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Glazius posted:There's also a DW setting called Pirate World. It was kickstarted and PDFs were distributed to backers, but it seems like the creator's just dropped off the Internet; it never hit print and it's not even sold anywhere. I'm sharing my copy of it. Oh hey I think I kickstarted that. Not sure I ever actually looked at it
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Apr 2, 2021 13:54
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Glazius posted:There's also a DW setting called Pirate World. It was kickstarted and PDFs were distributed to backers, but it seems like the creator's just dropped off the Internet; it never hit print and it's not even sold anywhere. I'm sharing my copy of it. Wait, this released? I vaguely remember backing it back when DW hacks were popping up like weeds and forgetting all about it. e: oh wait, I have this; I just completely forgot it existed.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:11
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Evil Mastermind posted:Wait, this released? I vaguely remember backing it back when DW hacks were popping up like weeds and forgetting all about it. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:34
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Evil Mastermind posted:Wait, this released? I vaguely remember backing it back when DW hacks were popping up like weeds and forgetting all about it. Yeah, for some reason for a lot of these early hacks, cross-statting with Fate was also popular? I've got Inverse World and Grim World that also did that.
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Apr 4, 2021 03:43
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Leperflesh posted:
Just how out of print is that game? If it's within the last, say, ten years or so, I think we'd better nix the openly sharing it part. Sorry.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:00
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Leperflesh posted:Just how out of print is that game? If it's within the last, say, ten years or so, I think we'd better nix the openly sharing it part. Sorry. It's never actually been in print; I only have this copy because I backed the kickstarter. The website provided in the PDF no longer exists and I can't find any place to buy it on the internet. The Kickstarter itself was rather ill-fated and never delivered the print copies it was supposed to, as far as I can tell. From the PDF licensing, it's using a Wikipedia-style attribution/sharealike license and I'm not 100% on my CC licensing but I think I'm clear there?
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Apr 4, 2021 05:26
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"Is a game that was never released out of print?" Is some real modern zen
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Apr 4, 2021 05:47
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Is there really a statue of limitations on abandonware before it's considered free range?
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Apr 4, 2021 06:04
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Glazius posted:From the PDF licensing, it's using a Wikipedia-style attribution/sharealike license and I'm not 100% on my CC licensing but I think I'm clear there? This is the part that matters, actually. If the material is explicitly granting you permission to share, than that's cool and fine. I assumed that the author/publisher had retained full copyright. BlackIronHeart posted:Is there really a statue of limitations on abandonware before it's considered free range? Absolutely not. Rather, there is a longstanding tradition that the site's owner is OK with continuing, that at some point the likelihood that he'll get a letter from a lawyer is low enough he doesn't care anymore. However, there is also a recognition that neither the mods nor the users (well, most of the users) are lawyers, and so we're not expected to find exactly the legal line. Instead we're supposed to err on the side of caution in these matters. "I can't find the author" doesn't mean the author can't find us, five years from now, basically. But hobby-published RPGs from the 1980s that you can find PDFs of on every roleplaying forum are not ever going to be a problem. Some fuzzy place in between those two is where we draw a fuzzy line.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:27
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I am not a lawyer, and I am normally pretty hard-line on copyright issues, but I have vast disdain for the rights of people who don't fulfill their Kickstarter obligations.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:36
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Oh, I assumed what Glazius was saying was the KS was fulfilled but then nothing else happened. If the creator stiffed everyone who bought a physical book, lol yeah gently caress them. Not that a lawyer or court would agree that means they give up their copyright rights, but: the creator is unlikely to have the gall to sue people over infringement while still not having delivered product they owed backers.
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Apr 4, 2021 08:47
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The KS dropped PDFs for backers but then the creator hosed off and nobody's heard anything since. Pirate World PDF posted:The text contained in this work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, and will be available online: see https://www.unpopular-mechanics.com/pw/ for details.
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Apr 4, 2021 14:34
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he still logs into kickstarter according to his profile but the personal website it links to is down and i'm not going to friend the guy on his linked facebook to ask him anything about if it's cool to share the pdf
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Apr 4, 2021 14:44
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Leperflesh posted:This is the part that matters, actually. If the material is explicitly granting you permission to share, than that's cool and fine. I assumed that the author/publisher had retained full copyright. As a matter of detail, granting a license under CC or most any other license still preserves the copyright as owned by the author/publisher/grantor. They do not lose any of their rights or control, and are in fact exercising that control in order to apply (and enforce) the license in question. A copyright assignment is a different sort of contract. (I’m not a lawyer but I spent a lot of time in the license mines of CC and open source software.)
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Apr 4, 2021 14:46
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Glazius posted:Yeah, for some reason for a lot of these early hacks, cross-statting with Fate was also popular? I've got Inverse World and Grim World that also did that. And god, I backed Grim World too. I was so bad at just autobacking every drat DW kickstarter that came down the pike.
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Apr 4, 2021 19:58
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Slightly unusual advice ask: My wife likes puzzle video games like Kami, Gorogoa, Baba Is You, The Witness, etc. Does anyone have any recs for puzzle books that are along similar lines? Searching for puzzle books in Amazon just brings up a bajillion sudokus and crosswords, that's not the kind of puzzle I'm looking for.
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Apr 4, 2021 23:01
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Cicero posted:Slightly unusual advice ask: My wife likes puzzle video games like Kami, Gorogoa, Baba Is You, The Witness, etc. Does anyone have any recs for puzzle books that are along similar lines? Searching for puzzle books in Amazon just brings up a bajillion sudokus and crosswords, that's not the kind of puzzle I'm looking for. I know of this http://www.lonesharkgames.com/maze/
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Apr 4, 2021 23:09
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Len posted:I know of this That it has a narrative is a great idea, the whole "you like this type of puzzle? Well here's EIGHT HUNDRED OF THEM IN A ROW, one after the other, no context no nothin'!" setup that so many puzzle books have sounds terrible and exhausting, even if you like that kind of puzzle.
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Apr 4, 2021 23:16
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Cicero posted:Slightly unusual advice ask: My wife likes puzzle video games like Kami, Gorogoa, Baba Is You, The Witness, etc. Does anyone have any recs for puzzle books that are along similar lines? Searching for puzzle books in Amazon just brings up a bajillion sudokus and crosswords, that's not the kind of puzzle I'm looking for. This one is a classic; Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle
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Apr 4, 2021 23:20
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drrockso20 posted:This one is a classic; This was my first thought as well. The illustrations are very nice & the puzzle is engaging.
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Apr 5, 2021 03:29
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Subjunctive posted:As a matter of detail, granting a license under CC or most any other license still preserves the copyright as owned by the author/publisher/grantor. They do not lose any of their rights or control, and are in fact exercising that control in order to apply (and enforce) the license in question. A copyright assignment is a different sort of contract. Yes, that's correct. A sharealike style license doesn't give up copyright, but it does mean that there's no legal peril for Jeffrey of YOSPOS from goons sharing the content, provided they're not violating the terms of the license. Typically, violations include stripping off the license and/or the author's name, actually selling the work for money, editing the text and then passing it off as the author's work, etc. The license DigitalRaven quoted actually grants permission to adapt, as well, provided you release your adaptation under the same license. When I said "retained full copyright" that was a mistake of phrasing and not what I meant to say, lol. There's probably a legal phrase for this. If the author has not granted you a license, directly or via a publicly offered license to everyone, then your only legal rights to copy the work are those granted by free use laws. Anyway. Point is I don't mind folks sharing that work since the author granted permission to do so via license. Glad it all worked out great, thanks!
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Apr 5, 2021 03:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well Fate Core came out around the same time DW was getting popular, and it's an easy system to convert to. There was a lot of Fate cross-promotion at the time. Oh man, big same. I have a collection of poorly made PbtA knockoffs.
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Apr 6, 2021 19:27
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So, I'm in the process of writing up a FATAL & Friends for Supers & Sorcery, that "5e medieval fantasy but superheroes!" thing. I am a sample size of one, so my question to you goons is what exactly would you want out of a tabletop superhero RPG? I know that 5e is a terrible fit regardless, but I want to make sure I can nail discussion of the genre conventions as well as the mechanics in terms of grading its emulation.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:11
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A big problem I find with superhero games is that the "superhero genre" includes pretty much everything. So people making superhero games often get sidetracked into making a universal engine. The big example is Champions becoming the Hero System. The problem is that universal engines don't do genre emulation well, at least not without being a "toolkit" game with lots of "optional plugins" to fiddle with. As a result, they make a supers game where Captain America is just flat-out not as good as some third-string character like Wonder Man, since the rules don't account for things besides raw power level. So to actually answer the question, succinctly, you gotta be able to run an action scene with the Avengers or JLA where every character matters and contributes to the scene. If Batman immediately gets red-misted by some glorified goon, it's not a good system for running superhero games! Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 22:27
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Halloween Jack posted:A big problem I find with superhero games is that the "superhero genre" includes pretty much everything. So people making superhero games often get sidetracked into making a universal engine. The big example is Champions becoming the Hero System. Right. To do superheroes, you gotta do super powers, and super powers can be pretty much anything, so either a) the designers provide a finite list of super-schticks to choose from (which provides an easy route to justify supplements to add more) or b) they create a subsystem to allow players to custom build their powers (the Champions route). I've never managed to be satisfied by either approach; option A always seems to leave out things I want, and option B always seems to become a recondite mess that's too crunchy for my tastes and/or doesn't result in powers that are balanced against one another. So, like, I'm not sure how fair it is to use that as a criteria for grading, since as far as I'm concerned no one's gotten a passing grade yet, but it's always on my mind. I'm always on the lookout for new superhero games that can satisfy my perhaps overly-picky standards, but so far the closest I've come are either too abstract to properly scratch my superfight itch (Worlds in Peril) and/or are games with superheroes in them, but not really *about* the superhero genre per se (Smallville/Cortex+). The search continues... Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 22:47
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Libertad! posted:So, I'm in the process of writing up a FATAL & Friends for Supers & Sorcery, that "5e medieval fantasy but superheroes!" thing. I am a sample size of one, so my question to you goons is what exactly would you want out of a tabletop superhero RPG? I know that 5e is a terrible fit regardless, but I want to make sure I can nail discussion of the genre conventions as well as the mechanics in terms of grading its emulation.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:47
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Basically the features of modern comic book stuff that stand out to me are 1) urban setting 2) fantasy trappings 3) the fantasy elements are not secret e.g. people may not know that Clark Kent is Superman but people know that Superman exists and has a distinctive brand that you can encounter Like the only thing really standing between most WOD games and them being Superhero games is that they're very paranoid, fear-filled settings. Some modest reskinning to get to "Changelings/Werewolves/etc are just known parts of the world that operate with public knowledge (though maybe with hidden identities)" and it's basically just a superhero game. It'd have the various complaints I have about WOD but that's another topic. I have played one superhero campaign that worked pretty well, and it was literally just "Dungeon World but we arbitrarily declared it to take place in the 21st century." The logic was that Winter Mage (and a fair few other playbooks) are better superheros than D&D characters, so we just had a small set of some of the more xmen esque playbooks that we went with. The things that to me are important for a superhero game: keeping the focus on superpowered (aka away from the mundane), opportunities for characters to go ham, and constant unambiguous conflict.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:11
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Libertad! posted:So, I'm in the process of writing up a FATAL & Friends for Supers & Sorcery, that "5e medieval fantasy but superheroes!" thing. I am a sample size of one, so my question to you goons is what exactly would you want out of a tabletop superhero RPG? I know that 5e is a terrible fit regardless, but I want to make sure I can nail discussion of the genre conventions as well as the mechanics in terms of grading its emulation. If you're trying to emulate a particular genre you need to at least put a token effort into mechanically encouraging players to play into it. If I can send people into the negazone and I'm nto supposed to send Lex Luthor to the negazone mid monologue I need a reason other than "ehhhhh come ooooooon" Hostile V posted:Have a concept of scope and scale not be a universal system to play every sort of hero. For the love of god if you're gonna do a hero thing pick a type of hero setting, stick to it and tailor the mechanics and powers to that setting, which should be way more specific than just "comic books the RPG". Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 23:12
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Hostile V posted:Have a concept of scope and scale not be a universal system to play every sort of hero. For the love of god if you're gonna do a hero thing pick a type of hero setting, stick to it and tailor the mechanics and powers to that setting, which should be way more specific than just "comic books the RPG". Or go the Masks route and be much more about the character interaction than how much you can lift/press under optimal conditions. My favorite these days is Sentinel Comics which is really more of a comic simulator than super RPG.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:13
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The two big things for me are "I'll use my Bat________" and "Aunt May Problems". By the former I mean having to figure out how to effectively use my super powers to solve the problem I'm facing - almost more like a puzzle then a fight. Which means I like well-defined crunchy powers, with lots of flexibility and negotiation about using them. For the second part, I mean I'm a messy bword who wants to constantly be involved in soap opera level drama constantly, and I really want the game to encourage me to do so. Otherwise I feel like i'm just hogging the spotlight.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:14
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Tibalt posted:The two big things for me are "I'll use my Bat________" and "Aunt May Problems". By the former I mean having to figure out how to effectively use my super powers to solve the problem I'm facing - almost more like a puzzle then a fight. Which means I like well-defined crunchy powers, with lots of flexibility and negotiation about using them. No crunchy powers though, sorry.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:16
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Was that intentional? Like, my understanding is that the system was designed to foster Silver Age style drama where everything in Peter Parker's life is hosed up.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:36
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Splicer posted:If you are going to do a game where Captain America and Superman are both playable characters you either need a strict tier system so that they never end up in the same party or try to fight the same opponents or strong direct narrative impacting mechanics so that Captain America player gets as much narrative control as the Superman player even though he has far fewer raw numbers and abilities. After years of watching Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice, etc, I have come to terms that heroes just rise to the level they need to to matter. Batman slaps on electric knuckle dusters, Vigilante crashes his motorcyle into the bad guy and shoots the gas tank, whatever. Since the comics and their accompanying other sources of media rarely seem concerned with measuring who can strictly punch harder between heroes, I tend to prefer games where I don't have to do that stuff either.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:06
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Libertad! posted:So, I'm in the process of writing up a FATAL & Friends for Supers & Sorcery, that "5e medieval fantasy but superheroes!" thing. I am a sample size of one, so my question to you goons is what exactly would you want out of a tabletop superhero RPG? I know that 5e is a terrible fit regardless, but I want to make sure I can nail discussion of the genre conventions as well as the mechanics in terms of grading its emulation. To be honest, in this context "superhero" feels a lot like "anime" in that it's entirely too broad to make a decent game out of without seriously focusing down genre-wise. I will say that most of my favorite superhero stories are about the kind of people who regularly fight monsters, as opposed to stories just about fighting monsters. theironjef posted:After years of watching Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice, etc, I have come to terms that heroes just rise to the level they need to to matter. Batman slaps on electric knuckle dusters, Vigilante crashes his motorcyle into the bad guy and shoots the gas tank, whatever. Since the comics and their accompanying other sources of media rarely seem concerned with measuring who can strictly punch harder between heroes, I tend to prefer games where I don't have to do that stuff either. Absolutely this! If you're not going to have a Super Sentai/Kamen Rider style game where everyone has a similar power source this is much better than fiddly measurements.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:14
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Halloween Jack posted:Was that intentional? Like, my understanding is that the system was designed to foster Silver Age style drama where everything in Peter Parker's life is hosed up.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:18
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theironjef posted:After years of watching Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice, etc, I have come to terms that heroes just rise to the level they need to to matter. Batman slaps on electric knuckle dusters, Vigilante crashes his motorcyle into the bad guy and shoots the gas tank, whatever. Since the comics and their accompanying other sources of media rarely seem concerned with measuring who can strictly punch harder between heroes, I tend to prefer games where I don't have to do that stuff either. Yeah, you can do generic 'super hero' game, but imo it has to be narrative driven. I think it's a trap to go with a mechanically crunchy system with 'power levels' and just expect everyone be the same tier. It's definitely important the system and group can help folks figure out if the tone and scope is gonna be Superfriends, Suicide Squad, or Justice League, or Defenders though.
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Apr 7, 2021 03:45
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Consistently the hardest problem I have with getting people into a supers game is that something seems to be broken in a lot of my friends regarding their ability to just earnestly make a superhero. You know, costume, powers, codename that references those powers. Can be a little silly, no problem. But every time it's like "Make a regular superhero" "I made an angry broken man with no powers and a terrible disease." "Make a superhero without deconstructing the genre." "I made the ubermensch but he's a terrible goblin it turns out." "Make a guy named [something] lad, where something is the kind of powers he has." I made Gangrene Lad, he died of gangrene some time ago." Maybe they're just loving with me, who knows.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:16
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theironjef posted:Consistently the hardest problem I have with getting people into a supers game is that something seems to be broken in a lot of my friends regarding their ability to just earnestly make a superhero. You know, costume, powers, codename that references those powers. Can be a little silly, no problem. But every time it's like "Make a regular superhero" "I made an angry broken man with no powers and a terrible disease." "Make a superhero without deconstructing the genre." "I made the ubermensch but he's a terrible goblin it turns out." "Make a guy named [something] lad, where something is the kind of powers he has." I made Gangrene Lad, he died of gangrene some time ago."  Come to think of it, I've read a few superhero games like Masks but I've never had the chance to play a superhero game even though I'd really like to.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:24
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Agent Rush posted:
Superhero gaming as a whole is a very different ball game from many other genres. It’s where tactical and narrative experiences clash hardest, as does power fantasy and group narration.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:35
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theironjef posted:Consistently the hardest problem I have with getting people into a supers game is that something seems to be broken in a lot of my friends regarding their ability to just earnestly make a superhero. You know, costume, powers, codename that references those powers. Can be a little silly, no problem. But every time it's like "Make a regular superhero" "I made an angry broken man with no powers and a terrible disease." "Make a superhero without deconstructing the genre." "I made the ubermensch but he's a terrible goblin it turns out." "Make a guy named [something] lad, where something is the kind of powers he has." I made Gangrene Lad, he died of gangrene some time ago." The Marvel films play it surprisingly straight on this front.
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