Quote from: Scooter on August 03, 2023, 08:34:51 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 03, 2023, 07:21:47 PM
WotC inherited loads of diverse IPs from TSR and freelancers invented plenty in Polyhedron during the d20 Modern era. By extension, Hasbro owns all of those. Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, Gamma World, Dark•Matter, Shadowchasers, Agents of Psi, Urban Arcana, Thunderball Rally, Iron Lords of Jupiter, DeathNet, BugHunters, Kromosome, GeneTech, etc. They're drowning in IPs that run the gamut of genres and could be turned into toys, video games, movies, tv shows, etc. But they're not exploiting any of it. In age when studios are snatching up IPs and driving them into the ground. Make it make sense! Do the executives just not know they own these IPs because nobody bothered to keep a list?

Most of those (Gamma World and the like) have no real value as names because they have been out of circulation so long.  One could recreate Gamma World using a different name and make as much money.

I do not understand why WotC hasn't taken the many great IP's they purchased from TSR and brought them all under the umbrella of 5th edition. Making an RPG is such a low cost endeavour and it'd bring value back to these brands and reinforce the copyrights/trademarks they own.

Boothill
Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World
Top Secret
Gangbusters
Star Frontiers

And why haven't they made updated boardgames of Dawn Patrol, Divine Right, and Knights of Camelot with spiffy new graphics and components during the boardgame boom?

It's like the people running WotC have no respect for what they have.

It's probably because the people running WotC have no respect for what they have. 

Remember, after a certain level of growth your chief officers leave cottage industry, labor of love into resumé padding rung upon the corporate ladder counting down to retirement upon a private island. WotC hit the big time a few decades ago. And once gobbled up by Hasbro C-level is now just dumb money faffing about waiting to name drop at the next cocktail party.

Welcome to hell. It affects your favorite hobbies, too. Salvation is personal; return to indie cottage industry. 

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 03, 2023, 07:21:47 PM
WotC inherited loads of diverse IPs from TSR and freelancers invented plenty in Polyhedron during the d20 Modern era. By extension, Hasbro owns all of those. Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, Gamma World, Dark•Matter, Shadowchasers, Agents of Psi, Urban Arcana, Thunderball Rally, Iron Lords of Jupiter, DeathNet, BugHunters, Kromosome, GeneTech, etc. They're drowning in IPs that run the gamut of genres and could be turned into toys, video games, movies, tv shows, etc. But they're not exploiting any of it. In age when studios are snatching up IPs and driving them into the ground. Make it make sense! Do the executives just not know they own these IPs because nobody bothered to keep a list?

Hasbro has been notorious for many, many decades for shelving properties for many years before trying to cash in on nostalgia. It helps camp on IPs while lowering operating costs. They almost had that and the Christmas season down to a science with a bizarre L-"curve" annual profit chart. WotC just gave them reliable MtG cardboard crack money to squeeze nerdy nutsacks in repeat shakedowns.

Though all that may be changing as they've been self-immolating in their own way like a lot of industries of the past decade.  Who knows? Maybe interesting times are ahead?

All this talk has given me an idea for a new Dystopian setting to run a campaign in.

In this dark future mankind has been reduced to menial laborers and foot soldiers while AI creates all approved art and literature and controls the flying kill drones and brain implants that keep the human cattle in line.

I call the setting "Our AI Future."

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 06, 2023, 08:30:07 AM
All this talk has given me an idea for a new Dystopian setting to run a campaign in.

In this dark future mankind has been reduced to menial laborers and foot soldiers while AI creates all approved art and literature and controls the flying kill drones and brain implants that keep the human cattle in line.

I call the setting "Our AI Future."

So... the back story to Dune?  No, wait, Terminator?

*JOKE* Sounds kind of unoriginal (see changes in bold below).

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 06, 2023, 08:30:07 AM
All this talk has given me an idea for a new Dystopian setting to run a campaign in.

In this dark present mankind has been reduced to menial laborers and foot soldiers while the media and academic elite creates all approved art and literature and controls the flying kill drones and reality TV shows that keep the human cattle in line.

I call the setting "Our Mainstream Media Present."

Not sure if you're aware of how badly the media/academic establishment totally controls what fiction gets published through brick and mortar bookstores (which is still where a lot of authors see over half their sales).

Quote from: Thor's Nads on August 06, 2023, 04:28:07 AM

Quote from: Scooter on August 03, 2023, 08:34:51 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 03, 2023, 07:21:47 PM
WotC inherited loads of diverse IPs from TSR and freelancers invented plenty in Polyhedron during the d20 Modern era. By extension, Hasbro owns all of those. Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, Gamma World, Dark•Matter, Shadowchasers, Agents of Psi, Urban Arcana, Thunderball Rally, Iron Lords of Jupiter, DeathNet, BugHunters, Kromosome, GeneTech, etc. They're drowning in IPs that run the gamut of genres and could be turned into toys, video games, movies, tv shows, etc. But they're not exploiting any of it. In age when studios are snatching up IPs and driving them into the ground. Make it make sense! Do the executives just not know they own these IPs because nobody bothered to keep a list?

Most of those (Gamma World and the like) have no real value as names because they have been out of circulation so long.  One could recreate Gamma World using a different name and make as much money.

I do not understand why WotC hasn't taken the many great IP's they purchased from TSR and brought them all under the umbrella of 5th edition. Making an RPG is such a low cost endeavour and it'd bring value back to these brands and reinforce the copyrights/trademarks they own.

Boothill
Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World
Top Secret
Gangbusters
Star Frontiers

And why haven't they made updated boardgames of Dawn Patrol, Divine Right, and Knights of Camelot with spiffy new graphics and components during the boardgame boom?

It's like the people running WotC have no respect for what they have.

Quote from: Opaopajr on August 06, 2023, 05:25:32 AM
It's probably because the people running WotC have no respect for what they have. 

Remember, after a certain level of growth your chief officers leave cottage industry, labor of love into resumé padding rung upon the corporate ladder counting down to retirement upon a private island. WotC hit the big time a few decades ago. And once gobbled up by Hasbro C-level is now just dumb money faffing about waiting to name drop at the next cocktail party.

Welcome to hell. It affects your favorite hobbies, too. Salvation is personal; return to indie cottage industry. 

Quote from: Opaopajr on August 06, 2023, 05:33:47 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 03, 2023, 07:21:47 PM
WotC inherited loads of diverse IPs from TSR and freelancers invented plenty in Polyhedron during the d20 Modern era. By extension, Hasbro owns all of those. Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, Gamma World, Dark•Matter, Shadowchasers, Agents of Psi, Urban Arcana, Thunderball Rally, Iron Lords of Jupiter, DeathNet, BugHunters, Kromosome, GeneTech, etc. They're drowning in IPs that run the gamut of genres and could be turned into toys, video games, movies, tv shows, etc. But they're not exploiting any of it. In age when studios are snatching up IPs and driving them into the ground. Make it make sense! Do the executives just not know they own these IPs because nobody bothered to keep a list?

Hasbro has been notorious for many, many decades for shelving properties for many years before trying to cash in on nostalgia. It helps camp on IPs while lowering operating costs. They almost had that and the Christmas season down to a science with a bizarre L-"curve" annual profit chart. WotC just gave them reliable MtG cardboard crack money to squeeze nerdy nutsacks in repeat shakedowns.

Though all that may be changing as they've been self-immolating in their own way like a lot of industries of the past decade.  Who knows? Maybe interesting times are ahead?

Yeah.

It's especially frustrating because a fair amount of these IPs are so unique that you can't do anything similar without worrying about being sued. I've searched fruitlessly for years to find anything similar.

Old ttrpgs are among the single most creative and coherent fiction I've encountered. Since they aren't restricted to main characters like prose fiction, they're able to worldbuild to such a degree that the settings actually feel like living worlds rather than fake theme parks for the main characters to romp through. Which lets them avoid the problem of sequelitis that you see in fiction where the writers didn't create a coherent world that could support endless sequels.

Quote from: THE_Leopold on August 01, 2023, 01:21:11 PM
All it takes is to have a human being altar the output of an AI generated piece and they can't say a damn thing.  20% change is all it takes to be "transformative" which, by DMCA law, makes it a new and unique piece. 

No such DMCA provision.

They're currently inventing AI detectors and counters to AI detectors. Because some Silicon Valley idiot savants genuinely thought trying to outsmart AI detectors was a good ideas. So there's really no way to be sure that anything is real or AI generated past a certain point. Drivethrurpg won't be able to enforce this except against obviously low quality content.

If they want to avoid a glut of low quality shovelware glutting their servers, then they need to curate the content before selling it. Which opens another can of worms and risks censoring free speech. How do you prevent shovelware from clogging the servers without censoring artsy-fartsy, satire or politics you disagree with? How do you distinguish between good and bad faith actors?

The only thing I can think of to even begin addressing the problem would be to institute an industry-wide content rating system that rates content according to apolitical metrics. How violent, sexual, politicized, well written or useful is the content?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 06, 2023, 01:49:02 PM
They're currently inventing AI detectors and counters to AI detectors. Because some Silicon Valley idiot savants genuinely thought trying to outsmart AI detectors was a good ideas. So there's really no way to be sure that anything is real or AI generated past a certain point. Drivethrurpg won't be able to enforce this except against obviously low quality content.

If they want to avoid a glut of low quality shovelware glutting their servers, then they need to curate the content before selling it. Which opens another can of worms and risks censoring free speech. How do you prevent shovelware from clogging the servers without censoring artsy-fartsy, satire or politics you disagree with? How do you distinguish between good and bad faith actors?

The only thing I can think of to even begin addressing the problem would be to institute an industry-wide content rating system that rates content according to apolitical metrics. How violent, sexual, politicized, well written or useful is the content?

Who decides what get's thru this industry wide rating system? Who decides who gets to make the rules for such a system? How do you guarantee it's applied evenly accros the board without giving some more leeway?

IF DTRPG really wanted to avoid low quality glut they would need to become a publisher and not a store, then they get to choose what passes their arbitrary standards and what doesn't. Which as you mention is a mine field of censorship, it's not a question if they'd censor those they perceive as their "political enemies" but how hard would they go.

If you ask me I would clamp down on low page content from new developers/publishers, but they needed to do so years ago.

Likewise applying OSR to everything and anything means the label has no value as a search therm. They needed to have created a different one for games not D&D based, OSG (Old School Gaming) for instance, which doesn't make it easier to filter because you have all 3d6, 2d6, etc games under it.

The more glut the harder it is to get discovered, the more rules you implement to clamp down on glut will have the same effect, for instance giving priority to bigger sales, bigger names, etc means the newcomer has an uphill battle on top of another.

IMHO what we need is a different site manned by fans to make reviews, but that requires a lot of money.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 06, 2023, 02:02:19 PM
Likewise applying OSR to everything and anything means the label has no value as a search therm. They needed to have created a different one for games not D&D based, OSG (Old School Gaming) for instance, which doesn't make it easier to filter because you have all 3d6, 2d6, etc games under it.

While the OSR category is a mess the individual categories underneath like Swords & Wizardry, OSE, OSRIC, etc, do get policed by the publishers who submit complaints to Onebookshelf. And the complaints do get acted on. But to be clear this is not a periodic thing. I know because I did that when I found some stuff in S&W that clearly didn't belong. I mentioned it to other OSR Publishers and within a few weeks it was a lot better.

Assorted replies to various posts...

Heh, page content alone isn't enough.  I write a lot of low page content as supplements or tools and I've gotten thousands of downloads, some good reviews, and made a tidy amount of mad money over the years.
---

I think the "20% rule" stems from the golden and silver age of comics.  That's where I heard it first. The world has gotten much more litigious since then.  The DMCA being a primary example of that.  While it offers some protections, it also has been weaponized to remove negative reviews that should have been acceptable use.

This article talks about it and more or less debunks the percentage logic.
https://topofy.com/how-avoid-copyright-infringement/
---

I like the US Copyright Office's AI policy; only humans can hold copyrights.  That's why going forward I'll forego text prompts alone and instead use images, sketches, control nets, and the like so that I am working with AI to modify a work rather than create one from scratch.
---

The funny thing about AI glut is that the app NEVER runs out and publishes something.  There is always a human in the loop looking to make easy money.  And you know what?  I'm okay with that.  It is the consumer that needs to decide and not the warehouse/store.  Maybe the buyer actually wants a portfolio of AI portraits for their local game.  [I know that I have some projects like that in my library.] 

Protecting human artists from mean old Technology is bullshit.  Those artists need to learn, use AI for concepts or style guides, so they make their own copyrightable art with more efficiency.  They adapted when photography became a thing.  They did it when Photoshop arrived.  This is just another evolution, adapt or go extinct.  If they need to cling to their old tools, perhaps they should check out Adobe Firefly.  Failing that, they can learn to code.   

[edit for typos]

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 03, 2023, 07:21:47 PM
WotC inherited loads of diverse IPs from TSR and freelancers invented plenty in Polyhedron during the d20 Modern era. By extension, Hasbro owns all of those. Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, Gamma World, Dark•Matter, Shadowchasers, Agents of Psi, Urban Arcana, Thunderball Rally, Iron Lords of Jupiter, DeathNet, BugHunters, Kromosome, GeneTech, etc. They're drowning in IPs that run the gamut of genres and could be turned into toys, video games, movies, tv shows, etc. But they're not exploiting any of it. In age when studios are snatching up IPs and driving them into the ground. Make it make sense! Do the executives just not know they own these IPs because nobody bothered to keep a list?

I wonder if people could leverage the DM's Guild to create new official content on DTRPG?  Sure, you're throw half your profits to WotC, but that might be acceptable if you're really wanting to revive a IP that they have sat on.

Not that I plan on doing that, but I should read up on that option to see if it is really viable for not 5e stuff.

And to answer the previous question, it is a firm 'not really'.  They want to put a 5e rubber stamp on everything.  To that end, they did not say you couldn't use other IPs, but to follow one of the DM's Guild rules it should be 5e compatible.  So, translations of older titles to 5e might be doable if you're keen on that.  Perhaps seeking permission for other stuff might be possible.  After all, it is 100% effortless money for them.  And, money is king at WotC.

My ultimate concern would be if they block anything that wasn't been run through the woke sewer water.  [Insert WotC drone...] "Boothill is 'problematic' due to its roots in historical oppression and discrimination."  Like gamers don't have a brain and can't separate a game from reality.


[edit for typos, again]

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on August 06, 2023, 11:49:34 AM

It's especially frustrating because a fair amount of these IPs are so unique that you can't do anything similar without worrying about being sued. I've searched fruitlessly for years to find anything similar.

I was thinking of this so I pulled out my '78 copy of Gamma world.  It would not be difficult to make a modern version of this using ZERO I.P. from the original.  Might prove profitable because gamers from the 90's and later probably have no knowledge of this game