[UA] The d20 system and Pop-magic

[John Nephew]

> Yep.  Apparently the folks at Chaosium got up one day and thought "Hm... I
guess
> today is a good day to give away the store."  Really, I'm just baffled.

Are you kidding?  (It's a serious, not rhetorical, question.)

> Eh... the idea of D20 UA makes me a bit uneasy, and not just 'cause of
some prima
> donna fear that the magnificent tone of my innovative mechanics will be
lost, blah
> blah.  No, what worries me a bit is that (1) doing a D20 UA would obligate
future
> UA stuff to have two sets of stats and two mechanical writeups for
EVERYTHING.
> No matter which system you use, you'll be going "Exactly half of this shit
is worthless
> to me."

That would be what you might call a "high class problem," as Jerry Corrick
says.  If there's pressure for two sets of stats, it's almost certainly
because the D20 book sold some significant large multiple of the original
book, and adding those second stats would mean doubling all the print runs
and royalty checks.  You can bet they wouldn't be included just for
giggles...  As for bloating the page count, the larger print runs could
allow you to keep the retail price in check while increasing the page count.
(Those larger print runs allowed us to do Thieves in the Forest as 24 pages
plus a two-sided 17x22 two-color poster map...for $8.95 retail, a dollar
less than WotC charges for 32-page B&W interior adventures.  Let's just say
that such a booklet/map combo would not be viable for the UA line.)

> I'm also concerned that (2) with a D20 UA out there, you'll get a slew of
off-brand
> UA material floating around.  "What, you mean Atlas didn't publish that
Naked
> Goddess flip book?  Huh.  Oh yeah, you can see the logo from Two Dipshits
> Studios.  I guess they figured that it was open source, what with being
D20 an' all."
> Granted, that assumes that enough people care about UA to rip it off, but
it's still a
> worry.

Not a worry--at least, not any more than it's an issue TODAY, when Two
Dipshits Studios could go out and publish the same thing.  They would be
equally in violation of the UA intellectual property, just as someone who
publishes The Pornographer's Guide to the Forgotten Realms would be
violating WotC's rights, D20/open gaming license or no.  There may be more
of a worry of rip-offs, however, simply as a result of more copies being in
circulation and thus available to come to the attention of morons and IP
pirates.

> Don't get me wrong: I think D20 is a noble experiment and has the
potential to be
> very cool.  But I feel a lot better about making new settings and systems
that fit the
> mechanics, rather than trying to shoehorn existing games back into a D20
mold.

Possibly so.  In any case, open to speculative discussions either way.
People will have to actually do some projects for anyone to have real data
to go by.  Maybe D20 conversion books and dual-system supplements will not
have any significant success.  I don't think UA, with its modern setting,
would be my first choice for experimenting -- at least not until the Cthulhu
D20 book is out, establishing a baseline for modern horror D20 system rules.

-jn


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