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Fuschia tude posted:More specifically, it's a company calling itself "TSR", cofounded by one of Gygax's sons, which claims that despite Wizards buying the TSR name and all its properties in 1997, they then abandoned both the rights to that name and logo and said properties in *mumble mumble* early 2000s. So is this the lawsuit equivalent of "that is a naval flag"?
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Sep 15, 2022 14:49
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SirPhoebos posted:So is this the lawsuit equivalent of "that is a naval flag"? Indeed. Unfortunately, these do occasionally work out, but usually when the big company is extremely incompetent and/or not trying.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:09
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WotC has been embarrassed by its own allegations the past
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Sep 15, 2022 15:16
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Oh right, I remember this. They were trying to put out a new version of an RPG made by the original TSR, which they obviously didn't have any rights to because the original TSR was bought by WOTC and the new TSR is just a new, unrelated company involving Ernest Gygax that took advantage of WOTC not renewing their trademark to the name. And then the game's rules were pretty explicitly racist. https://twitter.com/NoHateInGaming/status/1549479240390901760 But the most crazy thing is that apparently in the files being distributed for testing the new space racist game, there was an excel file outlining the company's perceived enemies, as well as some plans for fighting against them, including other members of the Gygax family. https://twitter.com/NoHateInGaming/status/1550463011604791298 Xiahou Dun posted:He quoted a 19th general justifying killing native children, "Nits make lice" in a discussion on why it's cool and good to kill orc babies. While it's definitely not great to make that quote, one lovely quote as an old man, long after he wasn't very relevant does not make for "notoriously lovely". It wasn't like a long screed, it was posts in a forum interview, which those can go awry in weird ways, and far as I can dig up as well, it wasn't actually even in reference to any orc babies at all, it was about a paladin killing a surrendered ogre. Not saying it was good, just that hearsay stories can balloon out of control. And since it was online, here it is. https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=11762&start=60 It's still a weird thing to say in response to a fairly weird question (which was actually posing a scenario where the paladin just did that and a dwarf kills the paladin's horse in retaliation, and Gygax's first response was to say he'd DM a combat between the dwarf and the paladin), and I think that at the heart of D&D, the game was conceived more to be about no-strings-attached killing, not complex moral considerations.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:34
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So WotC owns everything TSR created, but apparently they let the "TSR" trademark lapse. A guy named Jayson Elliott registered it on a whim, he says, and approached Ernie and Luke Gygax about doing something with it. They published Gygax Magazine and a new edition of Top Secret. (Written by the original creator, who I guess has the rights.) This company was called TSR Games and is now called Solarian. Elliott missed a filing date in 2020, which allowed a guy named Justin LaNasa to swoop in and grab it for himself. LaNasa made Ernie Gygax the president of a new company, also called TSR Games. Elliot was at one point licensing the rights to use the TSR name from LaNasa, but he rebranded as Solarian Games to distance himself from the constant stream of bigoted remarks and general PR seppuku underway at the new TSR Games. I have no idea why TSR Games (3rd Edition) thinks they have the rights to use old TSR logos or to publish a new version of Star Frontiers. AFAIK they've never even worked with any of the people who worked on Star Frontiers. They tried to bolster their claim over the logo by offering a shady contract to Darlene, the artist who designed one of them, but she saw through their bullshit immediately. I suspect that Ernie Gygax went along with LaNasa's plans in large part because LaNasa was planning to purchase the Gygax family home and turn it into the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum, which he has done. I think LaNasa has deep pockets by the standards of the RPG business. He owns a couple stores and the first Google result for his name is a judgment for uncollected sales taxes at his sleazy oxygen bar. He's the sort of Republican small business owner with delusions of grandeur that was mostly a punchline on Chapo Trap House until Greene and Boebert were elected to COngress.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:47
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I don't remember the original Star Frontiers being quite so... openly racist. I'm guessing that "NuTSR" is going all-in chasing those horrible, horrible racist dollars and making big bank off of the controversy.
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Sep 15, 2022 16:09
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Someone with more photoshop skills than I please replace "DON'T OPEN DEAD INSIDE" from that famous Walking Dead scene with "DO NOT TRUST WOKE" tia
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Sep 15, 2022 17:37
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MAYBE "TRANSBOTS"?
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Sep 15, 2022 17:58
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Randalor posted:I don't remember the original Star Frontiers being quite so... openly racist. I'm guessing that "NuTSR" is going all-in chasing those horrible, horrible racist dollars and making big bank off of the controversy. I think it's mostly insane people, since even most KKK splinter groups attempt more false nuance and coded language than this. "Negros are subhuman!!!" is straight-up Aryan Nations poo poo, the type of guys who live in compounds and don't recognize the federal government.
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Sep 15, 2022 20:16
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I think it's mostly insane people, since even most KKK splinter groups attempt more false nuance and coded language than this. "Negros are subhuman!!!" is straight-up Aryan Nations poo poo, the type of guys who live in compounds and don't recognize the federal government. ...did you read some of the other stuff in the RPG manuscript? quote:
quote:Races in SFNG are not unlike races in the real world. Some are better at certain things than others, and some races are superior than others. We get into this later on in this manual. Doesn't get any clearer than that.
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Sep 15, 2022 20:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:the game was conceived more to be about no-strings-attached killing, not complex moral considerations. That's always been my issue with most efforts to get D&D anything near realistic and gritty, since it was basically pretend-y time war games only thr ballista needed to nap for 8 hours after it fired a few bolts. Trying to slam meaty, fluff centric stuff in to a game that's so crunchy just irks me. But i've also had to put up with Discord text games where you were expected to both roll for political machinations and also come up with the speech to go along with it.
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Sep 15, 2022 21:34
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Randalor posted:I don't remember the original Star Frontiers being quite so... openly racist. I'm guessing that "NuTSR" is going all-in chasing those horrible, horrible racist dollars and making big bank off of the controversy. What I suspect, after a conversation with one of the people who runs the No Hate in Gaming site, is that "nuTSR" is attempting to run a Steve Bannon-style "flood the zone with poo poo" attack, in an effort to disorient everyone involved and drum up support for themselves against the woke mob at Wizards. The general idea here seems to be that Wizards had legitimately let the paperwork lapse on the trademarks for TSR and Star Frontiers, but has also been selling ebooks for both brands since December 2021. In order for nuTSR to have filed for the SF/TSR trademarks, they would've had to have submitted a statement to say that nobody was using them at the time. That means they lied to the USPTO; didn't run so much as a single Google search on the topic; somehow thought they had a valid case; and/or were hoping Wizards would drop a check on their heads to shut them up.
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Sep 16, 2022 02:36
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No it's okay, the book says not to do a racism, we can probably trust them. Although that secret woke list is hilarious.
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Sep 16, 2022 03:35
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Wanderer posted:The general idea here seems to be that Wizards had legitimately let the paperwork lapse on the trademarks for TSR and Star Frontiers, but has also been selling ebooks for both brands since December 2021. Wizards even admits to the former in their legal filing, but says they have additionally also been selling books for both brands through their authorized third party reseller online continuously since 2012 or earlier.
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Sep 16, 2022 03:55
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Wanderer posted:and/or were hoping Wizards would drop a check on their heads to shut them up.
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Sep 16, 2022 10:15
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Fuschia tude posted:Wizards even admits to the former in their legal filing, but says they have additionally also been selling books for both brands through their authorized third party reseller online continuously since 2012 or earlier. Yeah, that was a typo on my part. I wrote 2021, meant to write 2012.
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Sep 16, 2022 16:45
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I bought that root game on steam because of this thread. It's super fun! Is there a dedicated thread anywhere or just the general board game thread in traditional games. I wish to have somewhere to complain, which is apparently a phase everyone who plays it goes through
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Sep 27, 2022 00:10
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Milo and POTUS posted:I bought that root game on steam because of this thread. It's super fun! Is there a dedicated thread anywhere or just the general board game thread in traditional games. I wish to have somewhere to complain, which is apparently a phase everyone who plays it goes through There's no Root thread (though that is one of the only non-legacy board games that might be evergreen enough to justify its own thread), and I don't believe there is a Board Game Apps thread, unless it's in Games and I missed it. We're actually talking about Root RIGHT NOW gogogo
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Sep 27, 2022 00:40
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Space Biff writing on John Company 2e. I don’t think many other games take this perspective on colonialism, about how pillage turns into tea parties. Plus, it’s fun to play in light of the Musk buyout of Twitter, with how one bad actor can wreck a massive company with terrifying speed. E: if I get time after Thanksgiving I want to do a write up on how this game used it’s art budget. There’s deliberate choices on when/where to use realistic portraiture, caricature, historical art and created pieces, and a brief story of how the game had to censor itself in order to be produced in China (Opium had to be replaced with generic Export graphics) Triskelli fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Nov 24, 2022 |
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Nov 24, 2022 16:40
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I've posted some of this before in other threads but this seems to be the perfect thread to discuss it. I was an avid Battletech fan for the latter half of the '90s, through to the end of FASA and the announcement of the new Dark Age Wizkids clix game, which involved a time jump of about 70 years forward in the setting. The initial announcement of the time jump was in the summer of 2001, with a Michael Stackpole short story providing some basic details, which would eventually be further fleshed leading to the product launch of MechWarrior:Dark Age in 2002. People with a passing familiarity with the game's lore may know that to backfill in the story gap created by the time jump, it was established that a galaxy-shaking upheaval was caused by a faction called the Word of Blake - who were an ultra-zealous schism group from a quasi-religious faction called ComStar (the guys who control interstellar communication with 'Mechs). They went on a murderous rampage called the Jihad that wrecked everyone's poo poo. I've seen one or two posts in Battletech threads here observing that it was kinda awkward to have the next big game event be called the "Jihad" when September 11, 2001 hit. For those who aren't old enough to remember, there was an enormous spike in anti-Muslim prejudice and anti-Muslim hate crimes in the Western world after 9/11. Vicious and ugly, and lots of racists just loving it. So it really sucks that 9/11 happened after they announced the Jihad, but real life can't be planned for, right? Here's the thing, that isn't the order that it happened. The very first Stackpole short story to introduce the timeskip was called "Inheritance of Duty" and you can see it here on archive.org, archived on August 11, 2001. The short story explains in brief terms that the Word of Blake waged a terrible war to destroy civilization, caused utter chaos, was an attempted armageddon, yadda yadda, like I just said. Stackpole wrote a couple more essays in August-2001 addressing fan backlash about the situation. Noticeably absent from any of these posts - and from any post in rec.games.mecha before November 2002 - is the word "Jihad". The makers of Battletech deliberately decided to call their world-shattering event the "Jihad", to invoke Islam and holy wars, after 9/11, in the height of virulent anti-Muslim prejudice, to name their lovely in-game plot arc. And what a plot arc it was! When the details of the Jihad were fleshed out (by the "Classic Battletech" team who were advancing the timeline in the old pre-timejump era, while WizKids developed the game in the future timeline) they were a Bush-era Republican's wet dream of what they wished Iraq and Afghanistan had been capable of. Nukes! Biological weapons! Genocide! It was repugnant. Not surprising, since that's who the authors were, Bush-era Republicans. By the time the Iraq War started in 2003, I remember getting into an online fight with chief Battletech web forums rear end in a top hat/sex offender Warner Doles about the official BattleTech website posting its support of the US military on their way to invade Iraq. At this point the Classic Battletech line was owned by FanPro, a German company, who were less than thrilled when I pointed out the pro-invasion propaganda on their brand website, so they took that poo poo down pretty quickly. Anyway all of this left enough of a vile taste in my mouth that my interest in the game's development died as of 2003 and the in-game year of 3067. I still like reading through the older stuff (not that it doesn't have its own problematic elements and themes) but can't really stomach going back to the game even 19 years later. The 2018 computer game, set in the original 3025 era, was pretty fun though! Shame a bunch of whiny babies got upset that you could choose your own pronouns, but I knew better than to be surprised.
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Dec 4, 2022 04:37
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The most eye-raising thing about pre-jihad Battletech is the Draconis Combine. It's basically every 80s sinophobic trope, but in space. The only thing missing (as far as I know) is House Kurita still being upset about WW2, hundreds of years later.
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Dec 4, 2022 06:08
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SirPhoebos posted:The most eye-raising thing about pre-jihad Battletech is the Draconis Combine. It's basically every 80s sinophobic trope, but in space. The only thing missing (as far as I know) is House Kurita still being upset about WW2, hundreds of years later. surely the sinophobia is regarding the Capellans
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Dec 4, 2022 06:27
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Google Jeb Bush posted:surely the sinophobia is regarding the Capellans I mean really, representation in Battletech is token at best.
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Dec 4, 2022 06:42
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Battletech has great robots to shoot but literally everything to do with its politics is a disaster
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Dec 4, 2022 07:30
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Captain Oblivious posted:Battletech has great robots to shoot but literally everything to do with its politics is a disaster Mind, everything to do with its politics is kinda meant to be a disaster there are no "good guys" in Battletech Everyone sucks. Everyone.
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Dec 4, 2022 07:41
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Mind, everything to do with its politics is kinda meant to be a disaster For those who don't know it, think of Game of Thrones, but with giant robots and without any Starks to serve the role of people you can more-or-less root for without feeling weird.
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Dec 4, 2022 08:04
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Mind, everything to do with its politics is kinda meant to be a disaster And BattleTech is full to the gills with BOTH kinds. Roadie posted:For those who don't know it, think of Game of Thrones, but with giant robots and without any Starks to serve the role of people you can more-or-less root for without feeling weird.  There have been a few periods where one nation or clan have been Good Guys for a little while, but that was usually because some hack writer at the wheel of the official canon novels wanted to make their job easier, and it only lasted until a different writer got their turn at the wheel. The most common group for this was Clan Wolf, which had this happen so many times with so many different writers who all had different ideas about what made someone The Good Guys that the only prominent aspect of their culture left is their tendency towards sudden and meteoric rises to glory, followed by equally meteoric falls from grace so they can be the scrappy underdogs again.Though in a weird way, the Canopans kind of ended up as, if not good guys, probably-not-too-awful guys because nobody wants to get accused of trying to undo a much-needed retcon. The Magistracy of Canopus started as an incredibly eye-rolling "WOMAN GOOD, MAN BAD" nation written by the kind of men who think feminists are plotting to make them wax their chests and wear chastity cages. Thankfully, someone eventually realized that was incredibly stupid, and they've since been soft retconned into a moderately matriarchal society of liberal hedonists with powerful entertainment and tourism industries but poor-to-mediocre public education. Basically, Space Californians. This maybe kind of sort of makes them not-bad-guys by default, if you squint, if only because they're not important enough to be major players, and nobody wants to open the door to being accused of writing a Cartoonishly Evil Man-Hater in 2022 by introducing a Canopan villain. Edit: They're also The Reasonable Major Power in the HBS Battletech video game, but that game is only very loosely canon and the Canopan's role in it is more to be a 'bigger fish' circling around the edges of the plot, rather than actually getting involved themselves. (Which is hilarious in the context of how minor the Canopans and Taurians are on a galactic scale. But that's a different post.) girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 10:08
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girl dick energy posted:This is true, but there are good kinds of "everyone sucks" writing, where the people in power are all assholes because the kinds of people who'd seek and obtain that level of power tend to be assholes, and bad kinds of "everyone sucks" writing, where the people in power are all assholes because everyone's a different awful racial/political stereotype. Canopus is a major periphery power, which compared to many many places in battletech is DOING REALLY GOOD all things considered. its just Major Periphery power is still small small potatoes before the big 5 of the inner sphere
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Dec 4, 2022 11:10
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AtomikKrab posted:Canopus is a major periphery power, which compared to many many places in battletech is DOING REALLY GOOD all things considered. its just Major Periphery power is still small small potatoes before the big 5 of the inner sphere Which I guess in this extended metaphor would make the main plot of HBS BTech some kids playing stickball in an empty lot who're equal part excited and terrified because there are some 'actual pro players' watching who might decide to join in. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 11:17
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I do prefer Lancer, where there are still complexities about how the universe works, and people just trying to get by, but there is a large ideological conflict going on.
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Dec 4, 2022 11:32
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Josef bugman posted:I do prefer Lancer, where there are still complexities about how the universe works, and people just trying to get by, but there is a large ideological conflict going on. Though I don't think HBS BTech is a worse game for the small scope of its plot. Quite the opposite, really. Rather than try to introduce an entire universe at once, HBS decided to focus in on a digestible and archetypal story, letting the player get introduced to the conceits and tone a little at a time. It served them well with Shadowrun and I think it did the same for Battletech. Because yes, it's a game about a princess in exile and the ragtag mercenaries who joined her cause, fighting against her evil vizier uncle who stole the throne, and on a galactic scale it's basically a couple of kids throwing rocks at each other fighting over their favorite chair. But it's also a game about individuals with their own lives and goals being used to fight a proxy war by powers infinitely their greater, and if that's not a BattleTech story, I don't know what is. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 11:56
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I do feel Battletech could use at least a soft reboot. Maybe a treatment like The Great Pendragon Campaign would actually work really well. Retcon a lot, be a bit more culturally sensitive, keep the overall tone and events because that still can pretty much work. Plus, makes for a fun campaign book concept.
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Dec 4, 2022 13:45
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might be shallow of me but a lot of my irritation with Battletech is that if you're going to have a designated Evil Socialist Faction you could at least make their shortcomings flow from their material conditions and not just a laundry list of conservative "omg big gubermint" stereotypes played completely straight it's offset somewhat by "the Clans' eugenics program doesn't work and in fact results in them constantly shooting themselves in the foot" which is very charming as far as setting conceits go, but still
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Dec 4, 2022 19:08
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The original factions in some ways were rich and interesting and in other ways suffered from a painful lack of imagination. It's the 1980s so who are the future powers? Space America, Space West Germany, Space China-Russia, Space Japan and Space Democracy-Doesn't-Work. India and the rest of the global South? Nah. Who are the bad guys? The evil, incompetent communists and the barbaric Japanese. But at the macro level of the story, everyone is just Space Feudalism led by a noble house leader. If you're going to have Space Communists, why not actually have them be Communists? As for the Clans - why they thought they needed 15+ different flavours of Space Eugenic Fascists I'll never know.
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Dec 4, 2022 21:11
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SirPhoebos posted:The most eye-raising thing about pre-jihad Battletech is the Draconis Combine. It's basically every 80s sinophobic trope, but in space. The only thing missing (as far as I know) is House Kurita still being upset about WW2, hundreds of years later. I admit the main thing that irritates me about the Combine is it very much is a facist nation among a bunch of monarchies (the DC isn't samurai, it's WWII Japanese cosplaying as samurai), and the writing tends to buy too much into the fascist stereotypes that fascists are somehow great warriors instead of absolutely crap as reality has frequently demonstrated. I gather they are meant to be a darker grey than the rest of the setting's "no good guys" nations, but unapologetically buying into the weeaboo "samurai spirit makes them bestest at war!" bullshit is something that's aged REAL bad with all the current fascists running around in real life. The DC should have long ago imploded under their own stupidity, but the writers keep acting like just being brutal thugs should somehow keep the DC having fewer internal issues than all the other nations which at least have some existing internal factions with real influence in the fluff. The Clans are also pretty fascist, but at least there they have a designated villain role so we get to see that stuff bite them in the rear end more often than it happens to DC; certainly they've nicely imploded over that crap finally and realistically coming home to roost. I will admit as far as racially insensitive BT stuff goes, "scheming Chinese" Capella is probably worse than the DC, though they share the same "we're brutal and it keeps us strong" crap. Ghost Leviathan posted:I do feel Battletech could use at least a soft reboot. Maybe a treatment like The Great Pendragon Campaign would actually work really well. Retcon a lot, be a bit more culturally sensitive, keep the overall tone and events because that still can pretty much work. Plus, makes for a fun campaign book concept. Honestly they've been trying to soft reboot it with all the various more recent eras for a while now; current stuff from my viewpoint seems interested in effectively breaking all the factions down into smaller groups with less power (which has the advantage of making the small scale battles that classic BT works best at, more realistically important to the setting; a lance or company might be all these tiny factions can actually deploy at a location), which could certainly do the trick of getting rid of the more offensive groups by way of destroying them and replacing them with new groups with different desires.
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Dec 4, 2022 21:17
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Carbolic posted:The original factions in some ways were rich and interesting and in other ways suffered from a painful lack of imagination. It's the 1980s so who are the future powers? Space America, Space West Germany, Space China-Russia, Space Japan and Space Democracy-Doesn't-Work. India and the rest of the global South? Nah. Who are the bad guys? The evil, incompetent communists and the barbaric Japanese. But at the macro level of the story, everyone is just Space Feudalism led by a noble house leader. If you're going to have Space Communists, why not actually have them be Communists? . I mean, you’re basically complaining that the politics of the 1980s were the politics of the 1980s. No one cared about India and the rest of the global South then, and Japanese and the Commies were the bad guys, and Commies never did anything Communist. That’s all bog standard 1980s trope, so yeah, completely defined by their times.
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Dec 4, 2022 22:43
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skeleton warrior posted:I mean, you’re basically complaining that the politics of the 1980s were the politics of the 1980s. No one cared about India and the rest of the global South then, and Japanese and the Commies were the bad guys That was rightwing in the 1980s too.
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Dec 4, 2022 22:47
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skeleton warrior posted:I mean, you’re basically complaining that the politics of the 1980s were the politics of the 1980s. No one cared about India and the rest of the global South then, and Japanese and the Commies were the bad guys, and Commies never did anything Communist. That’s all bog standard 1980s trope, so yeah, completely defined by their times. So we agree that it lacked imagination, but your argument is that that's good?
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Dec 4, 2022 23:28
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Oh dear me posted:That was rightwing in the 1980s too. In the sense that all media was right-wing in the 1980s, sure Carbolic posted:So we agree that it lacked imagination, but your argument is that that's good? I’m not making any argument, just pointing out that it was parroting the political thinking of the 1980s, if that’s what you mean by ‘lacking imagination’, then sure, we agree
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Dec 4, 2022 23:45
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Carbolic posted:The original factions in some ways were rich and interesting and in other ways suffered from a painful lack of imagination. It's the 1980s so who are the future powers? Space America, Space West Germany, Space China-Russia, Space Japan and Space Democracy-Doesn't-Work. India and the rest of the global South? Nah. Who are the bad guys? The evil, incompetent communists and the barbaric Japanese. But at the macro level of the story, everyone is just Space Feudalism led by a noble house leader. If you're going to have Space Communists, why not actually have them be Communists? They couldn’t even predict reunification? Real loving visionary sci-fi that can’t see ahead 6 years.
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