Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 01, 2025, 07:33:02 PM

Quote from: JanDevries on May 01, 2025, 05:56:41 PM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 01, 2025, 03:45:06 PMIt's not a dumb criticism. I have no personal beef with Fox, but let's face facts. He created a retro-clone of someone else's IP, and then went out of his way to prevent other people from pirating his partially-copied work. He's just not in a moral position to complain about Internet "piracy", when his precious game is a copy of someone else's IP.

And let me add that I have absolutely no moral objection (in general) to Internet piracy. Copyright law (as we currently know it) needs to die in a fire. It needs to be either abolished, or at least MASSIVELY REFORMED.

Furthermore, internet piracy is not theft, and it never will be. Copyright is currently used as a weapon to starve the public domain. IP should not be permitted to be auctioned off to third parties unto perpetuity. But that's the situation we have now.  Copyright does not protect creators, and it's not meant to. Instead, copyright protects giant multi-billion dollar corporations who purchase enormous amounts of copyrights (sucking them up like a giant Hoover vacuum cleaner), and then they use them to repress innovation for extremely long periods of time.

"Piracy is piracy", you say?

Good.

Because we need more piracy, not less. Just remember that the intellectual properties that we love are (usually) controlled by the worst people on Earth. Chew on that for a while.

LMAO what a massive pile of self-serving gibberish. Just say you're poor, it'll save time.

Quote from: shoplifter on May 01, 2025, 04:08:23 PMthe Trove was just about the only place that had many very old, out of print, and in ownership purgatory games. Those would very likely be lost to time outside the hundred copies left in the wild in many cases.

This isn't even close to being true. There are at least two places that have everything in the the Trove had, and they never went down. Not to mention, /tg/ on the chans is a bigger, faster, better organized and more frequently updated place to find everything, and also where the Trove usually gets all their shit, anyway.

Name one piece of media that was lost forever with the Trove. I'll wait.

Daniel Fox, is that you?

I'll let you in on a little secret, Danny.....and tell you that the multi-billion dollar mega-corporations and the ultra-giant asset management firms that fund them with billions (trillions actually!) of dollars of ESG investment capital....don't really need you to white knight on their behalf.

Why would you ever defend the idea of depraved billionaires buying up all the copyrights, for the purpose of repressing innovation? Help me here. Help me to understand your position on this issue. You do have a position here, right, Danny?

Are Daniel Fox and the depraved billionaires in the room with us now?

Just say you have no rebuttal, it'll save time.

Greetings!

All of the poor, broke fuckers that cry all the time about them wanting everything for free, or that they will just gleefully pirate whatever they can--geesus. Get a fucking life. Get a job, make some fucking money, and discipline yourself to becoming generous and gracious, instead of cheap, ungrateful, exploitive, and selfish.

All the poor fuckers are not *entitled* to a goddamn thing. You don't want to spend the money to actually buy a product properly? Whaah! Then you don't get JACK. You do without. You miss the fuck out, and suffer. Actual creators and producers should not suffer theft and BS crying from selfish, entitled, scummy people like these kinds of people.

"Why isn't the product free???!!"

"Why can't I pirate and STEAL whatever the fuck I want??!!"

"Why do I have to pay for a PDF??!!"

"The game books are too expensive!"

On and on. Get a fucking life, and learn to be generous and gracious, and honourable, instead of exploitive, entitled, and selfish.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Krazz on April 25, 2025, 02:55:43 PM

Quote from: Spobo on April 25, 2025, 02:28:18 PM

Quote from: JanDevries on April 25, 2025, 12:47:53 PM

Quote from: Spobo on April 25, 2025, 10:26:14 AMThey went hard woke pretty quickly, which you can see with the dedicated LGBT supplement and the Flames of Freedom spinoff game that does a Hamilton-like pozzing of the American revolution.

No question that Zweihander is woke but the LGBT supplement is a third party product

I think it is official, it's published through their page on drivethru. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/331633/lgbt-in-a-grim-and-perilous-world-supplement-for-zweihander-rpg?

Wow, $10 for a 20 page pdf that doesn't have a single rule in it (don't worry, I just read the free preview rather than give them money). The author even says, "I am not an expert in LGBT history or culture". At that price, an expert should have hired. But it seems this is published by someone called Gwen Bloodmoon rather than Zweihander Games.

It's not even a game supplement, it's literally an essay and called that in the credits. As for the author, in their own words...

"Gwynevere Bloodmoon (She/Its) is a freelance writer and editor currently developing its own game."

"Author, Freelance Writer and Editor, and Hellenic Polytheist. Trans femme deergirl with she/its pronouns."

...it's all but satire at this point.

Zweihenderdev singlehandedly destroyed the ability to access not only out of print and nearly unfindable media, but also the ability to acquire good things made by the wokeified companies without continuing to fund the woke agenda, including the corpo-wokes pushing it especially hard.

All for a shitty ripoff of WHFRP.

Quote from: JanDevries on April 26, 2025, 02:13:34 PMIt's no more or less "stolen" than any other retroclone. There are valid criticisms of Zweihander and its creator to be made. This isn't one of them.

This would go over better had you not posted the tired Vance couch meme earlier in the thread.

Fox was an asshat in almost every encounter I saw with him online. That's enough for me to disregard his books. I had zero clue about his politics.

Theft is when I sneak into your house and take your book. You no longer have your book. I have it instead.

IP-theft is when I sneak into your office and copy your book, then sell the copy. Probably for less money to undercut you, because I'm not trying to recoup development costs. You still have your IP, but it has lower value because I'm selling a clone.

Piracy is when you make a copy of your book and give it to me. Both of us have the book, and neither of us are profiting from someone else's work.

These three things are not the same, and anyone claiming they are is arguing in bad faith. They're similar, certainly, but they're not the same. The difference between them matters a great deal.

An author has a legitimate interest in profiting from their work. The customer has a legitimate interest in the usability of the product. The author wants to make as much money as possible, and the consumer wants to pay as little money as possible. Both interests are legitimate. The problem with the "theft" argument is that it ignores the legitimate interest of the customer in the free use of the product that they paid for. The more you attempt to control for customers making copies and distributing to their friends, the more you restrict the use and utility of the product, and the price for that lower utility product is invariably higher as well.

The end result of this argument is manufacturers gating repair of their products behind licensing agreements in an attempt to force customers to buy new units rather than repairing existing units. The same legal reasoning behind software piracy is used to justify withholding service manuals from maintenance and repair outfits. Frankly, I'm not interested in making it harder for auto mechanics and computer repair shops to operate just so someone can act morally superior on the internet.

I got Fever Knights because it is probably the most original offering which isn't shamelessly based on something else,somehow actually less DEI-influenced than all their other products, and Daniel wasn't directly involved with it to my knowledge. Neat art and layout, but I really haven't dug into it much. The creator has a reputation of harming archival efforts of tabletop RPGs, even ones out of print, and took all the credit for taking down a popular site while simultaneously condoning the use of 'proper' sites to pirate out-of-print RPGs. Makes no sense to me, but this is the guy who took Warhammer Fantasy and called it his own so it's not like ethics are his first priority.

Quote from: Corolinth on May 07, 2025, 02:24:02 PMPiracy is when you make a copy of your book and give it to me.

Tell that to a guy in a boat ramming other boats. "No! You can't just make a copy of our treasures! That's PIRACY!"

At best, digital 'piracy' is copyright or patent infringement. The FBI labels it as piracy to make it sound more scary to the public. Reminder that Crunchyroll, Youtube, and countless other 'legit' sites started off as blatant 'piracy', with Google executives having their workers upload unlicensed songs on the clock to boost use of the site back when Google first merged with Youtube.

Quote from: SHARK on May 01, 2025, 08:56:13 PMGreetings!

All of the poor, broke fuckers that cry all the time about them wanting everything for free, or that they will just gleefully pirate whatever they can--geesus. Get a fucking life. Get a job, make some fucking money, and discipline yourself to becoming generous and gracious, instead of cheap, ungrateful, exploitive, and selfish.

All the poor fuckers are not *entitled* to a goddamn thing. You don't want to spend the money to actually buy a product properly? Whaah! Then you don't get JACK. You do without. You miss the fuck out, and suffer. Actual creators and producers should not suffer theft and BS crying from selfish, entitled, scummy people like these kinds of people.

"Why isn't the product free???!!"

"Why can't I pirate and STEAL whatever the fuck I want??!!"

"Why do I have to pay for a PDF??!!"

"The game books are too expensive!"

On and on. Get a fucking life, and learn to be generous and gracious, and honourable, instead of exploitive, entitled, and selfish.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

The nice part about piracy is if a product looks interesting, but the creator's retarded well...

Quote from: D-ko on May 07, 2025, 02:26:35 PMI got Fever Knights because it is probably the most original offering which isn't shamelessly based on something else,somehow actually less DEI-influenced than all their other products, and Daniel wasn't directly involved with it to my knowledge. Neat art and layout, but I really haven't dug into it much. The creator has a reputation of harming archival efforts of tabletop RPGs, even ones out of print, and took all the credit for taking down a popular site while simultaneously condoning the use of 'proper' sites to pirate out-of-print RPGs. Makes no sense to me, but this is the guy who took Warhammer Fantasy and called it his own so it's not like ethics are his first priority.

Quote from: JanDevries on May 01, 2025, 07:50:52 PM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 01, 2025, 07:33:02 PM

Quote from: JanDevries on May 01, 2025, 05:56:41 PM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 01, 2025, 03:45:06 PMIt's not a dumb criticism. I have no personal beef with Fox, but let's face facts. He created a retro-clone of someone else's IP, and then went out of his way to prevent other people from pirating his partially-copied work. He's just not in a moral position to complain about Internet "piracy", when his precious game is a copy of someone else's IP.

And let me add that I have absolutely no moral objection (in general) to Internet piracy. Copyright law (as we currently know it) needs to die in a fire. It needs to be either abolished, or at least MASSIVELY REFORMED.

Furthermore, internet piracy is not theft, and it never will be. Copyright is currently used as a weapon to starve the public domain. IP should not be permitted to be auctioned off to third parties unto perpetuity. But that's the situation we have now.  Copyright does not protect creators, and it's not meant to. Instead, copyright protects giant multi-billion dollar corporations who purchase enormous amounts of copyrights (sucking them up like a giant Hoover vacuum cleaner), and then they use them to repress innovation for extremely long periods of time.

"Piracy is piracy", you say?

Good.

Because we need more piracy, not less. Just remember that the intellectual properties that we love are (usually) controlled by the worst people on Earth. Chew on that for a while.

LMAO what a massive pile of self-serving gibberish. Just say you're poor, it'll save time.

Quote from: shoplifter on May 01, 2025, 04:08:23 PMthe Trove was just about the only place that had many very old, out of print, and in ownership purgatory games. Those would very likely be lost to time outside the hundred copies left in the wild in many cases.

This isn't even close to being true. There are at least two places that have everything in the the Trove had, and they never went down. Not to mention, /tg/ on the chans is a bigger, faster, better organized and more frequently updated place to find everything, and also where the Trove usually gets all their shit, anyway.

Name one piece of media that was lost forever with the Trove. I'll wait.

Daniel Fox, is that you?

I'll let you in on a little secret, Danny.....and tell you that the multi-billion dollar mega-corporations and the ultra-giant asset management firms that fund them with billions (trillions actually!) of dollars of ESG investment capital....don't really need you to white knight on their behalf.

Why would you ever defend the idea of depraved billionaires buying up all the copyrights, for the purpose of repressing innovation? Help me here. Help me to understand your position on this issue. You do have a position here, right, Danny?

Are Daniel Fox and the depraved billionaires in the room with us now?

Just say you have no rebuttal, it'll save time.

I gave you my rebuttal, but you ignored it.

My assertion is that copyright laws are deliberately designed to benefit billionaires who control corporations, and not the small IP owner. But you can prove me wrong. Maybe. Just make your own rebuttal. I can make no promises that I'll listen or agree, but I'll at least try to be open-minded....if you make arguments in good faith.

In any case, Daniel Fox created a retro-clone of a game. He functionally created an imperfect copy of a game. Then he tried to prevent people from downloading a copy of his imperfect copy of a game.

And that's weird.

Question: Did Daniel Fox create his own new campaign setting (while re-using WFRP 2e game mechanics) when publishing the Zweihander rpg, or is Zweihander just another version of Warhammer....but with the serial numbers filed off? That might be relevant.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 08, 2025, 10:59:43 AMIn any case, Daniel Fox created a retro-clone of a game. He functionally created an imperfect copy of a game. Then he tried to prevent people from downloading a copy of his imperfect copy of a game without paying for it.

And that's weird perfectly normal.

FTFY

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 08, 2025, 11:03:49 AM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 08, 2025, 10:59:43 AMIn any case, Daniel Fox created a retro-clone of a game. He functionally created an imperfect copy of a game. Then he tried to prevent people from downloading a copy of his imperfect copy of a game without paying for it.

And that's weird perfectly normal.

FTFY

Ok. It might be "perfectly normal", but "normal" or not.....it's still weird.

Hey! I have an idea.

Perhaps I should create a retro-clone of the Zweihander rpg, which is already a retro-clone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Then I'll hunt down the people who illegally download it. Yeah! I'll hunt down the people who are downloading (illegally, and without paying for it!) copies of an imperfect copy of another imperfect copy of a game that is owned by a multi-billion dollar corporation that is receiving ESG investment capital from trillion dollar giant asset management firms.

And then later on, someone else can create a retro-clone of my retro-clone, which is a retro-clone of Daniel Fox's retro-clone. By the way, I don't know where I'm going with all this...

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 08, 2025, 11:19:22 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 08, 2025, 11:03:49 AM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on May 08, 2025, 10:59:43 AMIn any case, Daniel Fox created a retro-clone of a game. He functionally created an imperfect copy of a game. Then he tried to prevent people from downloading a copy of his imperfect copy of a game without paying for it.

And that's weird perfectly normal.

FTFY

Ok. It might be "perfectly normal", but "normal" or not.....it's still weird.

Hey! I have an idea.

Perhaps I should create a retro-clone of the Zweihander rpg, which is already a retro-clone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Then I'll hunt down the people who illegally download it. Yeah! I'll hunt down the people who are downloading (illegally, and without paying for it!) copies of an imperfect copy of another imperfect copy of a game that is owned by a multi-billion dollar corporation that is receiving ESG investment capital from trillion dollar giant asset management firms.

And then later on, someone else can create a retro-clone of my retro-clone, which is a retro-clone of Daniel Fox's retro-clone. By the way, I don't know where I'm going with all this...

Did he hunt down people, or just work to shut down a site that illegally shared the files? If the latter, then that's not too unusual either.

Quote from: SHARK on May 01, 2025, 08:56:13 PMGreetings!

All of the poor, broke fuckers that cry all the time about them wanting everything for free, or that they will just gleefully pirate whatever they can--geesus. Get a fucking life. Get a job, make some fucking money, and discipline yourself to becoming generous and gracious, instead of cheap, ungrateful, exploitive, and selfish.

All the poor fuckers are not *entitled* to a goddamn thing. You don't want to spend the money to actually buy a product properly? Whaah! Then you don't get JACK. You do without. You miss the fuck out, and suffer. Actual creators and producers should not suffer theft and BS crying from selfish, entitled, scummy people like these kinds of people.

"Why isn't the product free???!!"

"Why can't I pirate and STEAL whatever the fuck I want??!!"

"Why do I have to pay for a PDF??!!"

"The game books are too expensive!"

On and on. Get a fucking life, and learn to be generous and gracious, and honourable, instead of exploitive, entitled, and selfish.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Good lord...

I actually agree (more or less) with SHARK on something.

It probably helps that no napalm use was encouraged.

It's kind of insane that where ever I go, the spirit of Danny Boy follows. Shark formats very similar to Daniel Fox. Anyway-- I swear I've never pirated anything related to Zweihander because I honestly had little interest. Again, Fever Knights looks neat enough and I own a physical copy of that. I'm okay with chopping up Warhammer Fantasy to make an anime adventure system with heavy combat and playable characters with missing limbs-- that's honestly really neat and qualifies as original to me. I have no need for feminist rewritings of American history, pirates, or Warhammer though.