Mothership isn't your friend.
An interview with Sean McCoy, co-founder of Tuesday Knight Games
Hey Sean. I think for a lot of people in the TTRPG world, you need no introduction. But for everyone else, how would you introduce yourself, in this case within the context of RPGs?
I’m Sean McCoy, co-founder of Tuesday Knight Games along with Alan Gerding. We are mostly known for party games like Two Rooms and a Boom, World Championship Russian Roulette, and That’s Not Lemonade!, but these days I think we’re more known for our sci-fi horror roleplaying game, Mothership.
Mothership 1e was officially one of the biggest indie sensations on Kickstarter in 2021, but the game had been released for free years before that. But where did the game start for you? Was it an itch that needed to be scratched or a solution to a problem you saw in games of that genre or something else?
While we were exhibiting Two Rooms and a Boom at Origins in 2013, Donn Stroud introduced me to DCC RPG [Dungeon Crawl Classics]. I had been heavy into RPGs in high school and college but had fallen off for awhile. Donn was showing me how DCC was all the things I had loved about 3e D&D but simplified and with a lot more flavor. From here he got me into G+ and then the wider OSR. For the next year I devoured articles from OSR blogs and was just amazed at how many issues I had with D&D as a kid had been worked over on the internet: particularly issues with usability, layout and design. I really wanted to contribute, but I didn’t want to make another fantasy game or retro clone.
I started brainstorming other genres that could still fit into the OSR model. What I came up with was a game where you explored giant alien motherships, similar to the tent-pole megadungeons from old school D&D. Once I started pulling at that thread, the game came easy – sci-fi horror really was a natural fit to old school style gaming, and I started to realize that a lot of what I loved about OSR games tended to be their focus on D&D as more of a horror game rather than an adventure game.
You mentioned Tuesday Knight Games co-founder Alan Gerding (@AlanGerding) at the top. When did he come into the picture as the concept of Mothership started to coalesce and what were your respective contributions, both then and now?
Alan’s hands down one of the best game designers on the planet and his expertise is really invaluable. I had been working on Mothership as a personal project for a few months, starting with an initial playtest at Gen Con 2017, then a pocketmod – by Origins 2018 I had the initial draft of the Player’s Survival Guide ready to go, done almost entirely as a personal project.
I wasn’t sure we were even going to get into RPGs at the time because it was so far from our brand (light, happy, party games). However, we didn’t have anything new to bring to Origins that year, and so I asked Alan if I could print up 50 copies to bring to the show, just to show that there was something new going on at the booth.
He said absolutely and to my surprise we sold out the entire first print run at the show. Since then he’s been a dedicated playtester and developer, running an amazing home game, producing video content, doing podcasts, running public games at SHUX – I couldn’t have asked for a better business partner. He’s been crazy supportive and helped make the game so, so much better.
And if that’s not enough he started developing his own fantasy horror RPG, Father Fog, which started out heavily inspired by Mothership but has since evolved into its own amazing game. I’m super stoked for that one to come out.
I can only imagine what it’s like to have a great partner to share the workload of game development, production and marketing, not to mention community building. It would explain in part the immense success that Mothership has seen so far. For those who aspire to design an RPG and see anything like the success that you two have achieved, what would you say are the three most important principles to stick to from a business perspective?
So we have a couple things we try and stick to internally that come up pretty often:
Don’t wake up screwed. So this means doing our due-diligence, trying not to over extend ourselves, that kind of thing. Obviously you want to do this no matter what, but when a few different values are in conflict, we fall back on this.
Have fun. This is a job, it’s not always going to be fun all of the time, but if it’s never fun or we’re making decisions to make, say, games we don’t like because we think they’ll make money, then we’re at odds with what we want out of this.
Build a career. This one is more for me than for Alan who is a tenured psychology professor. This, again, may sound like a no-brainer, but the idea is that we’re in this for the long haul. We should be building a company that lasts.
Those are our sort of basic principles we established back when we started the company. Since then two things have come up that we rely on a lot to make decisions:
The 1-2-3 system. One is “I hate it,” three is “I love it,” two is “I can go either way, I don’t feel strongly.” We end up saying things like “I’m a two on this,” or “I gotta be honest, this is a three for me,” more than you’d think. But it helps to cut through the chatter and really get down to where we stand. Our hardest decisions are when one of us is a 3 and the other is a 1, which has come up maybe 2-3 times in the ten years we’ve been together.
Run towards ourselves. The more time you spend in the industry the more you see other people doing cool stuff and it’s natural to want to get in on that: work with hot new designers, go after every opportunity. But over time all that means is Alan and I aren’t getting to do what we want to do: design games. Some people are really good publishers and connectors and that’s their passion: finding cool games, designers, prototypes, and honing and developing those people and products. It’s definitely a road we could go down! But now we have to say no a lot. There’s only so much time and when neither of us wants to regret not designing and publishing our own games, the ones we came up with, rather than missing out on someone else’s cool new idea.
That’s a lot of great advice! I want to zero in on one aspect of the third item that you mentioned, “Build a career.” I was party to a very illuminating online exchange where you explained the basics of advertising for a Kickstarter. I wouldn’t want you to repeat all of that here, but could you summarize some of the key points on advertising for a Kickstarter for a creator who has either never considered it or is afraid of spending money on ads?
So the biggest thing is that I worked with Backerkit, it was expensive and worth every penny. You’ll need to be a certain size before this is viable, but it’s definitely something you should be aiming for. The lightning round version is:
Let me start by saying that if publishing is a hobby or a personal art for you, then you don’t need to know all of this. You just need to focus on your writing, your design, your artistic ability and put your stuff out there however you want. This is deep dive business type information and its absolutely not the bar to entry into this space/hobby. You don’t have to do that. You can just put your stuff up for free on a blog or itch or whatever. But if your goal is to publish as a career long term you will have to learn how to do this stuff at least at this level.
You need to start an e-mail list even if you aren’t sending out newsletters. E-mails are the golden thing. People keep an e-mail longer than they keep a physical address, an e-mail list is your list of customers, which is also a list of your demographics. Save this and build it as large as you can. It’s not just a tool for sending announcements, though it is that and that is important, it's literally like 80% of the data you have on your customers.
You’ll need to google/youtube/tiktok a term called ROAS which means Return on Ad Spend. Essentially it’s a number (like 1.5, 2, 9, etc.) that means “for every dollar I spend on ads, how many dollars in sales am I generating?” You’ll need to be able to set a break-even ROAS (what’s the LOWEST this number can be and I still make a profit). On the Mothership kickstarter we ended up having a ROAS 3.25 after all was said and done. That means for every dollar we spent we made $3.25. So if you spend $60,000 on ads that means you’re bringing in something like $195k of revenue.
To do all these calculations you’re going to need to figure out your product’s margins. There’s the actual printing cost, freight costs, as well as the art and development costs, paying royalties, all of that. And that’s before you slice off 50-60% for retail/wholesale/distribution. So what are some good numbers to start with? Here’s how I do it: Let’s say your product is $50, if that’s the case ballpark you need to have a 10x margin. That means it needs to cost 10x less to make the game than it does to sell it. So 50/10=5. So the most you can spend on this book is $5 a book. So from here you have to fit everything else in. Let’s plan for your least profitable market: retail/distribution. Retailers take 50% off MSRP and distribution takes another 10% usually. 40% of $50 is $20. See how your profit just dropped from $45 a game to $15? That’s why you need that 10x margin. Because that $15 also has to pay royalties (something like another 5% so now you’re down to $10 of profit) AND advertising and any other costs you want to include. Shipping is probably another $1.50 per unit on a container, so now you have $8.50 to play around with. Let’s say you need 5% contingency per unit in case of emergency, so that’s $2.50. So now you have $6 of profit on a $50 game. That’s not, uh, a lot! So how much of that $6 should you spend on marketing? That’s what ROAS is all about, setting that number with your marketer to determine exactly how much money you can spend on ads before you start to lose money. In a kickstarter this works because you’re paying for the print run and your game will be more profitable in the future once you have these costs nailed down.
Okay that’s the nitty gritty, the minor stuff is things like: you want a small, physical, free gift that you can gift to people who back in the first 48hrs. This period is the most important time in the lift of a crowdfunding campaign and you want your first couple of days to be as big as possible, because they will be the biggest days of your entire campaign and everything else will be a division of that. Everything behind the scenes goes off based on that early performance, so get those day 1 numbers up as high as you can go. Plan your stretch goals and don’t make up new ones in the middle of the campaign because you’re likely not thinking clearly and backers will ask for everything in the world without any idea how much work or time things cost and because they too are caught up in the momentum of the campaign and just want things to get bigger.
Okay, phew. Final thoughts: Ads obviously don’t “just work.” Your product has to be good, you need to know what about your product sells, what differentiates it from everything else. And there’s a substantial upfront cost. So start small. Build your e-mail list. Give away free demos. Go on podcasts, start your own podcast. Really ask yourself hard questions like: what am I providing to my customers and how am I doing it differently than everyone else? Start with a good product, a great product. The best one you can possibly build. Then start small, start with a newsletter and e-mail list announcing your new products. And build from there. When you’re bringing in $30k+ on a kickstarter/crowdfunding campaign talk to Backerkit or another reputable marketer about taking on the ads for you and go from there.
That was like getting the answers to the exam. Wow. So you guys have joined the recent upswing in boxed sets with the Mothership project. It turns out people love boxed sets (again)! But from the accounting that you have just described, offering physical products can get complex and leave you open to more costs. What are your thoughts on digital-only and print-on-demand RPG products, especially in light of Wizards of the Coast planning to pivot to more online-oriented gaming?
Overall, I’m bearish on digital only goods. I think it’s hard to compare what WotC is doing to what we’re doing primarily in that Wizards has been building online infrastructure for this kind of move for almost a decade now.
Dungeons & Dragons is a monopoly and the goal with monopolies is to build walled-garden type businesses. I see what they’re doing as a continuation of that process rather than as a predictor of what people actually want. I do think making your digital content more accessible, like the work Dai Shugars (@daishugars) excels at, is going to be more and more key for people going forward.
Additionally, D&D specifically became a generational game because physical books existed for people to pass down from generation to generation. I’m still collecting out-of-print Planescape modules to this day, an online only/digital only product effectively destroys that.
For now, the market we’re in, people want books, boxes, board games, card games. I’d like to expand into the digital space more and start talking to some indie video game developers about what a Mothership video game would look like, but that would be a very separate project.
Interesting point about the big corporate RPG not necessarily making things that people actually want; advertising and influencer media can bridge the gap between barely usable modules and people’s wallets. With regards to actually creating a game that people will enjoy out of the box (literally, and something WotC admittedly does do with their Starter box series), do you have any tips on how to structure a playtest workflow, whether it be a few playtesters or hundreds of them?
I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all approach, but I do think it’s something you need to think about and approach intentionally.
Most players when they think about playtesting are picturing big open beta style playtesting for MMORPGs, whether they realize it or not, that’s usually what they’re picturing. The purpose of these playtests is to find bugs and that kind of thing. Stuff that can only be found in massive games by throwing tons of players at it.
Additionally a lot of these large games need heavy number crunching playtesting because they have a lot of builds and dependencies that have to be brute forced to find the OP strategy and players are good at finding that because they make game breaking decisions that designers tend to steer away from.
For a game like ours it’s not the math that’s the problem: it’s the teaching. We need “blind” playtesters. People who have never played our game (or any game) before so that we can find out what’s confusing. What are they having a hard time learning. What’s interesting to to me about rpgs isn’t the stuff you can do in a computer game it’s the stuff you can’t do. The infinity of rpgs. That’s what I’m here for.
Beyond that we have a guy, Reece Carter, who runs our playtests. Just plays a lot with a lot of different groups and writes up what he changed where he made rulings. Where things fell flat. But the key here is I know Reece and I trust his taste. Playtesting won’t tell you if a game is good or bad. Only you know that. Playtesting is just raw data. Someone has to interpret that data and make it into something usable.
So my advice is run towards yourself. First and foremost play your game until it is your favorite game. And when it’s not ask yourself why and run there. Give your game to new players and find out where their sticking points are. Then make a judgement call and make the game you most want to play. If your game gets big enough you’ll tend to have more feedback than you know what to do with and the trick will be learning to turn that faucet off because everyone will want you to design a game FOR THEM specifically. But that’s not what they fell in love with. They fell in love with the game you made FOR YOU. So you have to stick to that or else you’ll end up nowhere.
You’re very fortunate to have someone like Reece to wrangle playtesting. I’m assuming he came from the Mothership community? In the past few weeks I’ve seen some creators in the RPG space stepping away from their own Discord servers, and in one case nuking it. These are fairly successful creators, too! Their chief complaint is that toxicity in their community ended up eating up their goodwill, as well as just the fact that participation consumed too much precious time. The Mothership community, including its Discord server, is relatively large and healthy. How have you handled both bad actors in the community as well as the time demands that nurturing a community can demand?
Reece is incredible! An amazing playtester and a good writer and designer in his own right. He wrote the pamphlet adventure Chromatic Transference for TKG (DrivethruRPG, TKG.com) as well as Dead in the Water (DrivethrRPG) which is an amazing ready-to-run 3pp adventure that you should check out if you’re interested in a derelict shipcrawl that you can drop into any game). Reece and I met when we were both judges for the ENnie awards a few years back and became fast friends. He’s been a big booster of Mothership and is one of the moderators on our discord. Just a phenomenal guy.
I think more and more we’re seeing the pitfalls and toxicity as fandom, and I think it’s tied to the “growth at any cost” mindset that a lot of companies and communities have. The idea is the bigger the community the more money and that’s all that matters and we can clean up the toxic elements later. But I think more and more people are coming into contact with what the toxicity of fandom means, particularly in Geek spaces. Star Wars, LotR, D&D, Marvel/DC, videogames, etc. All of these spaces are rife with toxic fanbases, which are getting more organized at manifesting their collective will and putting demands on the people who work on these properties.
We don’t have this figure out, but what we’re learning is online community moderation is a completely unique skill set that most people don’t possess. You have to be more confrontational than you would like, particular with seemingly harmless members.
A good example is just someone who is being annoying. They’re not technically breaking any rules but day in, day out they’re in the server being kind of annoying. Your initial reaction, like mine, would be that the space needs to be inclusive and that they’re not breaking any rules so it’s not hurting anyone. And you would be wrong! This person is making the server a worse place. People who are not annoying are silently leaving and you don’t notice. And before you know it you have a server of super annoying people, the channels are filled with off-topic chats and reaction memes and just in general low quality conversation. So what’s the solution? You have to say “hey you’re being annoying, please stop.” And then if they don’t you’ve got to kick them.
We had this utopian dream initially of an open server where everyone could just do their thing, but it turns out you actually have to confront a lot of bad behavior early on in a way you might not if you were just meeting someone for the first time in public. You’d put up with it and just try and avoid them in the future. But in the internet everyone is everywhere all the time.
So you have to ban more people for seemingly innocuous behavior to keep the healthy non-annoying members there. Then you have to actively work against the temptation to build a cult of personality, to create an extremely parasocial relationship. You’ll see creators all the time saying they love each and every one of their fans. Which is nonsense. But it builds this idea that the creators are your friends, that they know you. It’s great for business, but it’s bullshit and it creates toxic fans who don’t see themselves as “shilling for a corporation” but rather “fighting for their friends,” which helps them justify all the worst kinds of behavior. Mothership isn’t your friend, Mothership is a product that we sell to earn a living. We try to do a good job but at the end of the day it’s just a game.
I feel for the people who nuke their servers – game design is a different skill set than publishing or community moderation and I think people get into the business thinking oh they’ll just design games all day and if the games are good then that’s all that matters. But if you want to build a career out of this you’ll need a strategy for how you’re going to handle things like this, otherwise it’ll eat you alive.
Would you say that Mothership as a player experience could only be achieved through its particular flavor of science fiction? Or are there other genres that it could inhabit? And are there any plans to visit those genres?
So Mothership is firmly rooted in sci-fi horror, but that genre has some interesting overlaps that I’m hoping to explore prettt soon. The biggest crossover is cyberpunk, which is sci fi dystopia typically, which is just a stone’s throw from horror. So we’ve been working on a stand-alone setting/expansion of Mothership called Null.hack. Imagine if blade runner and alien were set in the same cinematic universe. That’s what we’re doing with Mothership and Null.hack. Same system with some genre tweaks, totally intercompatible, but built standalone for people who are looking for a great cyberpunk game.
Beyond that I also want to get into some more post-apocalyptic stuff. Not in a modern day sense but more in like a crashlanded civilization that ends up in Mad Max like territory. The space western essentially. Again I think that frontier survival in space is another hop skip and a jump away from sci fi horror.
So those are the two sub genres I’d like to expand into. Separately, Alan is continuing work on our fairy tale horror rpg Father Fog which I’m continually excited about. Different system but with some initial inspiration from Mothership. It should be a hit with fantasy fans. A lot of great stuff coming down the pope. I’m working on a paranormal investigation game called SPIRAL and a modern day crime game called Heist as well. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
I had no idea there were so many things in the works with you guys. That’s probably a good time to end the conversation for now, even though I could probably ask you a hundred more questions. We’ll save some stuff for next time! Thanks for chatting, Sean!
Always happy to chat, thank you!
FYI Sean told me they picked up another $320k in Backerkit late pledges for Mothership.
Here's the video I made showcasing the highlights of this interview: https://youtu.be/Bjz54UFjyPY