Slashdot Mirror

I've bought a lot of PDF only products from Steve Jackson Games. Partially because I was picking up things that were out of print, and partially because for GM-only reference material, PDF documents are easier for me to handle when I'm prepping for a game.

Their e23 store has become a major part of their business, and they have pledged to keep downloads available as long as the company still has its doors open. That's saved my bacon a couple of times, like when the USB stick I kept my books on got fried by a faulty device on the USB Bus.

If you don't mind learning a new system, and you really want to get back to that old-school dungeon crawling feeling that a good D&D game can give you, you might check out their Dungeon Fantasy line of products. It's not for everybody, but there's a pretty big community of people who are getting their rocks off smashing monsters and taking their loot.

I've bought a lot of PDF only products from Steve Jackson Games. Partially because I was picking up things that were out of print, and partially because for GM-only reference material, PDF documents are easier for me to handle when I'm prepping for a game.

Their e23 store has become a major part of their business, and they have pledged to keep downloads available as long as the company still has its doors open. That's saved my bacon a couple of times, like when the USB stick I kept my books on got fried by a faulty device on the USB Bus.

If you don't mind learning a new system, and you really want to get back to that old-school dungeon crawling feeling that a good D&D game can give you, you might check out their Dungeon Fantasy line of products. It's not for everybody, but there's a pretty big community of people who are getting their rocks off smashing monsters and taking their loot.

This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.

It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!

This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.

It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!

This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.

It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!

Well, my memory goes back to this: SJ Games vs. the Secret Service, which happened in 1990. So your memory must be longer than mine to recall a time when such things didn't happen.

Btw, what was the outcome of that? Oh yeah:

The judge gave the Secret Service a tongue-lashing and ruled for SJ Games on two out of the three counts, and awarded over $50,000 in damages, plus over $250,000 in attorney's fees.
and
the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And that all occurred after a raid on a pretty small company. Imagine what will happen this time. Provided that the colo provider can survive the loss of it's tenants.

Well, my memory goes back to this: SJ Games vs. the Secret Service, which happened in 1990. So your memory must be longer than mine to recall a time when such things didn't happen.

Btw, what was the outcome of that? Oh yeah:

The judge gave the Secret Service a tongue-lashing and ruled for SJ Games on two out of the three counts, and awarded over $50,000 in damages, plus over $250,000 in attorney's fees.
and
the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And that all occurred after a raid on a pretty small company. Imagine what will happen this time. Provided that the colo provider can survive the loss of it's tenants.

Various documents, explanations, and analyses may still be found on SJG's site, according to Google. I also just verified these couple of links myself.

• Top Ten Media Errors, for instance. Pardon the formatting, it hasn't really been updated since 1994,
• Lawrence Tribe's "The Constitution in Cyberspace" from about the same period, and
• "Crime and Puzzlement". Included partly because it seems to be a worm's-eye account of the poopystorm that transpired, but also because I hate using the unordered-list tag on a list with less than three items.

Unfortunately, I'll admit it's straying a bit far off the topic of federal IP seizures, except perhaps to show that under the right circumstances, there's nothing an adequately jumpy government won't lay claim to.

Various documents, explanations, and analyses may still be found on SJG's site, according to Google. I also just verified these couple of links myself.

• Top Ten Media Errors, for instance. Pardon the formatting, it hasn't really been updated since 1994,
• Lawrence Tribe's "The Constitution in Cyberspace" from about the same period, and
• "Crime and Puzzlement". Included partly because it seems to be a worm's-eye account of the poopystorm that transpired, but also because I hate using the unordered-list tag on a list with less than three items.

Unfortunately, I'll admit it's straying a bit far off the topic of federal IP seizures, except perhaps to show that under the right circumstances, there's nothing an adequately jumpy government won't lay claim to.

Various documents, explanations, and analyses may still be found on SJG's site, according to Google. I also just verified these couple of links myself.

• Top Ten Media Errors, for instance. Pardon the formatting, it hasn't really been updated since 1994,
• Lawrence Tribe's "The Constitution in Cyberspace" from about the same period, and
• "Crime and Puzzlement". Included partly because it seems to be a worm's-eye account of the poopystorm that transpired, but also because I hate using the unordered-list tag on a list with less than three items.

Unfortunately, I'll admit it's straying a bit far off the topic of federal IP seizures, except perhaps to show that under the right circumstances, there's nothing an adequately jumpy government won't lay claim to.

One of which is that this is great publicity for the game and will surely increase sales.

Hey, it worked for Steve Jackson Games. Unfortunately, it almost bankrupted the company and took four years for the case to be resolved in their favor. That was in the 90s; I doubt that the victims next SJG-style incident will be so "lucky" in Post-9/11 America.

I am not a professional programmer, so I have the luxury of getting to choose my tools and switch whenever I want to. I have tried several times over the past to pick up Java, but each time I found it too heavy for what I intended to use it for. Kind of like hunting for deer with a M2 Browning. Personally, I use Python or Ruby for pretty much everything I do. Then again, the biggest project I've ever done was only about 1,000 lines of Python. It was a program for calculating trade between worlds in our http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/traveller/ game.

I find it rather strange that in a community so bent on not being mainstream, only the prime mainstream RPG is discussed.
Having played well over 20 RPG systems myself, I can safely say that D&D (no matter which edition) is one of the worst I've ever played. But that's just my impression. From a passionate RPG player, here are some alternatives to D&D Fantasy Roleplay:

Palladium & Rifts
Exalted
Runequest
Harnmaster
GURPS
Torg

If you haven't played at least one of the above besides D&D, you should do it ASAP.

Well, that's one way to look at it. I personally can't think of a lot of web sites that have been shut down 'by the government' although there have certainly been a handful of good examples. Mostly raids where internet equipment was confiscated, and such equipment seems to have a poor track record of getting back into the hands of its owners (if at all!) The most important might have been the raids around the 'E911' document which included storming the game company Steve Jackson Games and lead to the creation of the EFF which still operates today.

You can look over the EFF case history on their site to find a nice list of cases, some more dubious than others, where internet sites were shut down and/or censored. Of course, what you (hopefully!) won't find in their case history are perfectly legitimate shut downs of sites engaged in dully prosecuted criminal acts.

So, this might just be liberal fear mongering. It might also be an attempt to highlight the good work of watch dog groups who publish messages the government might not want released, even if such groups aren't in real danger of being shut down. Considering the size and scope of the /. crowd, it might even just be an attempt to highlight cool web sites, with the 'shut down by the government' meme part of our wacky hacker humor.

Or, it might just be an attempt to scare up some web hits by trying to tap into some internet controversy among geeks. Hanlon's razor, etc.

Has Munchkin suddenly become a valid meme for Slashdot?

This whole thing reminds me of the old Steve Jackson game Killer.

It also reminds me that I lost my copy in a flood 12 years ago and how bitter that made me feel.

And then it motivated me to see if I could find anything related on the net, and I see it's back in print.

http://www.sjgames.com/killer/

Thanks Slashdot! I feel a lot better!

In 1980, Steve Jackson's Car Wars background history includes a grain blight which devastates the world's nations and economy, plunging most of the US into anarchy. The year? 2012. His timing may be dead on.

[ObPlug: I still play old-school Car Wars PBEM at MadHat. Drive Offensively!]

of 4th edition.

Nah, he just wanted to go out on His Day. Today is DM's Day!

Check out the core rules for free: GURPS Lite

The Basic Set books are only available in print, but you can pick up cheaply on Amazon.com:
GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns

The rest you can buy DRM-free PDFs from Warehouse 23: GURPS 4th Edition

The rules are easy to learn, and you'll get amazing value out of each book. (I've got plenty of old GURPS 2nd and 3rd edition books that are *still* valuable references to this day!)

------

Oh wait, this article was about D&D? What's D&D?

Check out the core rules for free: GURPS Lite

The Basic Set books are only available in print, but you can pick up cheaply on Amazon.com:
GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns

The rest you can buy DRM-free PDFs from Warehouse 23: GURPS 4th Edition

The rules are easy to learn, and you'll get amazing value out of each book. (I've got plenty of old GURPS 2nd and 3rd edition books that are *still* valuable references to this day!)

------

Oh wait, this article was about D&D? What's D&D?

I played AD&D 2nd Edition when it was all I knew. After my introduction to GURPS, I never bought another D&D rule book.

Don't get me wrong. There is some really nice creative fodder that comes out of WotC; adventures ("modules"), campaign settings, and other color. I'll happily buy any of these (used, if possible) and convert them for play under GURPS rules.

I just recently (two days ago) picked up the 4th edition books, after being away from role-playing for almost 10 years. I think Steve Jackson Games hired a bunch of mind readers over there, because absolutely everything that bugged my old group about GURPS 3rd Edition (missile spell caps, concentrate maneuver delay, lack of real tactical combat options beyond feint [don't even get me started on the epic battles that boiled down to 'stab the bad guy in the eyes']) was corrected in the 4th Edition. It's a beautiful update to the best RPG ever.

Try it instead of D&D 4th; you won't be disappointed.

So... what if someone else stuck a TM after Cyberlaw?

Like this:
http://www.swcp.com/~zialink/patent.htm

or this...
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/cyberlaw.html ...and seems the term has been leveraged before, in court:
http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/040320/c378876cc036a94572ec64d1b6f1258f/OSS1993-01-29.pdf

Have you looked at the Hero System? It is basically what you want. The main rule book contains a list of abilities and their associated costs. From these ingredients you create your own recipes whose costs you can calculate to keep things balanced. The genre books then offer a series of templates.

While there are some things about the system that bother me, and which I prefer in the d20 system, its a really interesting system none-the-less. In fact, it is probably the best system that no one has played a game in, which is a shame

When GURPS did their 4th edition, one of the things that they took great pains at was to maintain a strong degree of backward compatibility (given a free PDF of conversion notes) so that the stacks of GURPS 3e books out there would not become useless. Hero System did much the same with 5th edition. When 3rd edition of D&D came out, none of the books really fit into the new game except for purposes of back-story, but 3.5 did work fairly well with 3.0 with some work.

Is Wizards of the Coast planning on maintaining enough backwards compatibility so that all of the dozens of 3.0 and 3.5 books out there can be used with 4e, or will we be faced with the daunting expenditure of re-buying our entire libraries?

They're constantly starting new free games of UltraCorps as they work out the kinks in it. Site is at http://ultracorps.sjgames.com/.

http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/

Looks like those of us who have already played at autonomous tank warfare are in the minority. :-)

Long after I played O.G.R.E. I also enlisted as a 19E10.
If staying in had been my goal (instead of college) I would have had a great time in DESERT STORM.

Tanks for the memories. :-)

I'd say I make up stuff like this for a living, but really it just about pays for my subscription to MAKE Magazine.

Egregious plug: The MacGuffin Alphabet

Point 1 - you are correct. The software license can't give you any additional access to the hardware, and Tivo cannot prevent you from doing what you want with the hardware. Verizon just lost a lawsuit for trying to block people from unlocking their phones. What Tivo does not have to do is make hardware that lets you run your own software. That isn't their business.

Point 2 - less correct. Games are a free market because there are also games for PCs, which are relatively cheap game consoles. There is also a market for standalone games, like mechanical pinball machines, or Munchkin (highly recommended). People choose the game console games because it's the biggest bang for the buck. Metroid on Wii rocks. I don't think that it is abuse that in order for me to piggyback my game on the hard work of the Wii developers, that they (or their stockholders) get a cut.

GURPS is, of course, an excellent system complete with more different worlds than you can shake a stick at. High fantasy? Low fantasy? Sci-fi? Spy? Historical? Alternate history? GURPS has it all. Heck, if you want to run a campaign with Jedi Knights running around Discworld, you can.

Then there are things like the Traveller reprints, worth getting not just for historical value but because Traveller was a damn fun system. Ditto for the Space:1889 reprints--if you can't see the fun of playing a subaltern in the British Army on Mars, I don't think RPGs are right for you...

And of course there are a lot of other systems out there. We live in a great time for RPGs, if you know where to look. It's not at the local game shop; it's not D20; it's online.

I guess you're right. There are situations where you might *wish* you had a skill, but not enough to actually put a point in it. For the DND system, it makes sense to get rid of those skills. On the other hand, I'm reluctant to condone anything that makes DND more of a hack-and-slash-only game. If only someone in my area played GURPS...

Obviously you have never encountered the philosophy behind Munchkin!

Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, (best known for Car Wars and GURPS), has been running something that pretty closely resembles a blog since at least November 1994. That has this guy beat by 2 years at least.

See here: http://www.sjgames.com/ill/1994/ill-nov94.html :)

Umm, Steve Jackson (of GURPS fame) has had a daily blog since December 1994: http://www.sjgames.com/ill/1994/ill-dec94.html

Or what about adding cards!
Steve Jackson's Knightmare Chess

So what if the kids want to play this game from SJGames http://www.sjgames.com/killer/
I remember playing it when I was in college with dart guns I imagine today I would be sitting in a jail cell as a terrorist.

Steve Jackson Games has been publishing Pyramid (or the obligatory Wikipedia entry) electronically for 9 years now with pretty good results. Of course, you can always print out those important articles and they'll be as permanent as any magazine.

And yet you read comments on /. (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

For those who want a replacement for the great Dragon magazines of old, subscribing to Pyramid is a good idea. It fills a very similar niche to those old great Dragons: lots of very interesting articles about many games, not just ones by the magazine's publishers themselves, as well as good reviews, industry analysis, a forum, etc.

[ ] G'Thak Meld testing out new nova bomb. Gas / dust shell was actually a cloud of mothballed habitats and light collectors towed to the system to see how blast would effect a dyson shphere.

[ ] Elder Race equivalent of Jackson Pollock at work.

[ ] Young Earth creationists are right; like anything more distant that 6,000 LY, this was actually elaborate illusion created by God.

[ ] Extremem upper limit of Mentos / Diet Pepsi reaction now known.

Stefan

Download The MacGuffin Alphabet.

No, it's here.

So evidently, it's actually imagination (or loud music) that causes incautious driving. We should enact bans immediately.

You got it wrong. It's Fnord.

Hopefully having a Computer Forensic Institute will help minimize the harm to innocent people while making it harder for the guilty to escape.

SJ Games may publish your game - if you have a good concept.. :)
Read the guidelines for submitting card- and boardgames..
Also check out the Author Guidelines for submitting other types of content.

(Unfortunately, they seem to be rather busy at the moment..)
Good luck!

SJ Games may publish your game - if you have a good concept.. :)
Read the guidelines for submitting card- and boardgames..
Also check out the Author Guidelines for submitting other types of content.

(Unfortunately, they seem to be rather busy at the moment..)
Good luck!

As Fallout and X-Com have already been mentioned, I'd next have to go with Autoduel, based on the Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars.

Yes, it was a little cheesy top-down type game, but before the MechWarrior series was Crescent Hawk's Revenge

You could do Car Wars / Autoduel as an open-ended environment, where you could elect to participate in the autoduel circuit, a courier running jobs, looks for wrecks to scrounge, a go criminal and create wrecks to scrounge, or go vigilante and wait for people to try to create wrecks and shoot them. With today's improved computers, you might be able to make it massively multiplayer, and have caravans and whole posses of criminals lying in wait to ambush people.

In the infamous Secret Service seizure of Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati Online BBS system in 1990 (case resolved in 1993), the court found that the government reading unread emails on a machine by seizure of the machine was not "wire-tapping", in spite of arguments by the EFF that the end result is the same - the government sees your communication before you do.

For all of the alledged "protections" congress has given electronic communication, they've all been mere extensions of protection for variations of wire-tapping. If the government can actually get the physical hardware in their hands, anything goes. There is no sense of protected files or folders on a disk drive.

Uh, if you'll excuse me, I need to go hide my D&D Player's Handbook. The D&D Player's Handbook is fine. Wholesome old-fashioned fantasy stuff. Just as long as you don't have a copy of that dangerous GURPS Cyberpunk book...

For some reason, Steve Jackson Games vs. the Secret Service comes to mind.

This reminds me, in a sick twisted way, of the Illuminati card game by Steve Jackson Games.

The MPAA attacks to control the Boy Spouts of America and succeeds...