PulpCruciFiction's page

I hate it when players play the same freaking character in every game, campaign, one-shot, whatever, especially when that character is annoying, unbalancing, or a thinly-veiled excuse to force PvP. We have two archetypes in my local group: (1) the completely amoral rogue type who hides from combat yet somehow manages to get to the corpse of all fallen opponents by virtue of the fact that the player shrieks the words “LOOT THE BODY” before anyone else, and (2) the “secretly” evil necromancer whose player consorted with the DM during character creation so that the entire game is about his plans to destroy everyone else and take over the world. This has happened more than once with these people.

I hate that 75% of all RPG’s run in my group when I’m not DM are completely random nonsense-fests that are supposed to be funny based on how CRAZY they are. Whoo, God appears and you kill him! Isn’t that CRAZY? Hey, now you turn into a 10-foot tall cyborg monkey, and you turn into a crackhead with the power to destroy the world! CRAZY!!!

Now, I want to phrase the next rant to avoid generalizations. I don’t have any problem with people having varied styles of gameplay. If you and your friends have a good time playing in a way that’s different from the way I do it, that’s great. But I hate that I have to play with people who came to the game from MMORPG’s, and as a result they see the game as an exercise in making their character the best to the exclusion of everything else, including the fun of other players. I don’t mean to suggest that this is typical of people who started out with online gaming, but it certainly is the case with my group – the people most obsessed with WoW are the ones who ignore everything but their own characters, b~%@~ about how the game is lame or boring when things don’t go their way (literally down to their failure to make a roll), and then spend hours talking about how great their characters are or how great their “plans” were, when those plans only involved them pulling random crap out of nowhere and the DM randomly deciding that it worked, no RP’ing involved.

I also hate that, as a result of the abovementioned players, there is little to no actual RP’ing going on in our RPG’s, outside of short and bloody interrogation of fallen foes. I hate that important NPC’s have no dialogue through the course of a campaign because of this and are reduced to plot points. I hate that half of the players painstakingly create realistic characters with compelling backgrounds which are ignored for at best fifteen seconds of exposition in favor of another player’s fifty-third necromancer and his demon buddies.

Another thing I really hate hate hate is having to drive over an hour to DM a game, then always having to buy my own food when I arrive there, when I’d be perfectly content to host the game and switch off providing food for everyone. I wind up buying a bunch of food with them and then leaving the leftovers – basically subsidizing their groceries! I also hate that, upon arriving to DM the game, the host randomly puts on some DVD in the background (Lord of the Rings wasn’t so bad, but after that was Dodgeball and Futurama). Not the most conducive environment to gaming.

And yet I love D&D so much that I’m willing to put up with all of this and more just to play it on a semi-regular basis. Whew.

I'm not sure about that - the current version of Mickey is a derivative of the Mickey from Steamboat Willie. I can't remember the exact rules regarding derivatives (other than the original copyright owner can stop deriviatives of that copyright), but is stands to reason that even though the subsequent derivative versions of Mickey created by Disney are independently copyrighted, you could still come up with your own derivative version based on Steamboat Willie Mickey. Just like you can come up with a deriviative version of the Wizard of Oz characters until your eyes bleed.

And considering (i) how lightly the Supreme Court took the constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Act and (ii) the Court's more conservative composition since that time, I can't see any legal challenge in the near future from stopping the extension of the copyright term. I think it's much more likely that copyright law will be changed in some way through an act of Congress. Since Disney's not going anywhere, such a change will undoubtedly protect him, but maybe it would also put more stuff in the public domain.

I agree that you could make the argument that your version of Mickey was a derivative of Steamboat Willie, but you'd have to prove that you didn't draw from Disney's later derivatives which remain under copyright, which is where Disney's juggernaut of a legal machine would step in.

ericthecleric wrote:

Under the copyright laws, it should be possible to produce a CD/DVD (or whatever format’s current then) of issues 1-140 about 70 years after the all the contributors are dead

Disney will put a stop to this. I know that sounds odd, but everytime Steamboat willy and associated art and media come up for general use from copyright protection, Disney goes to court and gets the law pushed further and further out. As long as Disney can make money on Mikey we aren't going to see the copyrights for things that occured after Steamboat Willy come up for use.

*DOH! Sebastion beat me to this one... guess I should read the whole thread before posting.*

Sean Mahoney

That's true, though the constitutional argument against extending copyright law is going to get stronger the further it gets pushed. What interests me is when Mickey finally drops into the public domain, how much of him can be publicly used? My guess is that only the material that has fallen out of copyright can be used as a basis for new works, meaning that if you wanted to make a Mickey Mouse cartoon without Disney's permission, you could only do so with the specific version of Mickey from "Steamboat Willie."

That's right. There are actually eight modules in the series, two for each standard class. I've only played one of them (Thief's Challenge II), but it was enjoyable, with a good mix of combat and intrigue.

Not that I could really be considered a fully-functioning board community member, but I'm a 3L in law school at the moment. Nobody else at the school is into gaming so far as I know, so I'm forced to go play at my girlfriend's undergrad school.

The funny thing is that, when gaming, I tend to skew away from the rules-lawyer mentality and in favor of emphasizing story. Maybe that will help when I've got clients with bad legal arguments but decent factual ones.

Essentially they can't revoke the old OGL, but they could make a new edition that does not make use of the OGL.

No 4e OGL means licencing for 3rd party 4e products.

Exactly. The OGL for 3rd edition would probably remain, depending on the language of the OGL itself, so other companies could still utilize 3rd edition rules, but Wizards could easily not make the 4th edition rules open source, meaning that people would have to pay to use them.

The trademark stuff mentioned above doesn't apply here - trademarks are indicators that a product is created by a certain company, like the paizo.com logo in the upper left corner of the screen here. The OGL is a copyright issue. What Wizards has done is granted a free license to other companies who wish to use its rules, not abandoned its rights in the material altogether.

My religion never conflicted with my gaming habits (I was pretty much raised agnostic), though my next door neighbor's parents' beliefs delayed the start of my D&D experimentation, and it's become an issue with several people since then.

My neighbor's parents had told my mother all of those 80's urban legends about the game and how it leads to Satanic rites or whatever, so she wouldn't let me try it until my cousin's family had started playing and told her that it was fine. Only much later did I find out that my father had played first edition years before I was born, while he was in the Army.

Later on, my girlfriend's parents, who are Catholic, got upset because I had introduced her to the game. I understood their concern based on the generally bad reputation D&D still has in those circles, but I did find the fact that they simply took what other people had told them as gospel to be irritating. What was worse was that I took the time to explain to them exactly what the game was, what it was all about, how it was played, that it actually helped develop social and problem-solving skills, and that in essence our games essentially boil down to good vs. evil. They listened to what I had to say, but as soon as I left they went back to disparaging the game and talking about how dangerous it was. Later, I lent her a White Wolf book, and her mother, a college graduate, told her that she could "feel evil spirits" around the book. They let her play the game, but they still think it has some kind of negative influence.

Well, technically my first character was one of the pre-gens from the AD&D starter set my mom bought me in middle school. All I remember is that there was a female thief named Slinker in there.

The first character I ever created myself, using the AD&D 2d Edition books, was a female half-elfin ranger/druid named Mystique. The object was to get a character with the most exotic powers and least restrictions possible, for maximum immediate hack-slashery. I was in seventh grade at the time.

Mystique is still alive, around ninth level, though we haven't played her party in a few years. Though I do have a soft spot for her, the other character I created for the party is probably my sentimental favorite of all the characters I've created.

Another quick update: after some very, very basic research on the topic, it appears that federal law does allow for criminal prosecution based on copyright infringement, but only if it is done for a commercial purpose, which the infringement in this case is decidedly not. You might want to check your state laws just to be absolutely certain you're not culpable there, though.

Hey, just wanted to throw my two cents in on the reproduction issue. I'm in law school, though I haven't yet taken copyright, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

The primary thing to remember is that copyright is a matter of civil law for the most part, meaning that the government isn't going to bash your door in and prosecute you for reproducing the magazine. What that law does is create a cause of action, which would enable the publishers of the magazine to sue you for copyright infringement in that case, like the RIAA is suing the kids who download music. While that might mean that the Kinko's guy won't copy your stuff, that's just because his company wants to be absolutely free of liability. Assuming you're just using the copyrighted material for the enjoyment of yourself and your friends, the publisher would probably have no desire to sue you, although theoretically it would be within their rights to do so.

The only thing this doesn't account for, that I can think of, is the FBI warning before cassette tapes and DVDs, which threatens with criminal prosecution for duplication. I'll take a look at the law in this area and let you know what I come up with.