http://www.amazon.com/Reliance-Products-Luggable-Portable-Gallon/dp/B000FIAPXO

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/

Regarding “fair use” specifically…

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

There’s actually a podcast called Law of the Geek (http://lawofthegeek.com) that is two lawyers who tackle geek topics like this. If you submitted the question, they could probably tell you at what point that would be a problem.

I’d actually be interested in hearing you talk to them since they could dispel a lot of misinformation, which, no offense, David seems to have posted a lot of. ;)

Required disclaimer: not a lawyer, and these are my opinions and not legal advice.

regardless, taking inspiration isn’t copyright infringing. I assume Evil Hat’s game doesn’t use Ang’s name and character/personality, or use other characters/locations/etc from the series… if they did, it’d definitely be illegal, and could get them in trouble (especially if they’re making dollars).

I definitely agree PIPA/SOPA are no good, but people seem to misunderstand what they’re about. copyright infringement is always illegal. PIPA/SOPA are just trying to hold the wrong people responsible.

http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/do-pilgrims-of-flying-temple.html

I have yet to listen to these podcasts, downloading at this moment to Poland, but I have yet to find the topic addressed of using RPGs to specifically create a social network for expatriates away from home. Alan Fine, in Shared Fantasy, observes that a subculture is drawn to the hobby whereas I am saying I am drawing a subculture together as a social network using the hobby. In case I ain’t clear, I am positing the reverse of Fine’s observation can also be true. [Think of the marketing implications to the hobby by what I am demonstrating with foreigners in a foreign country.]

Anyway, looking forward to hearing English between games and, of course, listening to the content of the two podcasts I have (almost) downloaded.

IF anyone wants to play in English in WARSAW, POLAND, hit me up on Twitter. There is always a seat at our table no matter where you’re from. Cheers!

https://twitter.com/#!/feartheboot/status/159371214186479616

Specifically, ideas to talk about. The twitter discussion on the next edition of D&D has raised a bunch of interesting topics that may not have come up recently, or even during the system design series. The discussion was:

-What did people think of one class being more powerful than another?
-Is it okay for different classes to shine at different moments? Should some classes shine more in combat than others?
-What does it mean to “shine” in combat, or in some other situation?
-What does balance mean in this context, and how important is it?

Any of those would be interesting fodder.

The best part of the game wasn’t the being nice part, but the untempered truth from each host. To me, it made this show one of the better ones in awhile.

If we ever do something like that again, I need an omni-directional condensor mic to pick up everything in the room. The good mic habits normally practiced during a recording weren’t even vaguely in-play.

MODERATE THIS EPISODE G** DAMNIT!!

MOW THE LAWN!!

Happy new year guys.

In a recent campaign, I wanted a critical plot piece to be a message from a character they were familiar with. I went on eBay and bought a puzzle box for $10 and put it inside. The players had to actually open the box, I think it took them about 10 minutes.

Another thing I’ve wanted to try is picking up a copy of Khet 2.0, a game where you shoot lasers through prisms and try to get from point A to point B. I mentioned it to one of the other players and he was intrigued by the idea that a puzzle must be solved by players and not a random dice roll. If they get stuck, let them roll a perception check for help, but otherwise I think it adds something fun to the game.

For the sake of discussion, we needed something to call those games. As you noted, “indie” has become so vague in its use as to be meaningless. Many self-employed people have a corporation for tax purposes, so that rules out a legal/accounting distinction. And the vast majority of gaming companies are so small as to make them all indie by that measure.

But as you noted, “hipster” implies something done purely for the sake of irony. That really doesn’t describe what we were getting at. A phrase came up later in the show — which we probably should have latched onto from the start — which was “relationship-based” games, wherein the setting and plot are almost superfluous in comparison to the (often prescribed) way characters interrelate.

There are two reason’s why the term ‘Hipster Game’ is troublesome.

Firstly, because it feels like a miss appropriation. I think it’s safe to say that in contemporary common parlance ‘hipster’ is associated with doing ‘crap’ stuff ‘ironically.’ Because of this applying the term to games legitimately pursuing a quality experience seems disingenuous at best, and an outright insult most of the time.

The larger, and more pressing issue is that coining that term disengages from the larger intellectual discussion. I’ll concede the point that ‘indie’ is, without real merit, a vague term in the gaming community, but by not defining the term within the context of your discussion, by side stepping that process you further the problem.

The first thing I thought about when you ‘released’ the term ‘Hipster Game’ was this comic http://xkcd.com/927/ By preference I choose to define ‘Indie’ as “any product that is not produced by an incorporated entity,” since this definition best maintains the original meaning of the word as it pertains to films produced outside of the studio process. You may define indie however you like, and as you do further categorize with new terms to suite your discourse, but for the purposes of furthering the discussion please define it.

My nightmare scenario in this is that ‘Indie’ becomes a term meaning, “anything not produced by Wizards of the Coast,” and that ‘Hipster Game’ becomes a term that means “games produced between 2007, and 2012,” while the term ‘Chktwqyft’ is a term used to describe “any game not developed by a corporation using a dice pool released in the years 2006, 2008-11, and 2013, but not 2007, or 2012.”

http://mrhalbert.blogspot.com/2011/02/when-to-call-for-roll-further-thoughts.html

In principle, I like knowledge skills. They have the potential to bring interesting things into the game, or at the very least let your character be awesome in a less conventional way. You can be the guy who kills monsters because he knows exactly where to put the sword, not because he can cleave a mountain in two with his biceps.

Where I have a problem with them is execution, in particular in having players roll them.

Let’s say you have information that you want to give the players, so you have somebody roll for it. If they fail the roll and you hide the information, your game world now seems flatter and less interesting because of it. If they fail and you give them the information anyhow, it’s clear that you fudged in their favor and it kills immersion in the moment. (Plus, perceptive players will stop taking knowledge skills in favor of “useful” attributes if it’s clear knowledge will come to them either way.) It’s even worse if you put progression of the plot behind a skill roll; again, if they fail, what do you do?

My preference is to simply forgo the rolls. “Because of your knowledge of ancient basket weaving techniques, you can see that blah blah blah” etc. The rolls are then saved for situations where failure doesn’t hurt progression or immersion.

Also, for cool accidents moments: I had an NPC that went from being a mild diversion to a significant opponent during a session. We were playing Dresden Files, and my players were to encounter a backwoods, hillbilly wizard who used mind-affecting magic (which is bad, bad juju in that world). Originally, it was just supposed to be a situation where the guy was a bit of a jerk, but he wasn’t going to cause any real trouble and the players would move on to their more pressing matters. As I played him at the table, though, his accent and demeanor gave him an arrogant swagger that just really sparked the ire of the other players. A few other improvised short-comings later (a dead brother, neglected nephews, a gathering of similarly evil acolytes) and the party was chomping at the bit to show this guy the inside of a shallow grave. I ended up setting them up to really duke it out with him, but it was just amazing to me how quickly he got under their skin. I was similarly excited about how I was able to turn him from a jerk into a true slimeball so quickly as well, once I noticed their antipathy towards him. It was excellent.

Also, back in The Good Old Days there were no lower-case letters, the Romans had their caps-lock on all the time. Lower-case form developed from simplified forms of the letter developed in some forms of handwriting.

Tell the doc to TAKE HIS FREAKING TIME!!!

I guess sometimes the dice do want the campaign to continue.

The “banter” topic went on for waaaay too long and I found it imbecilic and the main topic was so specific (and to me, uninteresting) that even the 30 minutes or so dedicated to it felt like an hour. A boring hour.

Please install Dan back as podcast dictator, errr….host, and go back to larger topics.