Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:29:14 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on August 20, 2023, 04:02:19 PM

The Adventures of Indiana Jones.

So, why can't  you play it?

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 20, 2023, 04:37:37 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:29:14 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on August 20, 2023, 04:02:19 PM

The Adventures of Indiana Jones.

So, why can't  you play it?

Would you like a link to an IQ enhancing product?

I personally have no interest in Digital D&D.

To be fair, I have no interest in tabletop D&D either, but even if I did, I still wouldn't want my experience turned into a half-hearted video game.

Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:42:07 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 20, 2023, 04:37:37 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:29:14 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on August 20, 2023, 04:02:19 PM

The Adventures of Indiana Jones.

So, why can't  you play it?

Would you like a link to an IQ enhancing product?

Dude, I don't hate you and I don't think anyone else here does but I really wish you could see how you come off to the rest of us sometimes.

Again, unless you've actually had an IP you like die, enter copyright jail and the community decline to nothing, then it's gonna be hard for you to understand why that experience is so upsetting. It's a lived experience that only a minority of people have.

Being able to pirate PDFs is irrelevant. To keep an IP alive, to build a community, you need to market it, produce books, sell books, write magazine articles, generally make a profit... this isn't rocket science. It's simple economics. If you still don't understand why I'm so upset, then please don't talk about topics you know nothing about. It's not helping.

Unless the IP you like is already public domain (like John Carter or Tarzan), then everyone who ever liked it will be dead of old age by the time the copyright expires. And by that time all the copies will have been lost to the material physically rotting or the hard drives crashing.

Also, most public domain IPs don't have communities because they're poison to corpos. The Boroughs Estate still has the trademarks to John Carter and Tarzan, but they still can't make those into profitable IPs because corpos refuse to invest in anything they can't own exclusively.

Here's an educational article about it: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/shrinking/

Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:42:07 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 20, 2023, 04:37:37 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 20, 2023, 04:29:14 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on August 20, 2023, 04:02:19 PM

The Adventures of Indiana Jones.

So, why can't  you play it?

Would you like a link to an IQ enhancing product?

No, thanks. I don't wanna have whatever it is that's making you go off on irrelevant tangents that have fuck to do with what people are actually talking about, and almost purposefully miss their point. This thread is derailed enough as it is.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 20, 2023, 07:20:43 PM
Again, unless you've actually had an IP you like die, enter copyright jail and the community decline to nothing, then it's gonna be hard for you to understand why that experience is so upsetting. It's a lived experience that only a minority of people have.

Being able to pirate PDFs is irrelevant. To keep an IP alive, to build a community, you need to market it, produce books, sell books, write magazine articles, generally make a profit... this isn't rocket science. It's simple economics. If you still don't understand why I'm so upset, then please don't talk about topics you know nothing about. It's not helping.

Unless the IP you like is already public domain (like John Carter or Tarzan), then everyone who ever liked it will be dead of old age by the time the copyright expires. And by that time all the copies will have been lost to the material physically rotting or the hard drives crashing.

Also, most public domain IPs don't have communities because they're poison to corpos. The Boroughs Estate still has the trademarks to John Carter and Tarzan, but they still can't make those into profitable IPs because corpos refuse to invest in anything they can't own exclusively.

Here's an educational article about it: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/shrinking/

Lets keep it to RPGs:

Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Alternity, Amazing Engine, d20 Modern/Future/Past... What exactly is it that you like about those? You can't have another game with the exact name and the same names for everything inside but you can have a game inspired by those, a spiritual succesor or retroclone. Heck Gamma World already has at least 5:

The Rad Hack, The Black Hack based
Mutant Crawl Classics
Mutant Future
Darwin's World
Barbarians of the Aftermath

Star Frontiers... Don't think it would be to hard to make a retroclone of it (if it doesn't already exist). I posted some stuff about reworking two of the races on my Guilded server.

Alternity... Never played it, if it's the one you were making stuff I don't think a retroclone is impossible.

Amazing Engine... Same as above.

D20 Modern/Future/Past... Again, not hard to make a retroclone if anyone wanted to.

John Carter an RPG already exists that's not from any big corpo, Warriors of the Red Planet, and it's excellent IMHO.

Tarzan... I'm not too sure Tarzan would work as an RPG, maybe as one of the PCs in a pulp RPG (Hint, I already made the class and work on the game continues).

Quote from: Scooter on August 19, 2023, 04:49:25 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 19, 2023, 12:31:32 PM

It's disappointing that all their IPs are being squandered, but that's a problem only copyright reform by the government will fix.

Their IP is not important.  I mean creators can make new settings.  Nothing they own cannot be replaced by something better.

Creation is hard, and has an element of serendipity. Popular IPs are popular for a reason, and there are legions of knock-off IPs, both good and bad, that lie dead in the ditch.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on August 21, 2023, 05:07:35 AM

Quote from: Scooter on August 19, 2023, 04:49:25 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 19, 2023, 12:31:32 PM

It's disappointing that all their IPs are being squandered, but that's a problem only copyright reform by the government will fix.

Their IP is not important.  I mean creators can make new settings.  Nothing they own cannot be replaced by something better.

Creation is hard, and has an element of serendipity. Popular IPs are popular for a reason, and there are legions of knock-off IPs, both good and bad, that lie dead in the ditch.

Exactly.

Creating a retroclone with the same functionality as one of those dead IPs is hard. Not only do you need to make an entire functional game with rules, setting, and advice/guidelines, but now you have the additional constraint of arbitrarily changing things to avoid being litigable for copyright infringement.

It doesn't matter if the IP has been dead for decades and the owner either has no idea they own it or has no intention of ever using it again. This is a complete perversion of copyright law's spirit. Copyright law was invented to protect authors from piracy for a fixed period of time, after which they would give their work to the public domain. The original period was 14 years. Disney lobbied for extensions multiple times, so now it lasts for a century at minimum. The problem with this is that it harms preservation efforts for all IPs that aren't being actively maintained by their owner. Physical copies rot. Digital copies are lost to server errors. After a century, even if copies have survived all the people who cared about the IP will be dead and unable to revive it.

Some publishers are extremely gracious and put their entire back catalogs on drivethrurpg indefinitely. But what happens when drivethrurpg suffers servers errors or whatnot? I've had several books get stuck in limbo because drivethrurpg locks them away due to bugs that never get fixed after years. This makes it impossible to easily share the PDFs because by doing so I open myself to litigation, and also I want to support the original author or indie company by paying them. I can't expect lone indie writers to constantly maintain their back catalogs in case something goes wrong. Most of them only made books briefly as a hobby decades ago and since then have real life concerns to deal with. They simply don't have any opportunity to fix bugs when bugs come up. So their work gets stuck in limbo because the employees at drivethrurpg refuse to fix the bugs themselves even though they're the only people available to do so because they're literally being paid to maintain the goddamn servers. Fixing bugs should be drivethrurpg's responsibility if the original authors aren't available. The author's consented to put their work on drivethrurpg, never demanded a takedown, so drivethrurpg should be free to fix bugs themselves. The author can get angry about it later, because the author still gets paid either way. It's fucking stupid that books the author put up for safe indefinitely arbitrarily get removed by drivethrurpg because of stupid reasons that the author simply can never resolve because they have a fucking life and can't be bothered to deal with maintaining PDFs from fucking decades ago!

This is why copyright lasting more than a decade or two is stupid. Unless they're J.K. Rowling or Brandon Sanderson, most authors make nothing from their work and don't give a fuck after the first decade. They have no responsibility to maintain their work. They don't own it for the next century or longer because they asked to, they had copyright forced upon them and most simply don't care to maintain ownership after more than a few years if they're not making bank. But by making it illegal to preserve their work after their lose interest, their work is doomed to be lost to time. Everyone dies eventually and you can't take your money with you, so the only thing of value in life is leaving a legacy after you die. But copyright arbitrarily burns books that aren't popular enough to be kept in print forever, so those authors are erased from history because they didn't have the foresight to release their work into the public domain.

Corpos are such tightfisted fuckwads that don't care to preserve the legacy of any of the writers whose work they own but are happy to sue anyone else who tries. Indie authors simply can't be bothered to maintain their work because they have fucking lives. So unless copyright is reformed sometime soon, then >99 of anything we can preserve will be destroyed and almost every writer and artist born since the 20th century will have wasted their lives.

Why should I have to make a retroclone of a perfectly functional IP on a fraction of the budget of the original? I can understand doing that for an IP that I have fundamental creative disagreements with (if you've known me for a while then you'll know exactly which IPs I think that about), but I'm not motivated to put in a ton of work I don't enjoy doing just to avoid litigation regarding an IP that I have zero criticism for. That's unfair and I resent the idiotic immoral anti-human circumstances that force it to be my only recourse.

Furthermore, TTRPGs IPs aren't the same as typical passive media IPs. The appeal comes from the worldbuilding and there generally aren't any recurring characters because the fun comes from the players making their own characters and going on adventures. So the detail goes into the worldbuilding. There is typically so much detail that trying to retroclone it is nigh-impossible. Trying to sanitize your clone of litigable elements ends up washing away most of the appeal for all but the most generic shallow IPs.

For example, Mutant Future is designed to be a generic post-apocalypse game. So it lacks signature elements of the Gamma World IP like the cryptic alliances. You can make a setting that takes place in the aftermath of nuclear war and has talking animal mutants with all sorts of bizarre superpowered mutations, but without a clear analog for the cryptic alliances it's not a spiritual successor. It's just a post-apocalyptic game. (Also, Gamma World's setting changed across editions, sometimes dramatically so. Do you pick one edition, or do you try to account for all of them? It's adding more to your work load.)

For more detailed or idiosyncratic settings the difficulty gets progressively worse. For most of these I can't even find loose analogs to the intended campaign structure, otherwise I wouldn't be complaining so much. And when I do find something (e.g. there's a handful of Star Frontiers-like games out there), they don't have anywhere near as much content as the original or really much resemblance at all besides being somewhere in the same genre. I remember finding a game somewhere that was similar to Star Frontiers, but it just didn't do it for me. None of the aliens were in the same ballpark, I don't think there was any mention of a space police force on the frontier... it was just "odd jobs in space", which is so generic that pretty much every space IP does that equally well.

At this point, I don't think Hasbro would care to sue a blatant ripoff that did the bare minimum of filing off serial numbers from an obscure decades old IP they inherited from one of their acquisitions. But I'm not filthy rich so I'm not willing to risk my livelihood on proving that. Some people might be willing to risk their careers on a ripoff of a dead IP, but not me.

Also, I just philosophically believe in having these works preserved for posterity. Internet piracy is an unreliable, illegal and just plain inconvenient workaround for an unjust law that opens you to litigation: it's not a solution, the solution is changing the goddam law. People only resort to piracy if they have no legal option, and statistics show that a legal option reduces piracy. We need to preserve our cultural works in a readily accessible form so that future creatives can see them and take inspiration. We've seen from experience with every creative industry that overly long copyright stifles creative innovation and renders the media landscape a homogenous low-quality gray mass.

Have you noticed that there's been zero genre-defining scifi franchises released since Star Trek and Star Wars? That those two IPs are orders of magnitude more popular and more detailed than any other scifi or scifi-adjacent IPs like Dune, 40k or Starship Troopers? Not to mention that their fandom wikis are professionally proofread and cited like an academic article rather than a scatter-brained mess of unsourced factually wrong incomplete gibberish that fails to keep track of vast swathes of the IP's releases? That's not a coincidence. It's because copyright prevents IPs from accumulating outside of corporate control, and since most IPs die in the cradle due to low profit the corpos aren't incentivized to do so themselves anyway. It's like trying to build a sandcastle, only for the tide to wash away your work and force you to start over again. You're physically incapable of building beyond a certain size because the tide imposes a hard limit.

TSR made Star*Drive in 1998 and by my estimation it was one of those IPs that would have similarly redefined the scifi genre if it wasn't strangled in its crib after just two years. In contrast to Star Trek and Star Wars, which are still firmly trapped in the technological zeitgeists of the eras in which they were created, Star*Drive incorporated scifi tropes invented afterwards that still haven't made a mark on the genre at large. It has multiple human stellar nations rather than one Federation or one Galactic Empire, whose ethos range across a spectrum only comparable to a 4X game like Alpha Centauri. It has Space Texas, Space Microsoft, Space Westworld, Space cyberpunk Russia, Space X-Men, etc. incorporated as basic facets of the setting as opposed to one-offs that only appear in one episode before being forgotten forever. It's humanocentric (humans dominated the thousand ly sphere around Earth because they invented the first FTL drive) but actually interrogates the politics of this: around 50 or so intelligent alien species have been reduced to client states of the human stellar nations that own the space around their home planets and this has huge effects on their cultures and self-determination. The mechalus (basically cyborg vulcans) see it as an opportunity to turn a new leaf after their accidental genocide of their sister species, the sesheyans (tribal multi-eyed bat people) were enslaved by Space Microsoft and are trying to emancipate themselves, the weren have political independence but their traditional culture is being eroded away by contact with humanity, etc. Then there's the Verge, a frontier region that was cut off for a century during the second galactic war that only ended a few years ago and the Space UN is trying to reconnect only to open cans of worms regarding colonialism... there's the Externals, a catch-all for every mysterious alien civilization that isn't a client state of humanity who are only seen in frontier space. Some of them are really hostile... oh, and in an ebook released at the exact end of the line it's revealed that there's an evil theocracy of Roswell grays who worship Cthulhu and have armies of space bugs.

I've spend years combing the scifi genre and Star*Drive is still unique. The individual pieces are not original, but holistically it's effing amazing and I'm really frustrated nobody else has taken up the torch. This is the problem with copyright jail.

Quote from: FingerRod on August 18, 2023, 11:10:38 PM

Quote from: Wisithir on August 18, 2023, 09:03:17 PM
The more Hasbro D&D diverges from an actual roleplaying game, the easier it will be to filter out Hasbroites at the table. Now one has to say "no 5e" to be rid of them, but soon "pen and paper only" will be enough. I cannot wait for video games with rpg element to finally divorce themselves from traditional roleplaying games.

Correct. They are making it extremely easy to back away from their product.

^^This^^

Quote from: Wisithir on August 18, 2023, 09:03:17 PM
The more Hasbro D&D diverges from an actual roleplaying game, the easier it will be to filter out Hasbroites at the table. Now one has to say "no 5e" to be rid of them, but soon "pen and paper only" will be enough. I cannot wait for video games with rpg element to finally divorce themselves from traditional roleplaying games.

   Hasbro D&D is a Brand first, a game second, and is swiftly moving towards recruitment venue for the Antichrist.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on August 21, 2023, 11:40:21 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on August 18, 2023, 09:03:17 PM
The more Hasbro D&D diverges from an actual roleplaying game, the easier it will be to filter out Hasbroites at the table. Now one has to say "no 5e" to be rid of them, but soon "pen and paper only" will be enough. I cannot wait for video games with rpg element to finally divorce themselves from traditional roleplaying games.

   Hasbro D&D is a Brand first, a game second, and is swiftly moving towards recruitment venue for the Antichrist.

Dude! You are giving the AntiChrist a bad name by claiming that!

Quote from: Exploderwizard on August 19, 2023, 08:09:57 PM
One important fact that I bet Hasbro didn't even stop to consider- WOTC has screwed the pooch on every single digital initiative that they have attempted.

DNDBeyond is awesome and has been for many years.

Quote from: Mistwell on August 21, 2023, 05:30:36 PM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on August 19, 2023, 08:09:57 PM
One important fact that I bet Hasbro didn't even stop to consider- WOTC has screwed the pooch on every single digital initiative that they have attempted.

DNDBeyond is awesome and has been for many years.

That was not a WOTC property.  It was a third party product that licensed D&D.  IT was purchased by WOTC just a few months ago.  I don't think that counts as a success for WOTC.

Quote from: BadApple on August 21, 2023, 05:51:50 PM

Quote from: Mistwell on August 21, 2023, 05:30:36 PM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on August 19, 2023, 08:09:57 PM
One important fact that I bet Hasbro didn't even stop to consider- WOTC has screwed the pooch on every single digital initiative that they have attempted.

DNDBeyond is awesome and has been for many years.

That was not a WOTC property.  It was a third party product that licensed D&D.  IT was purchased by WOTC just a few months ago.  I don't think that counts as a success for WOTC.

April 2022