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Game Historian: Gygax Swiped Fantasy Rules From a Forgotten 1970 Wargame (blogspot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to game historian Jon Peterson, Gary Gygax's Chainmail fantasy wargame (which became the basis for Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and later Dungeons & Dragons) borrowed heavily from an earlier set of rules published by Leonard Patt, a long-forgotten member of the New England Wargamers Association. Among the appropriations were rules for heroes and wizards including the iconic fireball spell, which ended up in everything from Magic: the Gathering to World of Warcraft, as well as monster rules for dragons, orcs, ents, and other Tolkien creations. Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit, and this latest revelation shows how the open and collaborative environment of early gaming was quickly exploited for commercial purposes.
... And that guy stole it from something else, which got it from some other dude, who took it from the Bible, which stole it from the pagans, who got it from Ancient Aliens.
Shakespeare stole everything he read for his plays, including making up new words for the English language. In short, so what?
Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit, and this latest revelation shows how the open and collaborative environment of early gaming was quickly exploited for commercial purposes.
We get it. Commercial is bad. Everything should be non-profit. We should all make the same wage. We should all have the same stuff.
I get that Mr. Patt may have had no way to know his work had been appropriated, but once D&D became the national craze it did, why didn't he wonder to himself at the similarities?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
This is ridiculous. You can't patent game mechanics and you can't get copyright on something as general as 'Fireball'. This is how the sharing of ideas was intended to work not some illicit theft of ideas.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
...how does one get to be a game historian and get paid for it?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
The summary pretty much says it all. The person want's to claim that the "Fireball" used in every game from 1970 to present including all of the big MMOs was from some guy who GG stole from. WTF? In reality, the Fireball goes back many many thousands of years. The "gods" threw fire and lightning. Shot was thrown as well as spears, so guess which one was the spear and which was the shot?
People want to push this idea that if you change a label you somehow "invented" something. Society must owe something to somebody at all times. "You didn't make that!" right? Sheesh. The cynic in me just ignores this concept after lashing out at the idiocy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Something that TSR did not promote during the 80s and 90s was the hobbiest/sharing culture that got the whole ball rolling in the 70s. In many ways it paralled Bill Gates and the software industry. Playing the part of Stallman was Peter Adkinson, who started WotC. When WotC acquired TSR in the 00s, it was a boon to the RPG industry as the OGL was formed to foster the hobbiest community and other companies to share and collaborate, but Hasbro went back to the older ways with 4th edition and put it under a restrictive license. Looks like the OGL is back though as WotC has released an SRD for the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The hobbiest community is still strong. Some things are created under other open licenses. Every year since 2009, the One Page Dungeon Contest (https://onepagedungeon.info/) holds a competition with all of the dungeons put under the Creative Commons License for people to share, remix, and build off of.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. And they get all the chicks, too.
If I have seen farther than others it is because I stood on the shoulders of Fire Giants.
Borrow from one it is plagiarism. Borrow from a bunch of gamers it is a lot of unattributed fun, because who cares!
Indeed. The history of roleplaying games is fairly well know, and everyone who knows the history of the genre knows that tabletop war games provided the initial inspiration, not to mention a number of mechanics used by Gygax and other early formulators of RPG rules. As I recall, the whole hex map scheme common to many roleplaying games, particularly from the 70s, was lifted entirely for war gaming. Indeed, I've often felt the original D&D was sort of the C of roleplaying games, something of a halfway point between the war games and the later more fully formed FRPGs like AD&D.
At any rate, game rules in all gaming genres freely steal off of each other, whether the rules are copyrighted or not. It's how all games evolve.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When you steal from a lot of sources that's labeled "creativity".
George Lucas couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, so he steals from Akira Kurosawa, some WWII movies, and a few few other bits and pieces and we get Star Wars.
Hanna Barbera wanted to do a "Jack Armstrong" series, but they couldn't get the rights. So, they fiddled with the formula a bit, changed a few names, and we got Jonny Quest, the killer animated series that influenced a generation and then some.
Frankly, if old Gary stole some ideas from here and there, that's very much BAU for how stuff goes from underground to commercial success.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
That's why I only play Pathfinder.
So thats what happens when you fail a Wisdom check...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.
Material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container may be registrable.
If your game includes any written element, such as instructions or directions, the Copyright Office recommends that you apply to register it as a literary work. Doing so will allow you to register all copyrightable parts of the game, including any pictorial elements. When the copyrightable elements of the game consist predominantly of pictorial matter, you should apply to register it as a work of the visual arts.
So, even using the exact same rules (described slightly differently but with the same result, same as there are plenty of different ways to describe, say, the game of chess), and the same system of play, and even the same NAME, are not protected. Make your own Risk clone with different artwork and you can tell Hasbro to stuff it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.