D20 Games

Ok.. I'm putting my (little) $$ where my heart is. Today is the 4th and I know the desire to just have a break form all this being trapped in doors and being told to wear masks all the time is enormous. It is the 4th of July and time for celebrating freedom! So I'm gonna celebrate those of you that are smart, wise and kind enough to realize that wearing masks are the coolest thing ever to do. [ 616 more words ] https://www.d20alameda.com//d20-prizes-for-wearing-mask-o/

We get to open D20 back up, according to the state. But the guidelines and the science don't really agree. Doing curbside only is a pretty big hit to keep taking, but as much as I love games, I love you guys more, and I'm not gonna play games with your (or my) life.

We are closed till Friday...literally boarded up.

https://www.d20alameda.com//prerelease-in-pajamas-or-how-/

If you are anything like me, this is another one of those milestones that remind us of how things have changed. Usually our Magic prereases are a tribal gathering of folks who all share loving to play the same game. But like most things these days, we need to get a little more cleaver to find hidden stashes of fun. Enter the [ 460 more words ] https://www.d20alameda.com//prerelease-in-pajamas-or-how-/

We are sooo working on this.

Oh man, do I hope this works... I've been working all week to get the webstore online so we could do sales for Ikoria (yes the new Commander Decks too) in the middle of the duck and cover in place time.* So here's the deal. We are doing a combo of Curbside and Delivery when the stuff comes out on Friday mostly because we don't really know what the rules are gonna be on a day to day basis. [ 555 more words ] https://www.d20alameda.com///preoder-ikoria-online-really/

Who wants on the Ikoria curbside Prerelease list ($30 per kit) Or Booster box? ($120). We're working hard to get the online store up and running so we can have curbside delivery at the ready for May 15th. We will also be tossing in extra promos and other goodies for at home prize action. (gotta do something fun, right?)

my latest small business guy rant in which I ask for what I think the small retailers actually need...universal rent moratorium, leg-up not hand out style loans, and believe it or not, government thermometers?!?

https://medium.com//diary-of-a-mad-small-businessman-pt-2- For once..Please share this...there is a well intentioned set of things that are designed to help w...ith rent via deferral that are gonna lead too a big batch of bankruptcies in about 7-9 months. If we don't get some choices that end up with the pain getting shared a smaller amount now, it is going to be much worse later. . : . . ( ) By Ben Calica : "" (, ), ( ) ( ) . , , r. So I'm a small business (D20 Games), and I, like most of my counterparts, did the right thing and closed down to do our bit to try and keep as many people alive as possible. It is an unthinkable sacrifice that most of us made without a question because if someone came to us and said if we shut down for 3 months we could save our mom or dad's life, we'd do so in a heartbeat, and if that was true, how could we do any less for someone else's mom or dad or grandparent, etc. But now the wheel is turning to try and help us out, (since our going out of businesses will hurt a lot of others and, well, cause we need it), and I'm finding that some of the most important things that are being done are really not "getting" it. Well intentioned as they are, they are more likely to kill us then save us, so I'm gonna try and lay it out with the aim of trying to explain what all of us small biz people can see to hopefully make things better. This came up yesterday during a Zoom town meeting , with people who are trying their best to save us but are actually setting up small businesses for an insidious failure, and am still smarting because I (and most of the other small businesses on the call) don't think the gov't folks understand what is gonna happen here. ' (and Gift Certificates to illustrate) Let me lay this out as clearly as I can, hoping we can get this point through to the policy folks. (And ironically, this is the same problem with the efforts of many of our customers to buy gift certificates.) Actually, I'll start with using the gift certificates since that is easier, and if you get that, the problem with the rent deferrals becomes much more obvious. : In general, gift certificates are an amazing thing for businesses. They are essentially free loans, that have the added bonus of "breakage" (i.e. all those that end up in the back of a desk drawer, unused are a gift to the business.). So why wouldn't they be the best thing ever as a chance for our customers to show they love us and keep us alive, by buying from us now, when we can't really do other business? Here's the thing. Once we are back up and running, we'll need all the business we can get, and our best sources are gonna be, well, you, our most loyal and loving customers. When you guys then show up proudly to cash in those gift certificates, our business is that much less at the time we really need you. Get it, gift certificates take business away from us later, when we are desperately in need of it to rebuildthey are borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today, when we are going to need every $ we can find to make tomorrow work. And that will happen at the time when we are no longer one of the big whales, stranded on the beach that everyone wants to come down and pitch in to help . ? So now we go to our very concerned, kind and well meaning friends at the city of Alameda. They have proposed a program where commercial rent during the shut down can be deferred, and then starting 30 days after we are allowed to open up, can be paid back over a 6 month period. It absolutely sounds great and comes from the best place. So why is it deadly? See here is the thing, when we (and I am shamelessly speaking for the majority of small retail businesses) open back up, it is gonna take a very long time for use to even get near our old business revenues from before the shut down. Any major shift like this, a move, a closure of any kind, hits small businesses like a sledgehammer and takes a while to rebuild from. And that is not taking into account the major shifts in how we do business because, well, the whole world is gonna change for a while, if not forever, and that is going to affect how we need to do business. So what do we do in-between when we get to open back up and a vaccine is widely distributed and effective. 6 months? We'll be lucky if we are able to get our adaptation of business back up to a decent point within a year. And the LAST thing we need is what is functionally a 2550% rate increase in the 7 months following getting a chance to open back up again to pay back the time when we had rent and no significant income. And make no mistake, deferments are pushing off big bubbles of payments on to the backs of businesses that will be struggling to pay their basic bills and keep people on payroll. What is gonna end up happening, is that we will all grab for whatever lifelines we can to have our business survive, even with this dread sitting in our bellies knowing that this payment later will probably take us down. Because the other choice is to go out of business now. When I think about this deferment, which may be our only choice, it makes my stomach turn to ice, because I can see myself in 8 months, with a bill the size of a quarter of a years rent, and it will be so far beyond my ability to pay that I will need to actually go personally bankrupt. If this sounds like exaggeration, it's not. I'd be taking the risk that I can bring my revenues not just to where they were last year, but somehow find that extra money at the same time. And at that point, no bail out, no guarantees, no attention. This deferment is putting me in the position to bet myself on my ability to succeed in the face of one of the great unpredictable shifts in the world's economy of the last century. That sound fun to you? Without intending it, this is ending up as the loan sharks deal, not because of the added cost, but because our ability to earn is so reduced that we're gonna be asked to pay later for a cost we have no way to earn enough to pay. When I brought up this point at our virtual town hall (writing the question in a shared Zoom chat), it was the only one of those questions that got a flurry of "I agree" comments from the rest of us, because as small biz owners, we could clearly see that future, even if it wasn't obvious to those trying to help.) Let me be clear.I'm not trying to give crap to those who are trying to help. We appreciate the effort and frankly, need everything we can get. But you need to know which of the policies will really help us, and which ones are kicking the can down the road to having us die in 7 months, when no one is really watching, rather then now when a good idea has a real chance to get approved. : There is an old cliche about many hands making light work. There is a corollary here, if we can all share some of this burden of pain, we will be much more likely to all survive. And for small business owners, rent is usually the main fixed cost that could drag us down so it is super important. If I ruled the world (or sat in the egg shaped room), what I'd do is declare a moratorium on rent that included mortgages to banks for anyone making less then enough money that they'll be ok through this regardless, including folks who rent to small businesses, and then make sure the banks were ok without that income for 6 months or a year. (and create a fund to pay for individual landlords who owned their properties and were using that rent as their main income to survivedon't want the folks who are using the rent of grandmas's house to pay for her hospice care getting hurt here.) Short of that, we need some method of sharing the burden a bit everywhere down the line. Reduce the amount of cost to the banks of reducing mortgages by 20%, they then reduced mortgage that landlords have to pay by, say 40%, they then reduce the rent to be payed by 60%. Obviously I'm using my nonexistent economics degree to pull these numbers from, shall we say, a dark cave, but the concept is the most important thing. Each of us need to take as big a hit that we can survive. And for anyone who thinks this is too much, from the govt, to the banks to the landlords, let me remind you of choice B. , we go out of business, you are looking at between 2 months and at this point looking at the new small business world for the next while, probably at least a year to two years of vacancy of your properties. Banks, how much less expensive is this to the number of loan defaults that happen to those landlords who have a ton of empty spaces unrented. (Maybe our safety net for the banks make math not equal logic anymore, so then this falls to some blend of legislation and human friggin decency). And for , well you know the cost of reduction in revenues from business, plus the people we employ, plus the cost of crime, etc. The way we all make it through this is if we all take a hit, and it is gonna be a big, painful one, but in doing so, we all survive and can slowly rebuild. If not, we're gonna take a cascade of much bigger blows that will take much longer to recover from,and be unrecoverable to a lot of us. I know for a lot of municipalities, they have a limit in what they can legislated that landlords do, much less banks. But even a publicly stated request/suggestion can help a lot. Just asking us to "talk to our landlords" is not a great solution. They are not getting any relief on their part, and to ask them to take the hit that we all need to take is pretty damaging to the relationship with that landlord. When we all needed to tighten our belts during WWII, it wasn't us needing to tell our neighbors that they had to ration their sugar, it was a shared burden we all were asked to share, and that makes all the difference. So to any body with any power that reads thisHELP! And be careful about what form that help takes. We can tell you, and are happy to talk, but the "walk a mile in our shoes" is easy. Imagine that the dimmer switch for public safety is the same for us, and in fact, more delayed from the time we open till the time we recover, and ask yourself what would added pay back do to use during that point in time. We'll do our share, we've already shown that, we just need help in getting the next part shared so we can survive this. I don't usually ask, but please share this, and if you are a small biz and agree, say so, so this becomes more than my uncanny ability to predict the future transformed into my undesired ability to sit mumbling to myself about "knew ittold 'em so" while wondering if I can make unemployment stretch to social security. (I'm just kiddingI'm a small business ownerwe're not eligible for unemployment.) Finally, for those of you that are helping your local businesses out by buying , great, and great intention, but do me (us) a big favor. Stick those suckers in that drawer for a year or two, or give them to someone that you know wouldn't otherwise do business with us, or just happen to lose 'em. We love you and appreciate you, and are gonna need your business for the next year as much, if not more then right now. Take care of yourselves and make sure you are gonna be ok, because we will do better if you survive this too. And if you have enough left over after you do that to help support us, that is gonna be the true magic to our survival through all this. The unintended consequence of all this is us deconstructing our world and assumptions about what is really important to each of us in the long term, and getting a chance to put that together differently. If there are particular small businesses that you want to make sure is part of that new world, we are here and as much as many of us hate asking for it, we need the helping hands, and will make sure we offer ours out to others in return.