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Nuns with Guns posted:Which um... I am pretty sure that's not how intellectual property works in relation to tabletop game rules? Not a lawyer, but it could be true. You can't copyright mechanics, but you can copyright their expression (cf. all your RPG books), and they could well have a contract that states how expression(s) of the rules gets used.
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Oct 30, 2020 17:05
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homullus posted:Not a lawyer, but it could be true. You can't copyright mechanics, but you can copyright their expression (cf. all your RPG books), and they could well have a contract that states how expression(s) of the rules gets used. The book itself, with all the published mechanics therein, would be copyrighted and could not be reproduced without consent, but wouldn't that be a baseline thing that would have already been pounded out when you set up a kickstarter for the game? It sounds to me like they think the mechanics are part of the intellectual property that must be protected. Like, are they trying to file a patent for the game rules or something? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 17:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:The book itself, with all the published mechanics therein, would be copyrighted and could not be reproduced without consent, but wouldn't that be a baseline thing that would have already been pounded out when you set up a kickstarter for the game? It sounds to me like they think the mechanics are part of the intellectual property that must be protected. Like, are they trying to file a patent for the game rules or something?
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Oct 30, 2020 17:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:The book itself, with all the published mechanics therein, would be copyrighted and could not be reproduced without consent, but wouldn't that be a baseline thing that would have already been pounded out when you set up a kickstarter for the game? It sounds to me like they think the mechanics are part of the intellectual property that must be protected. Like, are they trying to file a patent for the game rules or something? I think it's most likely "original idea, do not steal" dressed up in official-sounding language, as you also suspected. It is also plausible that they did NOT get it pounded out appropriately before the Kickstarter, because people ruin everything. If they felt the expression were an important part of the presentation of the the rules (like, I don't know, written in Luke Crane wizardspeak), and the contract said they could only release that expression in the book, they'd have to renegotiate.
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Oct 30, 2020 17:31
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Out of curiosity, what's the accepted community way to handle this situation?
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Oct 30, 2020 17:33
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Infinitum posted:Out of curiosity, what's the accepted community way to handle this situation? Which situation, per say?
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Oct 30, 2020 18:00
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"yeah nah, we can't tell you about our system"
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Oct 30, 2020 18:10
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Infinitum posted:"yeah nah, we can't tell you about our system" A common (reasonable) community response is "yeah nah, good luck with your Kickstarter, maybe I'll check it out after the game is out, if I remember it." There's a lot of games that are marketed as much more finished and/or more groundbreaking than they are.
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Oct 30, 2020 18:13
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Infinitum posted:"yeah nah, we can't tell you about our system" Not to back
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Oct 30, 2020 18:21
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With a name like Urban Shadows, I feel like you don't even need all the mental calculus. It's gonna be a retread of poo poo from the early 90s. Again. How many books about trenchcoat vampires and secret alley ghosts does anyone really need?
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Oct 30, 2020 18:30
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poo poo, even the prose bit on the KS page is bog standard 'vampire hunting at a club' wankery, with a little twist on things at the end.
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Oct 30, 2020 18:48
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Infinitum posted:"yeah nah, we can't tell you about our system" I don't see it as that far off from what you'd expect of a board game or video game kickstarter. I want to know how it works. Now, I do get that there's a lot more writing in any moderately complex tabletop RPG than the starter box for most board games, but if you're not going to disclose the full rulebook, I'd at least like an idea of how it works. The Mortasheen kickstarter is going for a Pokemon-alike game, and those always present an extra set of challenges on top of that. You're dealing with adapting a video game RPG with too many complex internal calculations and subsystems to comfortably adapt 1:1 to an analog medium, but there's also certain things people would expect from a Pokemon RPG, too. To start with: doing a Pokemon-alike game would imply it's going to have a focus on combat and acquiring a stable of fighting monsters with bespoke stats. But then you have to make calls on other things: how do you acquire the monsters? Can you breed them? How does stat growth and gaining new attacks work? Are you carrying over the item-holding mechanics? How do you resolve the fact that the original games are a single-player experience, while tabletop games are normally done in parties of 2-5 people? People usually start by trying to map Pokemon's conceits to their conceptions of how tabletop RPGs work: different trainer types as classes, pokemon as individual stats or fully detailed monsters in the back of the book, overland travel and random encounters, oh there's consumable resources in pokemon so should we have a crafting system? etc. And it's pretty easy for the scope of the game to rapidly expand as you consider what to do. He said there's going to be 13 types of monsters, in line with the large range of Pokemon types. There's going to be player "races", classes, and subclasses. There's going to be detailed locales. There's going to be sections for NPCs and I assume a respectable number of starting monsters. He says he's made over 700+ monsters, and if you're going for a Pokemon game, you'll want a decent sampling of all the types and monsters that fit the various locales. It sounds like there will also be monster customization systems to build your own cute horrors, too. Plus assorted tables and appendixes. And an alchemy system. It's all making me picture a meaty doorstopper of a book, even at D&D-style book dimensions, like 300 or 400 pages or more. A much higher amount than the 100-150 pages minimum he's projecting and a production cycle that I'd be surprised to see completed in a year like he's proposed. He's also looking to commission more art, hints at additional rules in the core book, and says base the rules are still in a revision phase. If there's something to the rules that is a lot lighter, more abbreviated, or faster than what I think of when he lists off all the stuff he's packing into the book, I'd love to see it because that would be really exciting and innovative, both for RPGs and Pokemon imitator games in this style. I don't doubt his dedication to the project, or the fans of his that started making the RPG, but from the outside it looks like the kind of project that's going to see a lot of hangups before it eventually materializes in 3 years.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:00
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theironjef posted:With a name like Urban Shadows, I feel like you don't even need all the mental calculus. It's gonna be a retread of poo poo from the early 90s. Again. How many books about trenchcoat vampires and secret alley ghosts does anyone really need? Urban Shadows always came across as "We want to use PbtA to use World of Darkness or related" and I think the original would probably serve well enough. I don't know that there's been enough advances of the PbtA science to drive home a need for a new edition.
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Oct 30, 2020 20:55
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Nuns with Guns posted:He also said this in a Q&A on the kickstarter when someone asked what the rules are: quote:
...yeah, you're right. I think I just needed to hear this spelled out. I shouldn't give them my money.
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Oct 30, 2020 22:11
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Honestly Mortasheen could do with a really nice gussied-up art book that explains all of the world and everything and if I ever wanted to run it in a game I could whip out Monsters and Other Childish Things. The world is clearly his baby, and that's fine and honestly he hasn't been an rear end about it, it'd just be nice to get a peek behind the curtain and print something along the lines of, like, Apple Quest Monsters rather than try to fly too close to the heartbreaker sun like Icarus.
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Oct 31, 2020 01:59
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At this point in 2020 if you aren't showing at least a demo version of your tabletop game to backers then I'm going to assume that you just didn't bother to do your homework.
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Oct 31, 2020 03:23
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If they aren’t telling you about the system, there’s a 99% chance it’s because the system doesn’t exist yet. The other 1% is that the person is an insane perfectionist and you won’t get the product for like three years, if ever, while they tweak poo poo endlessly.
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Oct 31, 2020 03:31
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sportsgenius86 posted:If they aren’t telling you about the system, there’s a 99% chance it’s because the system doesn’t exist yet. Even in the case of perfectionism you can still share system stuff. John Harper was posting early versions of Blades in the Dark from the outset of the kickstarter and the final game doesn't resemble those early drafts in a number of respects, a lot of stuff changed over the course of open playtesting, but he did have something to show people. Similarly Lancer was a publicly available game for years before the Kickstarter even existed. There's basically no good excuse these days to not show people proof of concept, and if you can't do that then it's reasonable to count that as a red flag.
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Oct 31, 2020 03:41
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Honestly as a backer I’m kind of fine if Mortasheen’s RPG rules are total rear end as long as it’s a good setting/ideas/art book. I’ll probably never get to play a system that obscure anyway unless I specifically sought it out. I’m a sucker for big weird idea books that I can ste- I mean get inspiration from
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Oct 31, 2020 05:28
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Even just taking the art and monster descriptions from what is on his website right now will take up more page space than his projection. Guy is not really understanding the size of this book.
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Oct 31, 2020 07:24
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Dunno how many people in this thread care about large scale miniature kickstarters, but I wanted to give this one a shout out for having nearly the perfect kickstarter focus tested miniature. -Female Elf -"Ranger" archetype -Wolf companion Give her a bow and she'd check every box.
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Oct 31, 2020 16:55
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potatocubed posted:Thank you, thank you. I did a short (public) write-up of my take on my patreon, which I probably should have mentioned! Well, I have now.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:36
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The creators of Guild Ball and Godtear are about to launch Bardsung, a dungeon crawler for 1-5 players. Campaign storyline by Rhianna Pratchett, adventure design by Ian Livingstone and Sara Thompson (of Combat Wheelchair fame).
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Nov 2, 2020 18:54
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Not really down with steamforged anymore after they blamed the playerbase for trying to win games and killed it off a few months ago after promising a huge surprise for the players.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:07
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"kickstarter exclusive player character" is pretty uhhhhh And while Rhianna Pratchett is a definite plus, I don't know how much good writing is going to bring to a procedurally generated adventure. I guess if it has a living/legacy campaign of some kind?
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Nov 2, 2020 20:23
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The blog linked off that page lists them as 'guest writers', so I'm not expecting much beyond flavour text on cards.
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Nov 2, 2020 20:34
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Jedit posted:The creators of Guild Ball and Godtear are about to launch Bardsung, a dungeon crawler for 1-5 players. Campaign storyline by Rhianna Pratchett, adventure design by Ian Livingstone and Sara Thompson (of Combat Wheelchair fame). Wonder if this one will also ship to retail before backers? KS-exclusive content that may actually ship!
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Nov 2, 2020 22:17
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Yeah as a former Guild Ball player, hard pass.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:21
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Subjunctive posted:Same and same! I'm writing about family therapy in the dungeon. So here were my thoughts looking at the map: there are no exits or entrances. And it's MOSTLY empty except that for some reason there is a cup in one hallway, placed EXACTLY between two openings. If there's no entrances or exits, why is there a cup there? Why is it right in the middle? Why is everything so clean except for that one cup? Why, it's two squabbling family members (sister-brother), trapped in the dungeon for aeons, and they are both insistent that THAT IS NOT MY CUP YOU USED IT AND YOU MADE IT DIRTY AND YOU ARE GONNA MOVE IT, SAMUEL/MILDRED! (This fight has been going on for hundreds of YEARS.) Everything else is following from there. The point is, you have to get the feud to at least a ceasefire to get out or get your thing - but you can't kill either feuding family member. If you do, they'll just reanimate. No, you'll have to get them to agree in order for the PCs to "win." I'm sure Samuel and Mildred have wonderful magical abilities and spells and a ton of magic items, but I won't be detailing that. I will be detailing how their puppy keeps pooping in the wrong place, and how they fight over who left the blood vat open to dry out over night, and so on. There, that's my idea.
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Nov 2, 2020 22:58
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Yeah as a former Guild Ball player, hard pass. Pretty impressive how they burned through years of good will so quickly and totally.
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Nov 3, 2020 05:28
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HidaO-Win posted:Not really down with steamforged anymore after they blamed the playerbase for trying to win games and killed it off a few months ago after promising a huge surprise for the players. So they cancelled the game because of, what, optimization?
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Nov 3, 2020 13:59
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They made good characters and they made bad characters, then they blamed the players for only running the good characters. Then they cancelled the game while essentially claiming that, because of the above, they had run out of design space.
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Nov 3, 2020 14:04
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This was also a tournament game, they essentially blamed the players for trying to win the tournaments they were running.
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Nov 3, 2020 14:14
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Didn't they just get acquired by some vulture types? They're just shifting to grab some short term profit before everything's run into the ground and the scraps of IP get sold off.
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Nov 3, 2020 14:18
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Guildball was always just their entry into the marketplace. Once their licensed FOMO Kickstarters became their main bread and butter they were always going to kill it off.
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Nov 3, 2020 18:40
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Didn't they just get acquired by some vulture types? They're just shifting to grab some short term profit before everything's run into the ground and the scraps of IP get sold off. Yup. Hallowed out from the inside.
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Nov 4, 2020 06:29
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Didn't they just get acquired by some vulture types? They're just shifting to grab some short term profit before everything's run into the ground and the scraps of IP get sold off. That's a shame, I always enjoyed their Gencon presence. At least this game, if it really speaks to your for whatever reason, looks like it doesn't require their continued support to function. Of course there's the "will it happen at all question".
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Nov 4, 2020 11:32
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I backed their Dark Souls KS and bought the DS Card Game (which is better than the board game), but haven't backed any of their other stuff. I was tempted by Resident Evil 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Devil May Cry 5, but ultimately thought better and decided not to back any of them. Bardsung still hasn't really shown what it's going to be yet, so I can't even form any opinion other than "I guess it's another fantasy campaign game with minis?" I kind of already have enough of those unless it's suuuuuper unique.
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Nov 4, 2020 13:45
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The Moon Monster posted:That's a shame, I always enjoyed their Gencon presence.
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Nov 4, 2020 16:31
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1398817948/kitty-clacks-cat-themed-polyhedral-dice-sets/description I like Black Oak Workshop's previous dice stuff like their dice advent calendars and I am a sucker for dice collecting. They make good dice and I wanted others to know about their dice. I like the colors and I also like cats so of course I would back dice themed after cats.  
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