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I mean it does come off as an amusing anecdote out of context, just like, she has this IP and runs this company, might as well put it to use and make some stuff. Though I do get the impression that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon have been surprisingly comprehensively dead IPs despite being pretty prominent in nostalgia and influential on sci-fi. Did Star Wars just render them that redundant?
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Nov 8, 2021 18:21
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I've still got that Buck Rodgers TSR board game down in my basement.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:25
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Though I do get the impression that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon have been surprisingly comprehensively dead IPs despite being pretty prominent in nostalgia and influential on sci-fi. Did Star Wars just render them that redundant? There has been a prevalent notion that the more recognizable the IP, the more money it should make. (Like, if a movie based on the Guardians of the Galaxy can be hugely successful, every Batman and Spiderman movie should make several billion dollars.) So a Buck Rogers movie is never going to rake in "expected" profits based on name recognition--at least not without a huge budget for both production and marketing. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 18:38
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Splicer posted:I don't know if the OGL made D&D bigger but I'm comfortable saying it made everything else smaller The OGL is flawed as a license, but it did introduce the gaming "mainstream" to the idea of open licenses and I think that's important. Sure, FUDGE was already there, but WotC endorsing the concept opened a lot of doors. Ultimately I think it was a benefit for tabletop gaming as a whole despite Dancey's hopes.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:45
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Would PBTA be a thing in a world without ogl?
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Nov 8, 2021 18:48
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I mean it does come off as an amusing anecdote out of context, just like, she has this IP and runs this company, might as well put it to use and make some stuff. I think with Buck Rogers, specifically, is that it's heavily associated with an outdated aesthetic. Like, at this point the whole "rocket ships and laser guns" look the franchise was rooted in is largely seen as outdated and corny. Flash Gordon has had a bit more longevity (What with the 80s film, the 90s cartoon and the 2007 live action series) which I think owes to it being more of a sword and planet science fantasy, which leaves a little bit more room for reinvention. Its big problem is the yellow peril stereotypes tied up in its iconic villain, Ming the Merciless and, while modern adaptations have found a variety of ways to downplay the racism (The cartoon made him some kind of lizard man with no Asian coding, for instance) it's much easier for studios to just work with newer properties inspired by Gordon like Star Wars or Masters of the Universe than try to make a nearly century old story palatable to a modern audience.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:50
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Yeah, if you look at the sci-fi properties that were successful after the Star Wars OT concluded, it was more self-consciously "serious" stuff like Star Trek, Alien, and Terminator. I have no data to back this up, but I think lashing the game to the Googie aesthetic and the AD&D rules was the kiss of death. Most people would never get past that to see the interesting things that people like Pondsmith, Winninger, Henson, and Findley were doing with the setting.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:57
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Kurieg posted:Would PBTA be a thing in a world without ogl? This is my primary concern when it comes to whether I 'like the ogl'. Without PBTA I would be a much worse GM than I still am.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:48
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, if you look at the sci-fi properties that were successful after the Star Wars OT concluded, it was more self-consciously "serious" stuff like Star Trek, Alien, and Terminator. I have no data to back this up, but I think lashing the game to the Googie aesthetic and the AD&D rules was the kiss of death. It’s just so old. The character predates the Golden Age of Science Fiction by a decade, and the Golden Age was already staid enough that by 1988 it had seen almost two waves of reaction to its staidness (the original New Wave and the 80s New Wave spearheaded by cyberpunk). With the exception of Star Trek, the serious, hard edge of 80s sci-fi comes out of this late-period cyberpunk-esque New Wave stuff: it’s modern and relevant. Buck Rogers in 1988 is like something that was popular in the 60s and 70s today. Roleplaying In The Worlds Of Larry Niven & Fredrik Pohl, a 5e based roleplaying game, coming next year! Aren’t you excited?
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Nov 8, 2021 20:22
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I stopped short of calling it a dead IP because it received a brief revival circa '79, but the new show only ran for a couple seasons and the related properties (comic strips and comic books) dwindled away soon after. Not dead, but certainly not a license to print money.
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 20:36
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LatwPIAT posted:Roleplaying In The Worlds Of Larry Niven & Fredrik Pohl, a 5e based roleplaying game, coming next year! Aren’t you excited?  ?
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Nov 8, 2021 21:09
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Oh, goody, more authoritarianism in my gaming! Plus bonus eugenics IIRC.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:25
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IIRC all the Ringworld human subspecies were the result of normal evolution rather than eugenics and the Pakk are the blood purity bad guys.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:40
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Hospitals on Ringworld were too expensive, so the Pakk spread rumours that they were harvesting organs.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:52
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Terrible Opinions posted:IIRC all the Ringworld human subspecies were the result of normal evolution rather than eugenics and the Pakk are the blood purity bad guys.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:56
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Halloween Jack posted:Yeah, if you look at the sci-fi properties that were successful after the Star Wars OT concluded, it was more self-consciously "serious" stuff like Star Trek, Alien, and Terminator. I have no data to back this up, but I think lashing the game to the Googie aesthetic and the AD&D rules was the kiss of death. Most people would never get past that to see the interesting things that people like Pondsmith, Winninger, Henson, and Findley were doing with the setting. Those were 2 different Buck Rogers games though. Buck Rogers XXV Century was based nominally on the 70's tv show and had that "clean" aesthetic and used (sorta) AD&D as the base. There was another game that came out a couple of years later that had the googie look going but didn't use AD&D and instead had a REALLY pared down game system.
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Nov 8, 2021 21:59
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DalaranJ posted:This is my primary concern when it comes to whether I 'like the ogl'. Without PBTA I would be a much worse GM than I still am. Probably it would. The classic "founder" of the narrative movement, Sorcerer, and Vincent Baker's first game kill puppies for satan were both responses to Vampire and oWoD, not to D&D or OGL (thus the themes of "do bad stuff, to get power, to do overall good stuff").
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Nov 8, 2021 22:02
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The human world government in Ringworld controls breeding, to the extent that Louis Wu exists only because they're trying to breed for luck. It is also true that Known Space human criminals are broken down for organs; see Niven's novel The Patchwork Girl.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:08
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The OGL probably helped the Forge scene insofar as there was outsize enthusiasm for something, please God anything that isn't D20 among the tabletop forum community.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:08
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Kurieg posted:Would PBTA be a thing in a world without ogl? I would assume so, since there's no license for PbtA, it's just Vince Baker just saying "Sure, I'm fine with it."
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Nov 8, 2021 22:10
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That’s a weird pick, tho, because like…Niven and Pohl didn’t collaborate. Niven collaborated with a ton of authors but Pohl wasn’t one of them.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The human world government in Ringworld controls breeding, to the extent that Louis Wu exists only because they're trying to breed for luck. It is also true that Known Space human criminals are broken down for organs; see Niven's novel The Patchwork Girl. Not Louis Wu - Teela’s the one with that particular power. And the Ringworld thing is that they are all speciated off rom the original Pak hominids, much like humans were. The Pak Protectora are inherently motivated to protect their own genetic descent, and almost all of them are villains. The ones that aren’t are still morally gray and only manage it by being willing to expand their view to protecting their entire species and being from a species that is cooperative with or reliant on others. (Thus the Ringworld ultimately is saved by the creation of Ghoul Protectors, because their species is reliant on all the others to survive, as they are carrion eaters, ans so the Ghoul Protectors will ensure that everyone survives.) E: Niven is a weirdo right wing libertarian climate change denier, but he is absolutely not a fascist or a eugenicist. Earth’s government is straight up villainous in his books. E2: mind you he’s fine collabing with fascists like Jerry Pournelle, but it was at least to produce the two best books Pournelle ever got involved with Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 22:24
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Mors Rattus posted:E: Niven is a weirdo right wing libertarian climate change denier, but he is absolutely not a fascist or a eugenicist. Earth’s government is straight up villainous in his books. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 22:31
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Mors Rattus posted:E: Niven is a weirdo right wing libertarian climate change denier, but he is absolutely not a fascist or a eugenicist. Earth’s government is straight up villainous in his books.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:32
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It's been many years since I last read it, but The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle was a book I liked. Though the whole "extremely fertile species breeds itself into extreme overpopulation until it all comes down in really bad wars, ad infinitum" is kinda suspect in retrospect. Replace aliens with black/brown people and you have what fascists and other far-right scum are firm believers in.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:53
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Just Winging It posted:It's been many years since I last read it, but The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle was a book I liked. Though the whole "extremely fertile species breeds itself into extreme overpopulation until it all comes down in really bad wars, ad infinitum" is kinda suspect in retrospect. Replace aliens with black/brown people and you have what fascists and other far-right scum are firm believers in. Mote In God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand are the two best books Pournelle has ever been involved with, but yes, they still got problems. Halloween Jack posted:...What? Eugenicists (and governments, honestly) are the villains in Niven works, consistently. He does not like them even when their plans work. He does, however, think climate change is fake.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:11
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Mors Rattus posted:E: Niven is a weirdo right wing libertarian climate change denier, but he is absolutely not a fascist or a eugenicist. Earth’s government is straight up villainous in his books.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The human world government in Ringworld controls breeding, to the extent that Louis Wu exists only because they're trying to breed for luck. It is also true that Known Space human criminals are broken down for organs; see Niven's novel The Patchwork Girl. Also the organs for crimes is expressly A Bad Thing in the books e: Like the patchwork girl is essentially a treatise about why the death penalty is bad Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 23:30
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Warthur posted:Yeah, I have been rereading the Known Space stuff lately and tonally speaking all the eugenics stuff is meant to be an alarming "future shock" type of thing. (This ends up leaning into the libertarianism because it means that those who choose to go off into space to get away from the Earth government's regulations are even more in the right, which feeds into the usual libertarian boner for the "frontier spirit".) Niven's not perfect by any means, and he's a classic 70s sex pest whose books can swerve into creepy territory very fast. But it's worth noting some of the "everyone knows" bits about Known Space were added by later authors when Niven opened the setting up as a shared universe. Most of the worst stuff the Earth government does, for example (although not including the eugenics) didn't come out of Niven, it came out of Baen's stable of authors adding in extra fascism and 70s Republican bogeymen. Because stuff like the Kzinti Lesson implied that Earth had strict gun control and a central government under the UN, so it "had" to be keeping the fascism somewhere. And yeah, the era of the organ banks is explicitly considered a horrible period in the future history when society got screwed up by access to cheap transplant technology. Stories later in the timeline look back on the period with horror (and always looked back on the period with horror right from when Niven first wrote them - he didn't change his mind later).
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Nov 8, 2021 23:42
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To me, Niven will always be the guy that whined about his feud with a furry pornographer in the foreword to one of the Man-Kzin Wars collections. I don't know what Elf Sternberg is up to these days but I hope that once in a while he remembers just how MAD he made Niven about gay space catboys, and smiles.
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Nov 9, 2021 00:09
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Re: Niven and Pournelle stuff, I remember liking Oath of Fealty, but I think I liked it because I took it as a proto-cyberpunk dystopian message about the extremes that may happen when corporations have more sovereignty than governments. Now I know their politics better, I am 99% sure they thought the corporation in that book is the good side.
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Nov 9, 2021 00:12
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Yes. Imagine publishing that today. Also I mixed up Pohl and Pournelle. 
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Nov 9, 2021 00:49
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KingKalamari posted:I also just want to point out the elephant in the room that in a lot of ways early D&D succeeded in spite of Gygax's involvement rather than because of it. Despite the narrative of Gygax as "The father of D&D" and this big, deific figure in nerd circles, that's largely a narrative curated by Gygax himself to further currate a sense of control over the product line he helped spawn that seriously detracts from the contributions of his collaborators. Without the involvement of people like John Eric Holmes, Tom Moldvay or other people who actually knew how to write, most of the general public wouldn't know how to play the drat game because Gygax's own prose was a turgid, bloated mess that needlessly obfuscated the game's rules. I don't want to tell you how long I was in the hobby before I heard Dave Arneson's name.
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Nov 9, 2021 00:59
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Re: the OGL and the pros and cons thereof, I don't think it's a huge stretch to draw a line between the d20 bubble and the subsequent bust which saddled a lot of game stores with product they couldn't move, which in turn resulted in a lot of them shutting down. It's probably too reductive to go "the OGL caused a bunch of game stores to close," and probably a lot of them would eventually have wound up closing anyway as it's not exactly a business known for its longevity or the acumen of those who run said stores, but I think of all the effects you could point to that's one of the less speculative. I'm not clear what a lack of OGL would have changed meaningfully here given that the shift from brick-and-mortar to online retail was still going to happen anyway, but it's not like game stores as a whole have gone extinct, they've pivoted largely towards being a place to go and play, usually card games, board games, etc, but also TRPGs as well. If it wasn't for that bubble bursting, would more stores have pivoted to that sort of thing quicker? I dunno, it's something I think about on occasion.
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Nov 9, 2021 02:15
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Tendales posted:To me, Niven will always be the guy that whined about his feud with a furry pornographer in the foreword to one of the Man-Kzin Wars collections. Was he the guy who thought up something called (ish) The Open Touch Project, where people at cons would be assumed to have opted in unless they explicitly opted out? I know my memory sucks, and I couldn't think up the right Google tags to retrieve it.
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Nov 9, 2021 02:27
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Was he the guy who thought up something called (ish) The Open Touch Project, where people at cons would be assumed to have opted in unless they explicitly opted out? I know my memory sucks, and I couldn't think up the right Google tags to retrieve it. No, that was Ferrett Steinmetz who, AFAIK, is somehow not a furry.
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Nov 9, 2021 02:39
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Arsenic Lupin posted:and the even more atrocious Inferno, which gleefully puts Kurt Vonnegut into Hell. That's loving incredible. What kind of stick up your rear end do you have to have to get mad at Kurt Vonnegut?
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Nov 9, 2021 03:29
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Tendales posted:To me, Niven will always be the guy that whined about his feud with a furry pornographer in the foreword to one of the Man-Kzin Wars collections. To me Niven will always be the person who wrote The Burning City in response to the LA Riots. And I can't remember when but I know at at least one con Pournelle has told Niven he was taking the right wing politics too far. I believe that the reason early Niven short stories were actually pretty good is that he used to hone them by reading them out loud at a bar or on an oil rig and adapting the stories based on the responses. When he wrote novels either by himself or with a sole colaborator on the other hand not so much.
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Nov 9, 2021 04:32
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I Am Just a Box posted:That's loving incredible. What kind of stick up your rear end do you have to have to get mad at Kurt Vonnegut?
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Nov 9, 2021 04:40
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LatwPIAT posted:Yes. Imagine publishing that today. I liked his stuff when I was 13, but in my defense, I was 13. Has anyone under 30 even heard of Ringworld or Niven?
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Nov 9, 2021 04:49
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