wbcreighton

"Would", "if"? Man, this actually happened. Wizards wanted to shut down 3.x edition, but here enter the Paizo guys (and gals), and - lo and behold - Pathfinder is born. And please note that Pathfinder is a clone, not an OGL product.

What makes you say that it is not an OGL product. It has a Reference document here:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

The reference document has been constantly updated as they have released new material for the game.

It says on this page:

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is released under the Open Game License, meaning the core rules that drive the Pathfinder RPG system are available to anyone to use for free under the terms of the OGL. This compendium of rules, charts, and tables contains all of the open rules in the system, and is provided for the use of the community of gamers and publishers working with the system.

I realize it states that the PRD is not the official game, but neither were the WotC SRDs.

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

I don't own ME:AoE but I bought ME:AoC in print ( I haven't read it yet, but it looks superb). The only way that someone could do what you are saying is if the OGL allowed for it or the owners of the copyright made it OGC. There should be a statement in the book designating what is OGC and what is not OGC.

I think that if Mongoose was worried about it, they would specify which sections of the document were OGC and which were not.

Someone mentioned that it seems ok to reproduce the rules on a web site. I actually don't see the difference between having the rules on a web site or having them in a file on my computer. The difference to me is that I don't make money when I check a rule in a file, whereas the web site owner may be making advertising money if I visit their site.

Having said that, I understand why you would feel the way you do.

According to Ryan Dancey one of the main ideas behind the OGL was to prevent the rules for DnD ever going into limbo because the owning company went bankrupt. Which is what almost happened before TSR was saved by Wizards of the Coast.

All the text of this book is designated as Open Content – this means you are free to use

the Open Game Licence (overleaf ) to reproduce this text and build upon it with your own

scenarios and mechanics. You can even print and sell such work, if that is your desire (and we

would wish you the very best of luck if you choose to do this!).

This is text from the Monsters of Legend pdf. I highlighted certain text.

Although fully within the terms of the OGL, unless this was released as a free supplement, I would be very uncomfortable with this.

What would make you feel uncomfortable about it ? I am led to believe that if Mongoose did not want someone to re-use the text in another format they would not put a page in the document saying that the whole document ( excluding images ) is OGC. Having a text document with the OGC text sans illustrations is in no way going to prevent people from buying the formatted illustrated pdf from Mongoose. I bought the Monsters pdf myself.

If I wrote something for Legend under the OGL and found that it had been copied into a text document and posted as a free download then I would think again about using the OGL. In fact, I would then make rules stuff OGC and everything else protected, which really defeats the point of Legend.

I think if I was an author, I would definitely think about protecting my writing under the OGL before it was published, and make sure I understood exactly how the OGL works. Mongoose is fully aware of how the OGL functions, and it is their fully informed business strategy to publish under the OGL, and to make all of the text OGC. The Legend pdf is still the hottest pdf on drivethrurpg, and Equipment of Legend is #3.

Just saw this on MovieCentral here in Canada. Really enjoyed it. Had some good drama, a good character, some action and some humorous parts. Could definitely have some good roleplaying possibilities.

Someone who purchased it could even copy and paste the text (including the OGL) into a text document and we could all see exactly what is included, since all of the Legend line is OGC.

I'm new to d100. I've spent some time looking at Openquest this month. I'm having trouble figuring out which game I should focus on as a beginner.

So, what is your best advice for someone new? What are the big differences between the various games?

The first question I would ask is: What genre of game are you looking to run ? Fantasy, ScFi, Modern, multiple genres ?

Thanks. I just got my copy from amazon last week. My first impressions are very good. I like the idea of having a campaign to introduce beginning players to the setting ( similar to the old RQ Borderlands campaign pack).

I think it might be handy to have a 1 or 2 page pdf introduction/overview of the empire for prospective purchasers/players to give them a taste of the flavour of the setting. There is a lot more to this setting than I thought when I ordered it.

I think it is related to trademark law. John Carter and Barsoom are trademarks of ERB Inc. or something like that. Same with Tarzan.

In the meantime I will be posting a free pdf scenario to slot in to the adventure thread in the main book to coincide with the availability of the Legend rules. Should be up later this week.

Did this get posted somewhere yet ?

In the end, I think that she got it right. For those who express such criticisms, there is Forgotten Realms.

I think a better analogy might be Dark Sun. The decadent, harsh, and gritty feel of Dark Sun would be closer to CoFE. Because FR is so different from the feel of CoFE your written comments came across as slagging FR.

Dark Sun also started as a campaign in small area ( city state) of a larger world, and the world got fleshed out with the supplements that followed. I would probably try to run a campaign set in Dark Sun before trying to set it in in CoFE. Even though I would need to convert the material to BRP, I know the setting material exists for Dark Sun. In order to run a campaign beyond the scenarios in CoFE, I'll have to invent most of the setting. Given my limited time I would rather do the conversion of existing scenarios. I would run the scenarios for CoFE that are available, then wait for more to be published...

Now if a company like Alephtar or Cubicle 7 was publishing material for the setting, I would feel confident that more material was on the horizon, and I would be more likely to consider a campaign using it as a setting.

Is the adventure in BRP Adventures "Escape from the Slavelands" in any way related to CoFE ?

This is the scenario in the compilation. I ran it as one shot using Fantasy Grounds a year and a half ago. Players really liked it. Hence my question last year.

Honestly you can't go wrong buying the $1 pdf of the Legend core rules:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=97239

D101 games has a nice d100 "Conanesque" supplement:

http://d101games.co.uk/books/openquest/the-savage-north/

http://basicroleplaying.com/showthread.php/2482-THE-SAVAGE-NORTH

Presumably, the Mongoose release of the Legend PDF is a 'loss leader' of sorts too.

I do note that a Pathfinder RPG representative was on the same forum and made it plain that their Basic box set was still profitable.

Well that is good to hear. They do seem to know what they are doing at Paizo.

- but box sets can't be done electronically. If you want to keep game retailers in the loop - and keep a brand identity on the shelf - then it's a point worth considering.

You can get the contents of the boxed set and the additional material for the Paizo Beginner box in PDF format. They think of everything.

If you subscribe to any of the Paizo products you get a free pdf copy of it. Including their fiction line.

If true, it's a sad insight into trying to run a business without knowing what you're doing.

OTOH, 'loss leaders' serve a purpose. Getting a significant increase of people introduced to your product is worth something, too. Then those new players will need to buy books, on which there would hopefully be a better profit.

And I'll say it again; boardgames come in boxes. With fiddly bits. Is every gaming company losing money on boxed boardgames? Really?

I would guess that they are pricing their product with greater insight.

He also adds his definition of hobby game (rpg):

I define a Hobby Game as one where (at least one person) spends more time preparing to play the game than actually playing it. For TRPGs that is usually the GM, but often it is players as well. This “out of game time” may be the biggest obstacle to overcome to keeping the TRPG platform competitive.

I think that commercially successful TRPGs of the future will be constructed more like a family game – something that can be unpacked, learned quickly, and played with little prep work. These games will give people a lot of the same joy of “roleplaying” and narrative control that they get from today’s Hobby Game TRPGs but with a fraction of the time investment. Wizards is already experimenting with this format, as is Fantasy Flight Games. It seems like a good bet that there is a substantially profitable business down this line of evolution.

I find that as I have aged, I have less and less time to devote to preparing a game. I don't have the time to invent an entire world for every campaign. Doesn't mean I enjoy gaming and rping less, but it does mean I will steer towards a game that has prepared scenarios etc.

On the topic of boxed sets I'm quoting an article from Ryan Dancey found here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/315800-4-hours-w-rsd-escapist-bonus-column.html

It gives an idea of why rpg content doesn't come in boxes very often. I tend to think that Paizo is doing a loss leader with their PF Starter Boxed set.

The first was that the products the industry was producing had become too costly. The boxed set, in particular, was a huge problem. The cost of a boxed set vs. a hardcover book was often a multiple, rather than a percentage. The cost of a hardcover vs. a softcover book was also substantial. In fact, we found several high profile D&D products that were costing the company more to make than the suggested retail price of those products! This issue was endemic throughout the industry, since many publishers assumed they had to “keep up” with TSR in order to be competitive. But TSR wasn’t acting rationally, and had set its suggested retail prices based on its opinion of what the market would pay, not based on what they needed to charge in order to make a profit on the things they were publishing.

In this field, we often use a shorthand pricing system called the “Rule of 5”. Under this rule, you determine the suggested price of a product by multiplying the cost of the product by 5. Factoring in the 3-tier distribution system the industry uses, the result is that the final suggested retail price produces the following divisions:

• 20%: Cost of Goods (the cost of the production of the product, plus the wages paid to people who worked on it and any licenses or royalties)

• 20%: Gross Profit (that is, profit before subtracting all operational costs like salaries, marketing, rent, etc.) to the Publisher

• 20%: Distributor Margin (the gross profit the Distributor earns)

• 40%: Retailer Margin (the gross profit the Retailer earns)

This means that every $1 of cost increases the suggested retail price by $5. Some of the things TSR was doing were adding $10 to the cost of its products – which should have added $50 to the suggested retail prices – easily pushing many of those products into the $100 range. Instead, TSR was just losing money every time it sold one of these products. And the people who made those products never knew, because TSR’s dysfunctional management system hid that information from them. It was not until they got to Wizards of the Coast and had a chance to see the “real numbers” that they realized what had been happening.

The entire column is an interesting read. The idea of rpgs generating network effects is also interesting:

We realized that TRPGs fall into a special class of products & services that generate network effects. In our case, the effect that had the most impact was the concept of the network externality. For TRPGs, the “true value” of the product is not in the book/box that you buy. It is in the network of social connections that you share which enable you to play the game. Without that social network, the game’s value is massively reduced (it becomes literature, and there’s a small market for people who like to just read and never play TRPG content).

Although we use FG now, I still visit the Maptool community often and use TokenTool almost exclusively to whip up FG tokens.

Token tool is awesome, it doesn't get any easier.

It is always nice to see cooperation among interested parties. Sometimes when reading these forums you'd think that the publishers were all out to get each other.

Of course maybe it is just a plan to get the others to lower their guard.

There is a good review of Merrie England here:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_reviews.php?products_id=98069&it=1&SRC=newsletter_reviews

I guess my main gripe is that it doesn't frontload all of the stuff the GM has in their toolkit to the players behind the scenes.

In the years I used the software, it was always a slog whenever the GM had a large map to present. This is compounded when you use the Fog of War feature. Granted, I don't use maps often in BRP, so that's not a huge issue.

I haven't really experienced a problem with this so far. I mainly do screenshots of maps from the adventure pdf so that the maps aren't too big. I know you can set images to pre-load when the players log on, but I usually don't do this. Not sure if that is something that makes much of a difference.

I cannot begin to estimate the number of times that save data has been lost when there is an active session

Happy to say I haven't experienced this yet. Fingers crossed.

Modifying the ruleset via the xml files for houserules is easy _if you only want to play with yourself_.

I haven't tried this since I don't have the time or knowledge. A friend is working on a RQ2 ruleset and has put in a lot of hours. Still waiting for it with fingers crossed.

It would be nice to have the option (kind of related to the previous gripe) to turn much or all of the tool set off as a GM. Most times I just want like three buttons/windows, not fourteen. (although I will say that with two monitors it isn't an issue).

I think that the newest programmer to join their team has done some really great improvements, and he has a wishlist of features he is hoping to implement. Never hurts to drop him some suggestions on the forum. Moon_wizard I believe is very responsive.

None of the 20+ people I have gamed with using this software over the years has figured out how to save the quick launch shortcuts between sessions, but many have complained. I would love an answer, haven't ever gotten it on the forums. Our elegant solution has been to save a text file and re-paste the code to the launch bar each session.

Do you mean the short cut keys across the bottom of the FG2 screen or a different feature.

I cannot get it to run on Linux. I know this is possible, but I haven't been able to do it.

I have no clue, and I think the only support for this will be from others users of FG.

All that aside, it is a good piece of software. I wouldn't have dumped nearly as much money into it as I have over the years if I didn't think so.

That is good to hear. I think the changes to the program have been good. Hopefully they will improve your experience. I have been running the program on a relatively new laptop and noticed increased performance since I made the change. I'm guessing the amount of RAM and the processor speed can make a big difference if you are GMing games.

OK, and opinions on Maptools? I ran it for about an hour and had a blast, all without reading any documentation or watching tutorials. Seems pretty user-friendly so far, but obviously doesn't do all the rules-set stuff that FG2 does.

I did play around with it early on and it did feel intuitive for the most part. I'm not a programmer so the thought of trying to get it into shape to play a rule system that I wanted just didn't really make sense for me. It is very good at being a map centric tool, focussing on fog of war and token movement etc.

One advantage that users really focus on it that it is free. I've seen discussions about how the program is free and that cost should be the only consideration. Well the problem from my standpoint is that free programs tend to have very little support, or sporadic at best. It is a very handy program that does what it specializes in very well. I used it to create the maps for the Apple Lane side trek adventure. If I used maptools for online gaming, I would want to use something to keep track of combat and for displaying the chat, and something for dice rolls. Because I can get all of those things with FG, that is what I use. Other people might have ideas of what you could use with maptools to make a functional online game.

Hi Bostoff, thanks for the reply.

I'd like to take the opportunity to give this a shot. (I'm also considering Maptools, which looks very simple but doesn't have rules packs.) If you'd be willing to demo as a GM for me, I'd be very grateful. If you don't mind, I'd like to just run the demo version for now. We don't have to actually play a scenario, just work through the features as a demo, as if we were playing. So 3.5 would be adequate for that, if you're in agreement.

So let me know what would be a good time for you. Probably a weeknight after 8pm would work for me (not tonight though, it's my wife's bday!).

Thanks again!

Sure that sounds like a plan. I can usually get free of the kids sometime after 8:30 pm on week nights as well. I'll have to try the demo to see how exactly it is set up to work. I know they made changes to it recently to make it easier to use. I'll let you know when I have a free night to give it a whirl.

Not to piss in anyone's breakfast, but FG is sluggish overhyped software. I have owned FG for about six years and used it extensively. I own a number of paid add ons, including the BRP and CoC mods. IME, FG causes a ton of headaches and makes online games (which are already slower paced than in person ones) grind to a near halt. I have had a lot more luck with Skype/G+ and a shared whiteboard than FG.

I'm not here to hype or over hype Fantasy Grounds. I'm surprised that if the program has been that much of a headache that you have stuck with it and used it extensively for 6 years. I would have given up on it. I have come from playing mostly Play by post (Pbp) to using FG. You can't get any slower that Pbp ! We also use Skype but mainly for OOC stuff. The IC stuff we still type away. It is usually slower than face to face but with some of the improvements that have been made for the 3.5/4e Dnd rulesets combat record keeping can speed things up. When we have bogged down it is usually tech glitches from Skype or user internet connection issues.

Like any type of rp gaming everyone has a different style. Some people prefer to use a VOIP program to speak the IC actions and OOC stuff, just as you would if you were sitting around a table with your friends. Some people prefer to never use a VOIP and want to type in everything. You can do either or some combination of the two. We tend to like to type the IC stuff, just like on a Pbp game. The difference is you get immediate responses, you can see the map and your tokens, you have virtual dice you can roll, and your character sheet is right there on the screen.

I tend to GM games right now and use the Pathfinder ruleset. This ruleset has seen some big improvements recently, and lots of automation has been added. I haven't used BRP extensively, so hopefully the problems that have plagued your group aren't related to that ruleset.

I'd be interested to hear what the actual specific problems were that ground the games to a halt. If those things were happening to us, we would have quit using it right away.

This is a good place to start: http://oberoten.dyndns.org/fgwiki/index.php/Anatomy_of_a_Ruleset. The BRP ruleset itself comes with a customization guide that's very good. You might also have a look at the Library section of the FG2 website. Although best bet is to open a BRP module (change .mod to .zip and extract) and see how it's done.

I haven't ever tried what it is showing at this link, and to be honest IMHO your best best would be to buy/use the BRP ruleset from Chaosium. It will be much easier to make mods to that ruleset.

Having said that, the way to get into using FG is to play a game with someone else GMing the game. It doesn't really matter what ruleset they are using. To play in a game only the GM needs to own the ruleset. The necessary files will be downloaded to your computer. I learned how to use FG by playing in a BRP scenario for a number of sessions. The GM then changed the game to Savage Worlds. The GM owned a Ultimate version of the license so we didn't have to buy the program. It didn't take too many sessions before we ( Blackfoot and I) bought into the program ( you might know me as Bostoff from Gringles ). We have been using it on a weekly basis ever since.

The way I learned how the program works is by watching the videos located here: http://www.fantasygrounds.com/downloads/

Resources:

Top down tokens - http://www.immortalnights.com/tokensite/tokenpacks.html

Map making web site: http://pyromancers.com/dungeon-painter-online/

Free maps: http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/free-stuff/

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27578

http://rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=19

I don't really have any FG adventures that I could post. I have mainly been using pdfs that I cut and paste into FG.

If you are interested maybe we could set up a time for a demo ( I'm in your time zone ). Possibly using the free demo, or one of the free BRP adventures from Alephtar, a short random encounter, or possibly the Star Wars scenarios posted on this site. I have a GM version of FG2, so either you need to buy a lite copy of FG2 or we could try a DnD 3.5 demo.