The 90s was the apex of coolness in gaming, right?

[RaggleFraggle]

B, Same applies to rule books and finding out of print stuff. Someone has a copy of Goblin rampage VS Elf hookers version 2.5 but you sure as fuck don't and never will. Unless some Grog decides to scan it and upload it online you cannot play some games because you can never read their rules.

Blame copyright law. People are scared of being sued for preserving out of print books. This has been a known issue for decades.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

B, Same applies to rule books and finding out of print stuff. Someone has a copy of Goblin rampage VS Elf hookers version 2.5 but you sure as fuck don't and never will. Unless some Grog decides to scan it and upload it online you cannot play some games because you can never read their rules.

Blame copyright law. People are scared of being sued for preserving out of print books. This has been a known issue for decades.

Never been a big issue with old tabletop stuff. There's so many online archives of old junk no one remembers

 

[RaggleFraggle]

B, Same applies to rule books and finding out of print stuff. Someone has a copy of Goblin rampage VS Elf hookers version 2.5 but you sure as fuck don't and never will. Unless some Grog decides to scan it and upload it online you cannot play some games because you can never read their rules.

Blame copyright law. People are scared of being sued for preserving out of print books. This has been a known issue for decades.

Never been a big issue with old tabletop stuff. There's so many online archives of old junk no one remembers

That is the issue. They’d remember it if the communities were allowed to preserve and share and remix the material, but copyright law gets in the way. Have you tried building a community around a dead IP like Star Frontiers or Star*Drive? Without the publishing rights, it’s impossible. There are still tiny communities for it, but they’re steadily shrinking to nothing.

Copyright terms are currently a century. This benefits nobody but ancient corporations like Disney. Terms need to be reduced to 20 or so years.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

B, Same applies to rule books and finding out of print stuff. Someone has a copy of Goblin rampage VS Elf hookers version 2.5 but you sure as fuck don't and never will. Unless some Grog decides to scan it and upload it online you cannot play some games because you can never read their rules.

Blame copyright law. People are scared of being sued for preserving out of print books. This has been a known issue for decades.

Never been a big issue with old tabletop stuff. There's so many online archives of old junk no one remembers

That is the issue. They’d remember it if the communities were allowed to preserve and share and remix the material, but copyright law gets in the way. Have you tried building a community around a dead IP like Star Frontiers or Star*Drive? Without the publishing rights, it’s impossible. There are still tiny communities for it, but they’re steadily shrinking to nothing.

Copyright terms are currently a century. This benefits nobody but ancient corporations like Disney. Terms need to be reduced to 20 or so years.

Check /tg/'s pdf share thread. Copyright has never stopped piracy.

 

[JamesDixon]

B, Same applies to rule books and finding out of print stuff. Someone has a copy of Goblin rampage VS Elf hookers version 2.5 but you sure as fuck don't and never will. Unless some Grog decides to scan it and upload it online you cannot play some games because you can never read their rules.

Blame copyright law. People are scared of being sued for preserving out of print books. This has been a known issue for decades.

Never been a big issue with old tabletop stuff. There's so many online archives of old junk no one remembers

That is the issue. They’d remember it if the communities were allowed to preserve and share and remix the material, but copyright law gets in the way. Have you tried building a community around a dead IP like Star Frontiers or Star*Drive? Without the publishing rights, it’s impossible. There are still tiny communities for it, but they’re steadily shrinking to nothing.

Copyright terms are currently a century. This benefits nobody but ancient corporations like Disney. Terms need to be reduced to 20 or so years.

WEG Star Wars is doing just fine and it's been out of print for over 20 years. Rules and game mechanics cannot be copyrighted only the setting stuff can be.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

There are tons of settings that are dead and it’s impossible to grow communities for because the fans don’t have the rights to the material. If they have communities, and many don’t, these are small and perpetually shrinking. Piracy doesn’t solve that problem and anyone who says so clearly hasn’t suffered this problem.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

There are tons of settings that are dead and it’s impossible to grow communities for because the fans don’t have the rights to the material. If they have communities, and many don’t, these are small and perpetually shrinking. Piracy doesn’t solve that problem and anyone who says so clearly hasn’t suffered this problem.

You have no clue what you're talking about and I'll give you a prime example.

Halo had a 6mm wargame called ground command. It didn't do very well and eventually the game died when the company making it went out of business and the new owners didn't renew the rights. The community rallied round and made a fan version of the rulebook and started to release free STL files for models so people could print their own armies. There's a guy making his full time living off of sculpting Halo STL files because of it now. Microsoft, 343 and the original game creators are well aware it's happening and don't care.

Bloodbowl? Kept alive strictly due to fan support for well over a decade of neglect. Multiple new teams and fan rulebooks exist and eventually it convinced games workshop to pick it back up.

Mordheim is still dead except for fan creations. It still has an active and some what growing fanbase.

There's nothing to do with copyright stopping games from existing and becoming popular. There are plenty of games whole sale ripping stuff off left to do their own thing. Often it's these fan communities that enable companies to revive their own properties because the piracy crowd is so large. Didn't the 80's TMNT stuff get a kickstarter this year? No one cared about that, you had to pirate it.

 

[MerchantKing]

Yes. Games used to be good back in the 90's. Now they're garbage.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

There are tons of settings that are dead and it’s impossible to grow communities for because the fans don’t have the rights to the material. If they have communities, and many don’t, these are small and perpetually shrinking. Piracy doesn’t solve that problem and anyone who says so clearly hasn’t suffered this problem.

You have no clue what you're talking about and I'll give you a prime example.

Halo had a 6mm wargame called ground command. It didn't do very well and eventually the game died when the company making it went out of business and the new owners didn't renew the rights. The community rallied round and made a fan version of the rulebook and started to release free STL files for models so people could print their own armies. There's a guy making his full time living off of sculpting Halo STL files because of it now. Microsoft, 343 and the original game creators are well aware it's happening and don't care.

Bloodbowl? Kept alive strictly due to fan support for well over a decade of neglect. Multiple new teams and fan rulebooks exist and eventually it convinced games workshop to pick it back up.

Mordheim is still dead except for fan creations. It still has an active and some what growing fanbase.

There's nothing to do with copyright stopping games from existing and becoming popular. There are plenty of games whole sale ripping stuff off left to do their own thing. Often it's these fan communities that enable companies to revive their own properties because the piracy crowd is so large. Didn't the 80's TMNT stuff get a kickstarter this year? No one cared about that, you had to pirate it.

How does a handful of lucky fandoms disprove the mountains of unlucky ones? You yourself just said there are countless forgotten franchises sitting in pirate archives. You said you’re dependent on grog charity to scan old games. Now you’re contradicting yourself because you’re only interested in being right rather than actually addressing the problem. Stop being obsessed with being right and listen to what I actually said. Whether you believe it or not, there are numerous forgotten tabletop IPs and dwindling fandoms that cannot be revived unless copyright law is reformed.

Example: There was a kickstarter for Alternity a few years ago that quickly imploded and died once the writers and fans realized they didn’t actually have the rights to the original IPs. This was kickstarted by the original writers of the 1998 game, and they still failed because they couldn’t get the rights.

Another example: The 1997 rpg Everlasting was owned by Chipp Dobbs. He died years ago and his family who inherited the copyright is impossible to find. Only some of the pdfs are available on drivethrurpg. There’s no community for it anywhere. Sure, I could pirate the books, sell my own version, etc. But I would be opening myself to litigation from his heirs if they ever found out and decided to claim copyright infringement. The problem of orphaned works is a big problem with copyright.

Numerous PDFs over the years have been taken down by technical errors and the owners simply cannot be bothered to deal with that. Many of these people are hobbyists who have lives and can’t be expected to maintain the tech after decades. I spend a couple years trying to fix an issue with one 20-year old PDF on drivethru so that I wouldn’t have to pirate it to share it with others, but it never got fixed despite me sending multiple emails to tech support and the original writer who was selling it. It’s like they want it to only be available via piracy!

Some fandoms are lucky enough not to deal with that, but many more have those problems. “Just pirate it dude!” isn’t the solution. That’s an irrelevant band-aid fix for the cancer in our legal system. We need to cut out the damn cancer, not ignore it!

You can read about the problems in detail here: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/
https://youtu.be/__NavkGtaZQ?si=-m1z64h__xud4oL3
…and plenty of other essays.

I’ve already had so many numbskulls already tell me to “pirate the books, dude” as if that actually solves the problem. I’m done trying to explain this.

 

[Stella Brando]