Tag Archives: rpg

Tarot History, Takei Respect, DRM Woes, Work Tunes, Illusions in Motion, and Comic Book Stuff

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This entry is part 50 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Hopefully, after today’s utter insanity and stress, things will fall back into a more “schedule-friendly” rhythm at work. We should be past the point where a project that should have ebbed has continued to flow… right over top of a new project that was planned to start in the down-time.

In the feed, there’s what I consider a nice story about the insistence on DRM (Digital Rights Management) has come back to bite the company that insisted upon it in the ass. Seems a publisher that vehemently insisted Amazon only sell it’s ebook editions with DRM in place, is now in the sticky situation where it’s no longer happy with Amazon’s terms and charges, but can’t pull out without more or less using it’s entire customer base–because they’re locked into only being able to read the books on Amazon readers… because of the DRM.

Even more “fun” is the tidbit in the article that mentions Tor Books, which dropped DRM from it’s ebooks a couple years back. Ostensibly, DRM is in place to prevent piracy. Well, it seems that since dropping DRM, not only has Tor not seen an increase in piracy, they’ve actually seen an increase in sales.

Same thing happened when Amazon really jumped into the MP3 game… challenging iTunes by offering DRM free downloads. That may not have been a clear-cut victory, but Amazon’s music sales aren’t too shabby.

DRM has always treated legitimate customers like criminals and done little to nothing to deter, let alone stop, actual criminals. In most cases, it seems that it’s created more who break the law–by stripping out or otherwise circumventing the DRM so they can use their products freely.

People pirate stuff because they can’t get it legally in the form they want to make use of it. This is a lesson you’d think everyone would have learned when Napster was the biggest thing. People went there to effectively steal music because there was no legal way to get it in that format.

Ebooks are popular because people love the format. It’s bad enough that there are so many competing formats (which offer very few differences when it comes to the actual content… outside of which device you can use to read them). Adding serious DRM to them does nothing but open the door for things like a content producer getting screwed over by their DRM provider.

Maybe this time around, companies will learn.

Probably not.

Plotting and Scheming in an RPG

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Pile of DiceI’ve been running various role playing game on and off since around 1992. Not quite as long as some other people I know, but more frequently than others.

During that time, I mostly ran games using the Palladium system (they make RIFTs, Nightbane, and Phase World) with a few forays into the Call of Cthulhu system and, recently, the White Wolf Storyteller system. I’ve played in games using a few other systems. My experience is pretty well-rounded, I think, and I know what I like as a player and as a GM.

What I like is a rich world that my characters (or my players) can really dig into. When I have a character in a world that’s poorly defined, I’m hard-pressed to know what’s possible. (The exception being if the character doesn’t know anything about the world, either… in which case, it’s just all out fun.) Without a solid frame of reference, I can’t help the GM move the story along and I have difficulty answering the big question of “Why bother?” for the character(s) that are supposed to be caught up in it.

That’s why, even as a player, I like to get my hands on at least the core source book for the setting and read all the “flavor” stuff I can.

But how about you?

I accept the fact that I may be a little bit of an odd duck when it comes to this. I know I’ve maybe overloaded my players with background info (which barely got looked at) before.

Thing is, I’m about to kick off a new game. It’s going to be set in a world completely of my own creation… and I want the players to feel free to help add to that world.

But I don’t want to spoil the fun of discovery.

Here’s the opinion-seeking question: When it comes to role playing games, is it better to have the players know only the bare minimum about the world they’re exploring (only slightly more than their characters, perhaps), or is it better to let them know all sorts of things (including stuff that their characters would have no way of knowing)?

As a creator, I’m kind of torn on the subject.