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Mr. Maltose posted:My immediate thought would be to use a framework similar to The Skeletons, specifically the way that game plays with time and changing both the player's characters and the world. Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Extremely my poo poo, would need a group you absolutely trusted not to be weird about it out-of-game. You've collectively convinced me that this should be a parlor LARP with good safety rules, and I might have to write it one day. Edit: Alternatively, someone else write it so I can play it!
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Mar 20, 2021 05:41
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Bringing this tangent back to TG Industry topics: is it legally possible in the US to write a game that is explicitly set in, say, Middle-Earth, distribute it freely (i.e., never charging for it), and get it played at conventions without having something like the litigious Tolkien estate crashing down on your head or that of the convention? How far can a fan project in someone else's IP go?
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Mar 20, 2021 05:44
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Speaking from experience, only so far as you can go without being noticed. Try not to get written up as a fluff piece by any gaming outlets.
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Mar 20, 2021 05:56
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Chuubo's is the only true magical girl rpg
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Mar 20, 2021 06:44
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fez_machine posted:Chuubo's is the only true magical girl rpg It certainly works, in my experience.
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Mar 20, 2021 06:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:It certainly works, in my experience.
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Mar 20, 2021 06:57
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SkyeAuroline posted:So the mythical "person who could decipher Chuubo's" is real, then. Teach us your supernatural powers. Oh no I just had a good GM! We muddled through, it was a fun summer. The real secret is probably muddling, idk.
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Mar 20, 2021 07:08
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The secret does kind of amount to "once you turn the whole machine on, it just works." Although Glitch does describe a lot of its mechanisms in a more straightforward way. I think Chuubo shows the mark of Jenna trying to explain things because people had questions about her earlier work, but her earlier work wasn't actually confusing because it was underexplained; it was just very nonstandard structurally.
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Mar 20, 2021 07:10
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The secret to Chuubo is very much 'play to find out'. Just get it rolling and see how things develop. I found it quite difficult to run because I struggled with the default pastoral setting, but when it sang it really sang.
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Mar 20, 2021 12:33
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Joe Slowboat posted:Well, here's a related industry question: I know there was kind of a boom of magical girl indie games for a while, is that still happening? And, same question for mecha - has Lancer inspired more mecha games, or have Lancer and Beam Saber sort of ended that trend by taking up that air? This pre-dates Lancer by a bit but Battle Century G is a pretty good mech game. Lancer's overshadowed it now in the "customizable mechs you fight in" category, but it's worth looking into still. I'm a bit saddened Magical Burst never got to a formal release. It's Madoka-y but I think it'd be possible to hack to a more Sailor Moon-flavored "fight monsters, deal with personal drama" setting where you don't have to worry about poofing into a monster as a Madoka-esque fail state. Kestral posted:Bringing this tangent back to TG Industry topics: is it legally possible in the US to write a game that is explicitly set in, say, Middle-Earth, distribute it freely (i.e., never charging for it), and get it played at conventions without having something like the litigious Tolkien estate crashing down on your head or that of the convention? How far can a fan project in someone else's IP go? Some IP holders wouldn't care, or may not easily notice due to being some international org or too big to bother, but with the Tolkein estate you're probably gambling against time like Leraika implied, before they notice and go aggro on you.
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Mar 20, 2021 16:44
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:So again as a genre outsider, it sounds like the key things to have for magical girls would be Someone should make a metagame called 'genre outsider' where one person designs a small game about a franchise they know nothing about and have people who enjoy that franchise playtest it.
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Mar 20, 2021 16:51
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:So again as a genre outsider, it sounds like the key things to have for magical girls would be I think it's worth stressing this is for some series. Saying "magical girls are like-" is kind of like going "superheroes are like-" in that, yeah, sure, maybe superman stopping costumed villains robbing banks is easy to summarise but that doesn't summarise Runaways or Young Justice or Immortal Hulk or- As a bunch of people correctly noted, a ton of magical girl series don't have fighting at all, they're just coming of age adventure/comedy series with a transformation gimmick. To more specifically break it down: 1 and 2 are yeses but it's worth noting this is easy to make maudlin and magical girl series rarely are; archetypally (see above for disclaimer) they're very much "people make nice again in 22 minutes" shows. A game that had the Apocalypse World style "you can be friends working together or you can be rivals at each other's throats" ethos would fit poorly, because if a character's too depressed to help or too mad at their friend to fight with them or whatever, that's usually not a long-term character-defining issue. There's a villainous magical girl archetype who tends to sit in opposition to the girls despite some kind of tie to them, though; they'll spend most of the series fighting the girls and will turn good halfway through or towards the end. 3. Magical girl shows in the mould we're talking about are usually monster of the week shows; Sailor Moon's hugely influential and it set up the structure where a monster with a human disguise has some front for harvesting life energy from people that impacts a friend or community the girls care about, so they go beat the crap out of it. If there's a natural disaster, it's usually directly caused by the monsters. There's often a weak masquerade, but sometimes full; the usual relationship is that there's incomplete knowledge that monsters exist or strange disasters have happened, but I've never seen one where it does the superhero universe thing where people are kind of used to giant monsters attacking the city and will hope Cure Phantom shows up to save them like they might in a superhero comic. An extreme atypicality of the dark magical girl genre is usually that their magical elements are heavily hidden. 4. The shows are typically episodic with underlying myth arcs; having beaten the monster, it's usually just new monster time, not that the next scheme takes advantage of elements of the first. This could be mundane arcs ("fighting monsters all the time is ruining my dating life") or arcs tied to the supernatural ("Queen Galaxa's gaining a bit of negative energy every week and will soon be able to make it eternal night"). It's usually not event fallout as much as it is the way the event interlocked in their day to day lives. I think you could run Blades that way but Blades is pretty proactive as a mechanical structure and most magical girl shows don't have their heroines actively hunting down danger, or if they do that's the niche one or two of them sit in; most are pretty reactive.
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Mar 20, 2021 17:18
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Kestral posted:Bringing this tangent back to TG Industry topics: is it legally possible in the US to write a game that is explicitly set in, say, Middle-Earth, distribute it freely (i.e., never charging for it), and get it played at conventions without having something like the litigious Tolkien estate crashing down on your head or that of the convention? How far can a fan project in someone else's IP go? Copyright is not about whether you charge money or add seventeen disclaimers promising that you're not taking credit for the IP in question--it's (broadly speaking) about using something that isn't yours. If you hold a copyright, it means you have extensive control over how the copyrighted work gets used. A fan project game can go until (1) the IP holder finds out, and (2) the IP holder's willingness and ability to take legal action exceeds the fan's willingness and ability to mount a legal defense. This is true even in cases where the fan project is built around a fair use exception, because while you may have legal standing to put out your (say) Middle Earth parody game, if you can't afford the lawyer to defend your claim, they can still shut you down.
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Mar 20, 2021 17:46
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homullus posted:Copyright is not about whether you charge money or add seventeen disclaimers promising that you're not taking credit for the IP in question--it's (broadly speaking) about using something that isn't yours. If you hold a copyright, it means you have extensive control over how the copyrighted work gets used. A fan project game can go until (1) the IP holder finds out, and (2) the IP holder's willingness and ability to take legal action exceeds the fan's willingness and ability to mount a legal defense. This is true even in cases where the fan project is built around a fair use exception, because while you may have legal standing to put out your (say) Middle Earth parody game, if you can't afford the lawyer to defend your claim, they can still shut you down. You're conflating copyright and trademark. Copyright covers the actual expression of a work, while trademark covers the distinctive symbolic representations of a product or service. Or, in other words: If you made a book that was paraphrases of Lord of the Rings all the way through with every character and location name swapped out and a new title, that would be a copyright violation but not a trademark violation. In contrast, if you made a book that was entirely original writing and storyline, and entirely original characters (to avoid the wibbly-wobbly bounds of copyright around character traits), but happened to strongly feature Middle-Earth names and locations and had a title using a distinctive phrase from Lord of the Rings, that would be a trademark violation but not a copyright violatioon. Roadie fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 20:15
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah, Henshin! would be a good choice for such a thing. Yeah, Henshin is the game I was thinking of. and that ticks all of the boxes.
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Mar 20, 2021 21:42
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Roadie posted:You're conflating copyright and trademark. Copyright covers the actual expression of a work, while trademark covers the distinctive symbolic representations of a product or service. I am not seeing where you are seeing the conflation of copyright and trademark. My example, a Middle Earth parody, is a fair use exception to copyright, but the fan would still have to prevail in court if the IP owner sued them, even if they had also avoided trademark infringement and/or dilution claims by the means you detailed. The original question was "how far can a fan game in another's IP go if they don't charge"; if the fan author can't afford a lawyer for their case, the fan work is very likely still done if the IP owner hears about it, feels aggrieved, and has resources the fan doesn't. Even if they don't charge, have disclaimers, and pinky swear that they have nothing but respect for the original work.
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Mar 21, 2021 04:17
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Based on my pragmatic experience at Origins, you're not going to get popped for your fan RPG or even for registering for an event to run that fan RPG at a convention. Or at least, I doubt you would be, since there's a lot more litigious entities who seem to not give a gently caress. If you start distributing or selling it, even for cost, you might be in bigger trouble if it's explicitly Middle Earth: Brought To You By Me.
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Mar 21, 2021 04:25
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Nuns with Guns posted:This pre-dates Lancer by a bit but Battle Century G is a pretty good mech game. Lancer's overshadowed it now in the "customizable mechs you fight in" category, but it's worth looking into still. BCG was written by a goon! I sadly don't recall their username though.
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Mar 21, 2021 18:34
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Probably Gimmick Man? Or at least that's the name of their LLC, they also did Monsterpunk.
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Mar 21, 2021 19:33
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Nessus posted:Based on my pragmatic experience at Origins, you're not going to get popped for your fan RPG or even for registering for an event to run that fan RPG at a convention. Or at least, I doubt you would be, since there's a lot more litigious entities who seem to not give a gently caress. If you start distributing or selling it, even for cost, you might be in bigger trouble if it's explicitly Middle Earth: Brought To You By Me.
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Mar 21, 2021 20:48
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WotC just can't help themselves, it seems. https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1373847320370970626?s=19
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Mar 22, 2021 14:28
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That Old Tree posted:WotC just can't help themselves, it seems. https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1373849182386065411?s=20
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Mar 22, 2021 14:47
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https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1373862780311248898 Yikes
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Mar 22, 2021 14:57
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This loving SUCKS.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:33
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Amazing how the franchise that has been rooted in weird colonialist fantasies and doing the bare minimum about fixing it just went and took an eraser to a new race with lore and motive and made them 'primitive'. It's like they never want to let go. I had hopes they were going to turn that car around but it seems they didn't. Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd were just a few years ago, after all. I hope POCGamer gets compensated. Or if the contract has enough wiggle room, he can release a complete edition of his story on DMsGuild or something DesertIslandHermit fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 15:52
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It's not even a new raceSplicer posted:Oh lord, here's the existing grippli Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 16:43
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Splicer posted:It's not even a new race I thought the Grung and Bullywugs were the only frog races. Goddamn this is a mess. Can't imagine what poo poo is going to be presented in Guide to Ravenloft if Wizards is this lazy or even reluctant.
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Mar 22, 2021 16:58
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DesertIslandHermit posted:I thought the Grung and Bullywugs were the only frog races. Goddamn this is a mess. Definitely not lazy. Reluctant, maybe, but it sounds like they put some amount of effort into undoing PanzerLion's work here, so lazy absolutely doesn't apply.
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Mar 22, 2021 17:07
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DesertIslandHermit posted:I thought the Grung and Bullywugs were the only frog races. Goddamn this is a mess. there's a bunch of other frog monsters, as well as an existing creator/progenitor race to tie them all together in the FR: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Batrachi my guess is that PoCGamer was tying the grippli into the batrachi, since he mentions deep FR lore and history as his focus that was cut.
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Mar 22, 2021 17:13
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I came in here to see if anyone was talking about this. This poo poo is why I can't get excited when they hire a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Why I can't cheer when they hire good writers. The same group of lovely white dudes still have the final cut. Mike Mearls and the people who refuse to fire Mike Mearls ARE D&D. They write regressive crap because that is who they are. They're happy to hire people from marginalized groups as long as they don't have to listen to any of them.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:28
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Jimbozig posted:I came in here to see if anyone was talking about this. This poo poo is why I can't get excited when they hire a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Why I can't cheer when they hire good writers. "Hire" seems like a strong word to use, given DC's experiences last year.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:34
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Can we make a :notracist: emote but for D&D?
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Mar 22, 2021 19:10
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StratGoatCom posted:Can we make a :notracist: emote but for D&D? I can't be racist, some of my best elves are Dark.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:11
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Arivia posted:there's a bunch of other frog monsters, as well as an existing creator/progenitor race to tie them all together in the FR: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Batrachi my guess is that PoCGamer was tying the grippli into the batrachi, since he mentions deep FR lore and history as his focus that was cut. update: yes he was https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1374049019480076296 and it just gets worse and worse
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Mar 22, 2021 19:14
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^ That tweet is another thread, which ends with this nightmare of a tweet. https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1374052068059582465 Really, this tweet feels like WotC in a nutshell.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:24
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That loving sucks. POCGamer seems to get what is, to me, the reason to play in the Forgotten Realms: a massive well of weird-rear end lore going back into deep time, and he wrote an adventure emphasizing that. I can understand WotC not wanting to introduce a big whack of retcons, lore, and player options in a random adventure, but for god's sake the time and place for that feedback was in the submission phase. It would have been perfectly valid for Wizards to say, "We don't have a place in this book for the thing you want to create - pare it back to something simple, or we'll have to reject it," but to string him along without giving him notice and a chance to amend his work is unconscionable.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:36
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I wonder how much Price knew about this going down when she made that thread preemptively defending the book
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Mar 22, 2021 19:37
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https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1374068466014064646 Oh no it was perfect 
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Mar 22, 2021 19:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:I wonder how much Price knew about this going down when she made that thread preemptively defending the book
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Mar 22, 2021 20:02
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StratGoatCom posted:Can we make a :notracist: emote but for D&D? A bar that says ‘Not racist.’ but Nanny Pupu quickly shifts in and out of the right side of the bar.
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Mar 22, 2021 20:49
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