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Humbug Scoolbus posted:So something popped up on the Legend Keeper Patreon. They do realize this is a crime right?
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Aug 8, 2019 23:47
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| # ? May 25, 2024 23:37 |
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Nah, dudes just mad right now. Information wants to be
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Aug 8, 2019 23:59
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Kwyndig posted:They do realize this is a crime right? I was advised by legal, in very strong words, not to do something tamer than this. If either of these projects make money, there's probably a case here.
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Aug 9, 2019 00:02
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The WordAnvil guy waded in on the LegendKeeper patreon page and had this to say:quote:Good day Braden and everyone else! I've never heard of either of these toolsets before today, and I didn't click the links to compare, but that's their defense. There's also a bunch of other posts from the WorldAnvil person on other comments: (viewable by everyone) https://www.patreon.com/legendkeeper/posts
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Aug 9, 2019 01:13
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WorldAnvil guy sure is confident that those chat logs exonerate him and don't, for instance, have him literally admitting to copying the UI.
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Aug 9, 2019 02:31
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Fuego Fish posted:WorldAnvil guy sure is confident that those chat logs exonerate him and don't, for instance, have him literally admitting to copying the UI. "This thing includes ideas my thing also used therefor I can take whatever I want from it, the end," seems to be this dude's whole logic train
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Aug 9, 2019 03:51
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this is a good time for Legend Keeper guy to talk to a lawyer and to follow legal twitter's #1 rule: https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/865722654442913792
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Aug 9, 2019 05:43
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I can't imagine there's legal recourse for using similar UI - treeviews with filters are everywhere, icons with text under them are also everywhere. If your competitors in the software industry have good UI, it gets copied - crying plagarism when you're literally building a competitor to an existing app is really weird and counterproductive to me.
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Aug 9, 2019 12:46
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xiw posted:I can't imagine there's legal recourse for using similar UI - treeviews with filters are everywhere, icons with text under them are also everywhere. If your competitors in the software industry have good UI, it gets copied - crying plagarism when you're literally building a competitor to an existing app is really weird and counterproductive to me. Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc. seems relevant: quote:Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc., 516 U.S. 233 (1996), is a United States Supreme Court case that tested the extent of software copyright. The lower court had held that copyright does not extend to the user interface of a computer program, such as the text and layout of menus. Due to the recusal of one justice, the Supreme Court decided the case with an eight-member bench that split evenly, leaving the lower court's decision affirmed but setting no national precedent. quote:Borland released a spreadsheet product, Quattro Pro, that had a compatibility mode in which its menu imitated that of Lotus 1-2-3, a competing product. None of the source code or machine code that generated the menus was copied, but the names of the commands and the organization of those commands into a hierarchy were virtually identical.
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Aug 9, 2019 17:07
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noisms, the enlightened centrist, has a new hot take
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Aug 12, 2019 14:32
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It's not new if it's older than me.
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Aug 12, 2019 14:35
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It says a lot about this industry that what would, in any other field, be bog standard capitalism (setting the retail price of your product at the upper end of what your customers would be willing to pay, but not so high that they don't cough up) is associated with Games Workshop (and therefore bad?) as opposed to being just plain doing business.
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Aug 12, 2019 14:43
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Serf posted:the real reason that post is hilarious is that an automatic rifle will not save you from that many hogs. its even funnier because they also generally avoid humans unless you specifically go after them Why do these chuds keep going on about needing an automatic rifle to kill feral hogs? I thought all they needed was a katana and a trenchcoat.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:07
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Warthur posted:It says a lot about this industry that what would, in any other field, be bog standard capitalism (setting the retail price of your product at the upper end of what your customers would be willing to pay, but not so high that they don't cough up) is associated with Games Workshop (and therefore bad?) as opposed to being just plain doing business. Wait until you see how they feel about socialism.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:14
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I had to read an academic book about pricing as part of my job. The key takeaway is that most companies are totally clueless when it comes to setting prices, and they most frequently err on the side of pricing things too low (pricing things too high tends to self-correct pretty quickly)Warthur posted:It says a lot about this industry that what would, in any other field, be bog standard capitalism (setting the retail price of your product at the upper end of what your customers would be willing to pay, but not so high that they don't cough up) is associated with Games Workshop (and therefore bad?) as opposed to being just plain doing business. Hearing "price gouging" being applied to entertainment goods in this hobby is a huge lol from me.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:51
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canyoneer posted:I had to read an academic book about pricing as part of my job. The key takeaway is that most companies are totally clueless when it comes to setting prices, and they most frequently err on the side of pricing things too low (pricing things too high tends to self-correct pretty quickly) quote:Hearing "price gouging" being applied to entertainment goods in this hobby is a huge lol from me.
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Aug 12, 2019 23:11
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The only thing on that subject which might make any sense is feeling like you must have high-quality art attached to your product. Someone doing good and actually paying an artist and/or designer well is going to factor the cost of that into their final price for the content.
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Aug 12, 2019 23:29
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I can see what he's trying to say - I'd also like for more RPG books to understand that they're game manuals and not coffee table editions. I don't want books in glossy full-color hardcover. If mass-market paperback editions existed, I'd buy more games. But at the scale these things operate, nothing's going out the door without art, hardcover, cloth binding, etc. That's just the industry standard in 2019. Maybe there's a market for no-frills RPG books, but there's a much bigger, more established, and safer market for $59 hardcovers. Cheapass Games was awesome though, but even they got on board with production values.
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Aug 13, 2019 00:24
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moths posted:I can see what he's trying to say - I'd also like for more RPG books to understand that they're game manuals and not coffee table editions. There's the saying that you eat with your eyes first. I think I and many others play RPGs with our eyes first. I would not buy more RPGs if they were cheaper; I only buy the ones I really want. If I'm only going to buy those, I would rather they were attractive and durable. I don't buy special leather-bound versions, but I do get color/hardcover when it's an option.
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Aug 13, 2019 00:37
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I feel like a atmosphere / mood book would be a good place to maintain or establish the game's asthetic. The new V5 books would have benefited tremendously by having all it's LARP couturier corralled somewhere else.
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Aug 13, 2019 00:44
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The space that cheap perfect-bound softcovers were occupying in the eighties and nineties is now taken up by PDFs.
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Aug 13, 2019 00:47
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Cheap and cheerful production values - the sort of mostly black-and-white booklets which were the bread and butter of the indie scene in the mid-2000s, say, or the sort of short one-booklet-and-done games you have Fantasy Games Unlimited cranking out by the dozen in the early 1980s - would be great if they were more generally accepted by customers, but as has been pointed out, customers have been taught not to accept them over the years, and generally it's not the indie publishers who've benefitted from that trend. That said, you know what they'd be really appropriate for? Games and products produced on a strictly hobbyist basis, by folks who don't intend to make a business out of them. As has been mentioned on this thread in the past, part of the issue with pricing is that this is a hobby where people are willing to write material for the sheer fun of it, or publish their refereeing notes for beer money. On the one hand, this is clearly bad for people trying to make an actual living out of it, especially if the hobbyists don't charge a sensible amount of money for their work (because that then drives down the price of work across the field, especially if the hobbyists end up taking freelancer jobs). On the other hand, taking the DIY ethos out of tabletop RPGs is structurally impossible, and wouldn't really be desirable even if it weren't. Perhaps hobbyists who want to specifically flag their work as being hobbyist product could deliberately adopt a fanzine-style production aesthetic for hard copies of their work, as a way of signalling that it is not a professional product and shouldn't be seen as setting norms for actual professional products? (It occurs to me that the DM Guild/Storyteller's Vault/Miskatonic Repository/etc. sections on DTRPG already kind of provide a PDF equivalent to this, since with rare exceptions you won't be mistaking anything in there for a professional product and the people writing material for it aren't really competing with professional products - or, to reverse the logic, if a professional product doesn't actually add that much value over the shovelware in those sections, then what the gently caress is the point of it?)
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Aug 13, 2019 00:47
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Layout, editing, art, and playtesting are all pretty important costs to consider. Marketing too, if you want people to hear about your stuff
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Aug 13, 2019 00:53
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homullus posted:There's the saying that you eat with your eyes first. I think I and many others play RPGs with our eyes first. Which is interesting because conversely I buy RPGs to read and see if I'm interested in running them off the cuff all the time and being notably expensive is a barrier to me on that front. Most of my collection is PDFs, and a significant percentage I've never played, but a lot of the ones I didn't play I stole mechanics to kludge into other games from.
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Aug 13, 2019 01:05
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I have been a rpg collector for a long time, and I love this new digital age. Sure, reading my pdfs on my tablet is an inferior experience on the whole but the option to carry huge chunks of my library around in one light device is so convenient that it more than makes up for it. Now, for games you are actually playing I feel a physical copy of the core rules is a must, but I doubt I will ever go further than that with a physical collection other than a few especially cool or beloved books. Finally completing my physical collections of Ars Magica 5th and Wraith freed me.
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Aug 13, 2019 02:53
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PDFs that let me ctrl+f and click on links between pages are way better than any physical book could possibly be. Flipping through a physical book at the table feels really bad to me.
Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 03:29
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LuiCypher posted:Why do these chuds keep going on about needing an automatic rifle to kill feral hogs? I thought all they needed was a katana and a trenchcoat. Because it's not about Feral hogs. It's about brown people and liberals. The fact that they equate them to literal feral animals should be telling in and of itself.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:50
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I find a physical core useful if the game can get pretty fiddly as a base, because it's slightly less onerous to act as a human index with a physical book. Anything non-fiddly or material beyond the core, I'm making customized cheat sheets for everyone anyway, which will largely cover everything they need as long as I caught it. (Every WoD cheat sheet seems to call for at least a dozen minor tweaks because important poo poo is buried in flavor text or just not really where it should be.) I really like playbook style games because everyone gets everything important right in front of them as an assumed part of the game.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:57
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:PDFs that let me ctrl+f and click on links between pages are way better than any physical book could possibly be. Flipping through a physical book at the table feels really bad to me. Yeah, strong agree. Lancer having an SRD app that's connected to it's character builder is just mind-blowingly useful to me, I'm stunned nothing else ever did that.
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Aug 13, 2019 07:33
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spectralent posted:Yeah, strong agree. Lancer having an SRD app that's connected to it's character builder is just mind-blowingly useful to me, I'm stunned nothing else ever did that. Putting together the Lancer book at the moment and Comp/Con’s existence is really making me think about what the role of the game book is. When you have a free, easy tool for looking up rules, making characters and playing the game, the book itself kinda needs to focus more on being a pleasant experience to read and to teach the game to people with imo
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Aug 13, 2019 08:27
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moths posted:I feel like a atmosphere / mood book would be a good place to maintain or establish the game's asthetic. These books would sell like poo poo. Ever since D&D started the games have been about art too. Showing the players the world they are getting into as they learn the game has a lot of value.
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Aug 13, 2019 12:29
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alg posted:These books would sell like poo poo. I'm not saying that you're wrong in terms of the role art can play in establishing the tone and mood of a game by any means - but to say RPGs have been strongly focused on artwork since the beginning is just incorrect.
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Aug 13, 2019 12:39
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Warthur posted:...how many 1970s RPGs have you seen? Because I can assure you, they weren't communicating very much about the world at all through their art, if they even included any. (Traveller managed to be a monster smash hit by the standards of the time without any artwork whatsoever.) Basically just D&D, which was very art focused from 1E on (1977). From what I have read in various D&D history books (Empire of Imagination, Art & Arcana) and seen in the Eye of the Beholder documentary, it's very true for at least D&D. I'll admit I have never seen old Traveller, but even new Traveller seems very bare bones.
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Aug 13, 2019 13:25
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I always preferred a spiral bound or even a ring hindered copy for tabletop use even if I have to make it myself. Lays flat, can be passed around easily, good for quick reference. When I print PDFs I usually end up doing the binding like that myself since I haven’t seen it as an option for PoD. There was a traveller5 mock-up years ago that showed shop-manual type big binders that would lay flat, but I don’t think it made it into production.
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Aug 13, 2019 13:26
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alg posted:Basically just D&D, which was very art focused from 1E on (1977). From what I have read in various D&D history books (Empire of Imagination, Art & Arcana) and seen in the Eye of the Beholder documentary, it's very true for at least D&D. Pre-1977 D&D stuff had much more humble production values. And anyone who wasn't TSR was generally working a step down as far as production values went. Prior to 1E AD&D, I'd say the only game which really put made presentation and artwork at the front and centre of its approach was Empire of the Petal Throne. (I'm strongly of the opinion that this is an unspoken reason behind early Chaosium's initial success, incidentally. Compared to the sort of games which had preceded them, the early editions of RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer looked absolutely gorgeous. That plain white two column layout formatting which has gone so firmly out of style these days? Cutting edge by the standards of the time, and a real revelation in the hands of people - like Chaosium - who actually had half a clue how to make it look good.)
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Aug 13, 2019 14:31
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Warthur posted:...how many 1970s RPGs have you seen? Because I can assure you, they weren't communicating very much about the world at all through their art, if they even included any. (Traveller managed to be a monster smash hit by the standards of the time without any artwork whatsoever.) But how many have decades of success behind them? Not to say Traveller and so on don't have their fans but people want nice looking things.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:53
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Warthur posted:Bear in mind that 1E AD&D was, by the standards of the time, a great leap forward in production values. It was sort of the equivalent in those days of those really plush leatherbound special editions of some games you get today. In terms of core rules sheer page and word count, only 1E Chivalry & Sorcery came close (and it did that by shrinking down all the pages so that it was printing 4 sides on each side and it was loving unreadable as a result), and it represented TSR really pushing the boat out as far as the art budget went. As in, they shrunk four pages down to fit all four onto one page? 
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Aug 13, 2019 16:07
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Admiral Joeslop posted:As in, they shrunk four pages down to fit all four onto one page? I had to look it up because that sounded so dumb but not out of the realm of possibility given some of the crap I've seen. Linking to someone's full review. It contains a scan of one page. It certainly exceeds my expectations. It's not a literal "PowerPoint, please print four slides per page". It's more like bumping your font size to meet an essay requirement, but reversed.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:19
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Flail Snail posted:I had to look it up because that sounded so dumb but not out of the realm of possibility given some of the crap I've seen. I've seen Terms and Conditions with bigger fonts.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:24
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That's pretty hard to read but I feel like that's along similar lines to the old TSR 3 column model, isn't it?
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Aug 13, 2019 16:30
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