DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Front of House Play-by-Post Game Studio Genre Surveys Q4 Genre Survey

I voted other because I suppose I'm more for the overall tone of a game and no as much for the specific.

That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing some magical-realism based games though.

Now that's grabbed my eye, Raven! What do you mean by "magical/realism based", do you have a published example?

I'm thinking Borges style writing actually. I've seen people host those types of games with various systems. But there isn't a system for it that I know of.

Not familiar with Borges, but also intrigued.

Jose Borges was an Argintinian essayist and poet who acquired some fame as an advocate of the "chaos that rules the world and the character of unreality in all literature."

His most famous books, Ficciones and The Aleph are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God.

His works basically defined the genre of magical realism, which was a reaction against the naturalism and realism of the nineteenth century. During his life he became progressively blind, which a lot of critics suggested helped him create his signature literary symbols through imagination. Some of his poems are basically dialogues with such famous figures as Spinoza and Virgil.

Nicki

huh. If we're going to be playing games in this genre they are going to be needing a good amount of explication for the poor and unwashed such as myself unfamiliar with it.

Personally, I don't see how it could actually be translated. Magical Realism is more about thought and dialogue than action, which I think would be about as exciting as watching paint dry in a BB format.

It would be almost as exciting as doing a game based on Dialectical Materialism... <g>

Nicki

Nicki,

There was a question about preference, and I answered. That's all. I would say there's some flavor of MR in various games currently being run.

It's obvious I disagree with your statements; however, from your words I believe it is best we leave it at the fact that there are differing thoughts on this.

I'd rather not hijack this thread to any larger extent.

No, you're probably right about the "flavor," although as I understand it, there is some argument as to what actually constitutes MR. I just thought an entire game ambience devoted to it would be difficult to manage, what with all the time and effort required to sort out the philosophical perameters. But... it might be interesting if you could pull it off.

I posted this in another thread, but what this forum really really needs is a Pathfinder game.

Has anyone ever figured out how we can do a Harry Potter game without getting sued. I know that's always been the fear.

Is that really a concern? Wouldn't it have to be for pay or for publishing, before they can sue you? And I would think Potter has long since passed into the public domain, like Band-Aids or Jell-o.

Nicki

Potter has developed a rep for getting Foxed by Rowling that's almost as bad as 20th Century Fox's Foxing. Whether it's deserved or not, I'm not so sure, but Rowling's stated a few times that she's quite happy with free, online fan works.

See HarryPotterFanFiction.com with 65,000 Potter stories and 30 million hits a month.

Their copyright policy is near identical to ours, so we should be absolutely fine to run a Potter game.

If anyone wants a functional (and I think actually rather good) rules system for Potter gaming, feel free to use mine. It's bare-bones and keyword/description focused, but I found it worked fairly well for its purpose.

Wushu might also work well for Potter, since fans could use all their knowledge of the setting in describing their actions and increasing their dice pool. But then Wushu heavily favours success, whereas failure is a large part of Potter (and growing up in general ).

Agreed. Wushu, HeroQuest, and FATE were significant inspirations for my own system. It's all about writing down what's important about or to your character and then using those important things in play to drive the story.

Also, the system is diceless because it was designed for use at AmberCons. It would be easy enough to add a small degree of dice (say, coin-flips for each point ala HEX or some such), but not at all necessary.

Well, I'm not sure how things have changed over the years, but I do know that several years back when someone wanted to run an HP game the brakes were put on because the admins expressed fear of litigation.

Then again, I may be remembering things completely wrong. It's been known to happen.

If that was a commercial venture, Barry, then I can see why 'they' would want to prevent that ... without the licensing agreement (i.e. dollars changing hands).

I think I remember the occasion Barry's talking about. Iirc there was an ongoing lawsuit at the time involving the Harry Potter A-Z, an abridged version of The Harry Potter Lexicon a work that had put a question mark over all Potter fan sites.

In the end, Rowling, her publisher and the judge seemed in agreement that the Harry Potter A-Z just contained too little original material to qualify for fair use. It was largely a cut and paste job, according to them.

We'll never know how accurate that assessment was, of course, but either way, Harry Potter's online fan community flourishes to this day with Rowling's consent. It seems she even got over the writer's block the court case apparently caused her.

A message game on DreamLyrics would be almost entirely original. No problem there. The GM wouldn't even need post Harry Potter resources on DreamLyrics since there are so many other sites they can link to.

Whilst it's not a game that'd interest me personally, I can see no reason why it couldn't be done.

I think the concern was that DL is pay to play, and thus it could be considered using her works for financial gain.

DreamLyrics is a technically a social activities club with a registration fee, and is a non-profit organisation.

It isn't a paid for service per se. In this context, paying to join the club doesn't guarantee you that you can run or play in a Harry Potter game.

I know it seems pedantic, but it's an important distinction to make.

Just my 2 cents here, but one could run a Potter game but to do that, you would need to call everyone and everything by a different name:

Hogwarts = Pigzits
Harry = Henry
Hermione = Henrietta
Ron = Rob
Nobody uses "wands", they use "rods".

Concepts could be the same but no toes get stepped on.

As I said...



Np.

The question is, who would want to run it? I can imagine it being even more prickly yet mercurial to handle than a Lord of the Rings message game. :s

At least with LOTR you can set it in the Fourth Age, job done. Or some time long before the War of the Ring. You still have the flavour.

But what's Potter without Hogwarts and Voldemort? Showing my ignorance here.

hmm i dunno , I think Henry twiddling his rod in the hallowed halls of Pigzits doesn't quite do it for me

In all honesty (and being serious for the moment), how many law suits to date have been filed against DL for copyright infringement since the site started? For that matter how many request to remove due to copyright violations have been received by the admin’s?

I’m going to make an educated guess here and say exactly zero

I’m pretty certain that these major corporations will not bother claiming against a zero profit tiny members only roleplay club. Put simply, under the tortuous and fiendishly complicated international copy rightlaws you are not worth suing. I know US courts sometimes like to think they have jurisdiction in the UK but I promise you they really don’t

If you want to run a game, syndicated or not just go for it!

Well be honest, I doubt you'd be playing the actual book characters. Odd's are, they'd be NPC's. You'd make your own characters, but the universe is the thing.