...We should produce a Product.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 11:50 pm

A couple months back, I was playing around with bookbinding, and wanted to make a Tome handbook. Then I realized that wasn't possible.

The tome material is generally good, and is written well. It's typeset nicely, and has some good flow inside each section. But it's incoherent, it's poorly balanced, it's wordy, and it's not a game. Also, despite Frank's (clear and unambiguous) statements, I wasn't willing to assume it was unencumbered. Here's some more detail on those indictments:
-Incoherent: tome fighter with tome feats. I don't mean incoherent like "what is this I don't even", I mean it like "these options don't work together." This could be partly solved by establishing a canonical basic rule set or SRD, and all the way solved by writing it as one continuous whole.
-Poorly balanced: basically inherited from dnd. It's amazing that tome works as well as it does, given that foundation. Same solution.
-Wordy: I didn't know what the short form of "needs pictures to space out the rules" was, but that's what I meant.
-Not a game: at best, it's a game supplement (at worst, a set of rules options). It really suffers from not being able to hand it off to someone as a complete game.

As to whether it's encumbered, I was hesitant for a couple reasons. First, there are other contributors. I'm not smart enough to know for sure who authored each part (though it is pretty well partitioned). They also make a lot of references to (potential) IP, which I was too lazy at the time to check. Also (and here's the big one) it's built on D20. I don't understand the OGL well enough to screw with republishing SRD material.

All together, that seemed like a lot of hassle for wanting to mess around with when I had a perfectly good 300 page summary of the DoD's acquisition process ready to go.

However, orthogonal to the post about incorporating, arranging the tome material into a complete product would be really spiffy.

Edit: and I use "We" in the loosest sense. I'm decent at editing, but that's that helpful in this environment.

MfA · Post by **MfA** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:01 am

You can navigate DoD bureaucracy but the OGL escapes you?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:12 am

I've put many days into figuring out the first labyrinth. I've put zero time into the OGL (also, the DoD has a half dozen subtly different instructions for everything. It's nearly impossible to be entirely wrong).

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:17 am

fectin wrote:-Wordy: I didn't know what the short form of "needs pictures to space out the rules" was, but that's what I meant.

I think the technical term is "Layout" (and it's more than just a pretty picture). However, a term I learned back in the 1980's when writting BASIC code that was easy to read and understand was "Pretty Printing" ... making the text visually appealing. Blocks that shift the text left and right help this tremendously, and nothing beats a nice graphic as a block. That's a trick I love to employ when writing newsletters.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:23 am

I agree with Tzor that, while graphics are great to attract a broader spectrum of people, block shifts in text are a cheap and easy way to show appeal.

Also nothing highlights text as different hued framed block of text embedded into a page of text.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:34 am

I wasn't even thinking dnd style paintings, just some line drawings to break up the page.
Callouts are good, but also break your flow. They're super-awesome for powerpoints, but less awesome for books you want someone to read through.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:57 am

Callouts are good to emphasize a huge subset of things. A quote, stat block. These sort of things fall nicely in this concept.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 2:21 am

The OGL is essentially:

`You have to say that you based this on open game content and your product must also be available under the OGL.

`You have to say what parts of the content that you've added are open game content and which are product identity (AKA: not-shareable; eg, god names, maps, character names, anything like that)

`You have to reprint the existing Section 15 copyright statements from all things you took open game content from EXACTLY as they printed them, then add your own copyright statement at the end.

`You can't ever say that your product is compatible with any other product, or compare it to another product, or any such thing, without express written permission from the other product's owner.

--

So the only problem is that Frank and K use product identity in some of the essays when they talk about Hextor or Tordek or people like that.

Things like Asmodeus, which are just public names in lore dating back ages, are still okay to keep in. Everything else has to be edited to not refer to PI, which includes that you can't ever actually say "dungeons and dragons" anywhere in the final book.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:09 am

Wasn't here also some funny thing where the stats were OGL, but the resolution mechanics weren't? Or am I making that up?

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:59 am

Wasn't Trailblazer made by a bunch of people on a forum? What was the story behind that?

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:47 am

fectin wrote:Wasn't here also some funny thing where the stats were OGL, but the resolution mechanics weren't? Or am I making that up?

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35

That's the SRD, including a copy of the OGL explaining what's Open Game Content and what's Product Identity. Basically everything except names of planes and names of places is OGC.

What isn't included is anything having to do with experience points. Earning it, using it to level up, calculating it based on the CR of a creature, calculating EL of an encounter based on the CRs it contains. None of that is provided for you.

You can just make up your own experience system though, and since Tome abandons "kill things for EXP" anyways then it's really no problem.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:03 am

Also a few select monsters are not OGL. Mindflayers, Beholders, Slaadi, and no doubt a few others that I am forgetting. Not that you cannot rebrand similar entities... Starspawn, Floating Eye, and so forth.

Xur · Post by **Xur** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 12:04 am

MGuy wrote:Wasn't Trailblazer made by a bunch of people on a forum? What was the story behind that?

AFAIK its made by two guys from ENWorld, under the label Badaxe Games. They have a history of supplements, but its kinda hard to find out anything about it because it was small-scale and is long OOP.

They are doing a bestiary thing atm, with this patronage funding that has become somewhat popular (e20?). I don't know how well this really works, but maybe its worth a look for a Tome project?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 2:07 am

Patronage funding?

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 2:16 am

You put up sections or chapters or whatever, and people pay money towards particular things being written as a way to "vote" for how much they want things to get done.

Or, more generally, you say "Hey guys I'm gonna make this product pay me ahead of time so I have money to spend while I work on finishing it", and then they pay you on the trust that you'll finish it.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 2:50 am

Hypothetically, I am a potential consumer.

What is the benefit of buying the Tome material instead of just downloading it for free and using it in my game that way?

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 3:19 am

Good feelings and solutions to the issues I raised above, I imagine.

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 5:47 am

I would have though aWoD would be much easier to publish, given it's reasonably complete in and of itself.
I recall Frank saying some time ago that there's a minimal amount of effort needed to remove trademarks, and after some editing it should be good to go.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:18 am

Blasted wrote:I would have though aWoD would be much easier to publish, given it's reasonably complete in and of itself.
I recall Frank saying some time ago that there's a minimal amount of effort needed to remove trademarks, and after some editing it should be good to go.

Sure. You'd want to change the introduction completely and take out any reference to terms owed by CCP or Topps. That includes covenants like the Camarilla and Carthians (but not The World Crime League or Marduk Society), types such as Ventrue and probably Children of Ether (but not stuff like Nezumi or Golems), and cults like the Tremere (but not cults like the Stellar Oracles), and disciplines like "Obtenebration" that are based on bullshit words (but not disciplines like "necromancy" that are real terms). There are a lot of places where IP is fuzzy. "Get of Fenris" is a specific tribe of werewolves in copyrighted material, but it's also just a plain English descriptive term for people descended from wolves. Khaibit is obscure as fuck, but it is really just the Egyptian word for your soul shadow, so it's unprotectable.

That being said, rubbing the serial numbers off of something and releasing it as unique IP is not terribly difficult. True story: Cordelia's Honor was originally written as Star Trek romance fanfic. In the original draft, the Beta Colonists were Federation and the Barayarrans were Klingons. And hey, that worked out.

-Username17

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:41 am

TBH that sounds like the work of a day or so. The editing process would be more expensive in terms of time and money. I'm not sure about the going rates for artwork and printing... I've almost got myself convinced here.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 9:17 am

I have all of AWOD in latex form already, including some editing work (I think most of which made it back into the bbcode version currently posted). If people want to provide art and say where it goes I can shove it in and adjust things to make it as hard-copy friendly as possible.

https://sites.google.com/site/awodpdf2/ is the site i hosted it on, if you want to see the current version.
https://sites.google.com/site/awodpdf2/ ... ects=0&d=1 is a direct link.

So come up with a change list and I can recompile the document. If people really want the Latex to edit themselves then that can also be arranged.

The biggest thing that AWOD lacks at the moment is real GMing advice and a real explanation to the players as to what the game is and why they should give a fuck about it. Right now that's because it's a type of WOD and so everyone knows what you do in WOD, but if you say it's something new then you need to have sections for that even if they state the very obvious.

EDIT: Even as I just perused that PDF, I noted a spot where I failed to convert the bbcode into proper latex markup (and/or just remove it); it's the Antagonistic Organizations section. People are bad at being their own editors. There may be other locations that people note when combing through to find IP to rename, please point them out if you do.

MfA · Post by **MfA** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 1:22 pm

Schwarzkopf wrote:What is the benefit of buying the Tome material instead of just downloading it for free and using it in my game that way?

The idea is not to print the Tome material, the idea is to clean it up, pare it down (not everyone is interested in design justification) and integrate it with the SRD and create a complete player's handbook. Pretty printed in a nice dual column format and with some images to break up the text.

Even then the potential market is tiny and it would have to be pretty damn cheap, but these things are more labours of love than anything else.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 1:42 pm

I'm pretty sure that someone did make a Tome SRD at one point, but I think parts of Book of Gears were missing from it, since I've seen Kaelik mention something about how boosts to speed were a minor property that gave a bonus based on 1/2 level (while the list of basic properties includes the same effect at a different rate/cost of 1/3 level).

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 3:35 pm

Hmm... I'd be on board pretty easily with something like that. I'd like to see an actually "Tome of Awesome" on my shelf instead of that kinkos binder and the rest of the 3.5 set.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 3:43 pm

Anyone who wants to pursue this may want to get in on the current pdf project rather than redo from start (related thread). It's all in LaTex at present, but I imagine migrating that to docbook wouldn't be too hard.

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