T2K acquisition around the same time I happened to be dusting off my old T2K books I found on the shelf anyway. It was the perfect timing. I was playing and enjoying another FL game at the time, but was considering running a T2K game with some of my military-minded friends.

The setting of the new edition lacks a bit of the detail and specificity of the old one, so far as some military aspects go. It's also a far cleaner system (as you might expect, with three decades of advancement to its advantage). I own all of the GDW editions (sorry, Tegyrius!) and, well, I don't find any of them particularly elegant or easy to run.

So as for what I plan to do/have been doing for months now: run a T2K game using a new, fairly elegant and easy to run system that also draws on all the resources and knowledge I have from 1st and 2nd editions. It's pretty ideal, really. The details I've thought they got wrong, I've changed or fixed. The systems I've felt aren't detailed enough, I've added on to a bit. It's ten times easier to add complexity to an elegant system than it is to find elegance in a complex one.

But I also can't remember a time I ran any game exactly RAW or in its 100% official setting. I call on external resources wherever I can find them. I use the 2.2 encounter generator. I use perchance tables. I use oracles inspired by Ironsworn (and hey, look what they did -- signed its creator to create similar material). I use 1st edition's motivation generator (and hey, look what they did -- implemented it in 4th edition). I'm currently finding the default day-by-day system of time and resource management tiresome, when you have to use it all the time, so I'm writing a system derived from Band of Blades that will generate missions at a higher level.

This is all stuff I assumed most if not all GMs did. Maybe I only talk to the ones who are also designers.

[Raellus]

Change of Plans

Thanks to whoever resurrected this poll thread. Now that 4e's been out for a few years, it's worth revisiting our initial plans.

Originally, I'd plan to just mine 4e for various bits to incorporate into the v2.2 rule set that I'd been using for a decade or so but I decided to give the 4e system a try and I'm really glad that I did. It's a lot less unwieldy to use than v2.2 and, for the most part, it doesn't lose any verisimilitude.

I now run my T2k using the 1e world history and the 4e rules.

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[Adm.Lee]

I now run my T2k using the 1e world history and the 4e rules.
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I did this for a 2- or 3-session game late in '21, though I made up my own variant of the Sweden invasion in the 1e timeline (posted elsewhere on this forum).

[Red Diamond]

RAW

I just do T2K 4e raw. That's even if I have time to game.