Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 06, 2025, 10:48:23 AM

Quote from: Jaeger on March 05, 2025, 03:39:19 PM

Quote from: D-ko on March 05, 2025, 02:47:58 PMIt's important to note that without trademarked names and image copyrights, there's very little (apart from flavor text) that is copyrightable at all concerning D&D in the first place.

Read the OGL - the list of proper names under copyright is quite short...

That is why D&D relies on its market position and overwhelming network effect to maintain its dominance.

I wish more people realized this regarding all genres and all popular IPs.

How copyrightable RPGs are has yet to be tested in court, so I think it remains murky.

The current Supreme Court has generally sided with stronger copyright protection, like in Warhol v. Goldsmith. That was visual art rather than text, but it suggests they might be amenable to less leeway in derivative works in general.

EDITED TO ADD: Cross-posted with Venka, who describes in more detail. The question of copyrighting RPG rules is tricky, because while you can't copyright a procedure, game rules can also have creative expression - like a game race including its stat block, or a spell including its effects. Its been established for a while that software code is copyrightable.

Yeah, and that's strangling our creative output. Corpos have been steadily destroying all IPs, leaving pop culture nothing to work with. Where are the alternatives to Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness? Or whatever other IP I could name?

There's nothing. Creators are afraid to compete for fear of being sued. Furthermore, I question how many of them can even produce worthwhile products.

Tabletop gamers aren't loyal to genres, they're loyal to IPs. So when an IP dies, nobody else cares to make a replacement to fill the market void. The OSR movement is a unique fluke that hasn't been replicated with other genres.

Not all genres are evergreen.

Urban Fantasy needed that post-Cold War peace dividend, crime drop, and lack of existential conflicts to make empathy with the allegorical monster a sustainable genre. Real economic hardship, rampant crime, and the threat of World War 3 makes that feel stupid.

Instead you've got a few successful monster HUNTER games and some PBtA storygames based of trashy romance and young adult novels... because that's what the genre has become.

If we can get some world peace and get our economy and crime situation under control, the sort of urban fantasy you lament being lost might return in some fashion. Until then we wanna punch monsters not be them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 06, 2025, 04:00:36 PMNot all genres are evergreen.

Urban Fantasy needed that post-Cold War peace dividend, crime drop, and lack of existential conflicts to make empathy with the allegorical monster a sustainable genre. Real economic hardship, rampant crime, and the threat of World War 3 makes that feel stupid.

Instead you've got a few successful monster HUNTER games and some PBtA storygames based of trashy romance and young adult novels... because that's what the genre has become.

If we can get some world peace and get our economy and crime situation under control, the sort of urban fantasy you lament being lost might return in some fashion. Until then we wanna punch monsters not be them.

Not all urban fantasy is about playing literal monsters. Urban fantasy includes stuff like Urban Arcana, which is about D&D races and monsters showing up on Earth. Harry Dresden isn't a monster who eats people either. It includes something like Touched by an Angel.

Urban fantasy, or more accurately contemporary fantasy, is just fantasy takes place on contemporary Earth. Otherwise, it's a huge broad genre. It's just not a popular subject of ttrpgs for whatever reason.

You could totally make an urban fantasy game about playing angels who fight crime and help the helpless.

Quote from: jhkim on March 06, 2025, 11:43:35 AMIts been established for a while that software code is copyrightable.

This is due to legislation specifically adding code to the list of copyrightable items. It isn't something the courts did on their own.

Murky grey areas.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 06, 2025, 06:59:59 PMNot all urban fantasy is about playing literal monsters. Urban fantasy includes stuff like Urban Arcana, which is about D&D races and monsters showing up on Earth. Harry Dresden isn't a monster who eats people either. It includes something like Touched by an Angel.

Urban fantasy, or more accurately contemporary fantasy, is just fantasy takes place on contemporary Earth. Otherwise, it's a huge broad genre. It's just not a popular subject of ttrpgs for whatever reason.

I know I explained this already in another thread, but I think I need to repeat myself because your viewpoint leans towards myopia on the subject...

Urban fantasy as a setting to run in is still plenty popular... but because 95% of it just the modern world with whatever changes you make that is your particular expression of the supernatural you can use pretty much ANY modern setting RPG to run the genre.

Savage Worlds, Mutants & Masterminds, FATE (which already has a Harry Dresdan specific book) all have urban fantasy bits available in their core rules. Heck, the d20Modern SRD complete with the Urban Arcana material is still available with an internet search that took seconds.

You keep asking "Where are the alternatives to World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu?" That's them! Right there!

You're just so focused on finding some title exclusively saying "urban fantasy" on the cover you've missed that what you want is already out there. And if its already out there and currently supported, why SHOULD someone go and write some bespoke book for a single setting?

Honestly? Its not the other gamers who are caught up supporting first movers and won't create anything else, its YOU who is so caught up on specific IP titles and wanting alternatives formatted to your specific demands and so has missed completely that the holes you say exist are already completely filled.

They just don't say "WOD-KILLER: The Urban Fantasy RPG" or "Off-Brand Star*Drive" on the cover like you want them to, so you ignore them and continue to bitch about there being no alternatives to WOD and Star*Drive and so forth.

Go grab the SWADE, FATE or M&M core rulebook... everything you'd want to do with Urban Fantasy or Sci-Fi is 100% doable with, at most, an optional rule or two.

I've got everything I wanted for "Hunters of the Damned" in Mutants & Masterminds 3e (including all the cybernetics and bio-modding for the cyberpunk elements already built for me) with nothing more than a setting document.

Why should I spend months or more on building a bespoke system that wouldn't have rules for half the ancillary stuff that M&M gives me for free?

That's why you don't see anything... because you refuse to look in the right place.

"You can use these random universal(?) rpgs from decades(?) ago to make your own game!"

Why would I do that when Urban Shadows 2e just released?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 07, 2025, 08:05:32 AM"You can use these random universal(?) rpgs from decades(?) ago to make your own game!"
 "This is why there hasn't been much released for a genre that is 90% the modern world."

Why would I do that when Urban Shadows 2e just released?

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 07, 2025, 08:51:43 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 07, 2025, 08:05:32 AM"You can use these random universal(?) rpgs from decades(?) ago to make your own game!"
 "This is why there hasn't been much released for a genre that is 90% the modern world."

Why would I do that when Urban Shadows 2e just released?

I know Urban Shadows exists, but thus far I haven't been able to really get into it. The rules are pretty good, probably a lot better than WoD. Maybe it could fill the void left by Paradox quietly canceling WoD as they seem to be doing. (You can check out the schedule yourself. Only one vampire book is scheduled for 2025.)

World Of Darkness peaked in the late '90s. Popular culture such as Buffy and Scooby-Doo overused the tropes and sorta bled it dry, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. Those full-room Vampire The Masquerade conventions were something else, even into the early 2010s. I remember being like 20 and a 30 year-old lady trying to 'drain' my brain.

Btw, I'm trying to make a spiritual successor to Star*Drive. The setting, not the rules. It's a hugely detailed setting that easily rivals Star Trek, Star Wars and 40k in its complexity. It's hard af to write a substitute because I have to tiptoe around effing copyright. If somebody didn't already make a comparable setting (and believe me, I've spent years looking), then I get the impression that even trying would be casting pearls.

But of course the suits at Hasbro decided to ignore it and make yet another doomed scifi IP in Exodus. Copyright law is effing stupid. It's a fascist suppression of free speech.

Quote from: D-ko on March 07, 2025, 02:02:36 PMWorld Of Darkness peaked in the late '90s. Popular culture such as Buffy and Scooby-Doo overused the tropes and sorta bled it dry, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. Those full-room Vampire The Masquerade conventions were something else, even into the early 2010s. I remember being like 20 and a 30 year-old lady trying to 'drain' my brain.

It's really silly how the IP has been bought and sold twice by new owners trying desperately to mine it for video games, only to fail every time. It's a very generic IP that you could emulate easily by writing your own IP. I don't understand why people keep fixating on it instead of moving on. It's dead, make something new! I feel like modern gamers have lost creativity and drive compared to 20-30 years ago.