"Doctor, there's an infection in my dice-throwing hand."
"Yes, it's ... Gamegrene."
New link added in Gaming, of the pen-and-paper kind. Smart essays without navel-gazing. Some good OGL stuff, and practical guides ot out-of-the-way systems. They're spot-on with a mention that D20 Call of Cthulhu was a well-designed and unjustly discarded system.
Oh, and you'll notice a Creative Commons tag down and to the right. I'm going to start popping up some gaming ideas here soon; some more serious articles on media theory are also due; and some teachers have asked permission to link to and summarize some of the screenwriting articles, so this seemed in order. The CC site itself is very clear and helpful -- I wound up using the cartoons provided to guide me in chossing which variant of license I wanted.
I wonder, although it would take a gamer/lawyer multiclass to be sure (don't allow it, GM's, the Lawyer's front-loaded), whether one could fold the OGL concept of D20 gaming into a specific Creative Commons license. Anyone?
11 comments:
Beware. While CC may be a good license guide, you should always have your own lawyer, sometimes two. The only thing worse than haveing a lawyer is not having a lawyer.
Beware. While CC may be a good license guide, you should always have your own lawyer, sometimes two. The only thing worse than haveing a lawyer is not having a lawyer.
I just want Top Secret to come back. Many a night was lost to playing Top Secret when I was a kid (of course we used the "Q Book" from the James Bond game for weapons and gadgets).
OGL = Open Gaming License.
The problem (I'm simplifying here, but bear with me) with role-playing games as they boom/busted through their cycles is that you had to learn a different conflict resolution/dice system for each genre/gameworld. And each was copywritten -- so if you wanted to write something for a game, or even design a game, you had to grind out your own non-infringing dice system AND/OR get permission from incredibly byzantine, poorly run (on the average) gaming companies. It was an industry which fit the small-press model beautifully, but wasn't operating under small-press rules.
The designers of the last edition of D&D (with Ryan Dancey taking point) essentially Linuxed the rules -- the game system of using a twenty-sided die itself was now "open-source."
There were other, more subtle business motivations to this decision, but it was a startling precedent. Now small game companies coudl spring up, write supplements, etc. using the D20 (or D&D for you non-players) rule system -- which would create a market-space worth of free advertising for the D20 rules sytem, which then made it the dominant "first blurt" identity of what role-playing was all about, etc. etc, goodness all around.
After an intitial boom, the market is settling out. But the result in my mind, is a much more vibrant, interesting gaming landscape -- not because D20 is such a great system (I prefer Unisystem, actually, adn Savage Worlds kicks monstrous ass), but that influx of new blood and heightened awareness really kicked things about. Creative people who wanted to tell STORIES but weren't rules jockeys, could now contribute to the gaming world in a much more streamlined way. It was also, quite frankly, a variant of Creative Commons concepts before CC got big.
Just found GameGrene, eh? Great site, I've been reading them for sometime now.
...as far as a horror game that's easy, I like "vs.monsters". Phillip J. Reed wrote the original game in 24hrs, inspired by McCloud's 24hour comic.
FREE download here.
www.philipjreed.com/downloads/vsmonsterslow.pdf
TG
Actually, there's an anime series which publishes the D20 stats of its heroes. The name escapes me -- Ross would know.
If GF had gone, I would have done "Night of the Cattle Mutilators" from my Modern D20 game as an ep. You can hunt up the storyline in the messgaeboards over at ENWorld.
CoC classic is nice, but right now I dig Savage Worlds -- ran a game when Devon Grayson was in town with vampires, transgendered Sailor Moons, Matrix agents, a baby proto-mass and a Johnny Socko robot and the whole thing ran smooth as butter.
Well, since WOTC released the pre-painted figurines, the barrier's come down somewhat. It wasn't the figurines themselves, I think, it was the fact that painting and preparing them took hours, the expenditure of which implied a committment to the hobby which often accompanied obsessiveness.
To be honest, however, pretty much everyone's who's tossed a D20 has used a figurine to track movement at some point. And one may wish to remember that the tradition of figurines is linearly descended from HG Wells and his rules on miniatures battles (I think it was Small Armies); and even more, that such tactical and strategic analysis of military battles was considered a more then respectable hobby, and indeed a useful tool in the serious study of military history at the time.
There will always be a schism between the "beer-and-pretzel" players and the "elf-ears at the con" players.
Thanks so much for this post, really helpful material.
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