Jan 28, 2018, 5:00 PM
IIRC, a friend who does Pathfiinder Society stuff mentioned once that the reason they don't use other sales sources is a method of control of PDFs getting out there and trying to help handle piracy.
Sci Fi/Opera Originality
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@kanye-qwest said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
It's a bad idea to create a setting where people can be spread out all over a universe from the beginning. If you have a game that successfully runs for awhile and attracts players through story and atmosphere, you can work on adding other places, other destinations. But first, you should definitely create a reason for players to be together.
Yes and no.
I hate looking into a game, asking the game "What do you need?", being told "anything you want", and then get every idea for civilians / trader / pirate / random NOT-crewperson turned down because it doesn't fit in the box they want to put everyone in. Most sci-fi games that stick people in the sphere-box tend to keep even basic civilians on NPC status and everyone must be part of the crew so that they're "not left out of RP", like away missions.
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Offtopic, but the Starfinder people have the most annoying web store ever. Have they never heard of drivethrurpg?
/rant
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@rnmissionrun Yeah, not sure why DriveThruRPG hasn't picked up Paizo as a publisher yet. Until then, the website can be a bit of a pain, but the product is worth it.
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IIRC, a friend who does Pathfiinder Society stuff mentioned once that the reason they don't use other sales sources is a method of control of PDFs getting out there and trying to help handle piracy.
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@bobotron That's fair! They went through DTRPG with Pathfinder and you can find those books everywhere for pirating so it makes sense.
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@miss-demeanor I think some places -- I don't know if they're one of them or not -- are able to generate an embedded tracking code in the stuff as it gets sent out, so they can track it back to the sharer if needs be. I know the digital content place I was working with for ages looked at something similar, but with the kind of product we were making, it wasn't feasible at the time (and may still not be, it's been years since I checked in). One guy who was doing software and selling through his own site had some method of affixing a serial# of sorts to the files and was able to track folks down this way, but it was a different sort of content, and he was very clear in warning people about this up front before they purchased anything at all. (The data he was able to get to the rest of us was pretty horrifying. Stuff he'd sold, say, 23 copies of at a whopping $12/each after spending months coding it in 2+ years got downloaded something like 6k+ times within the first three hours, and that was just the people who clicked to open up and use the thing that pinged his tracker, not just the folks who left it sit in a file of things they'd maybe look at some day. Sooo many reasons I stopped doing that kind of work.)
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality The Starfinder PDF I bought is marked on every page with my real name and a code which I assume is the order number or something, so yeah, they are one of the ones that do that. I honestly don't mind this kind of DRM. I understand the need for it and besides, it's not like I am the kind of person who would redistribute the stuff anyway.
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@rnmissionrun
That's a pretty standard way that DTRPG marks some of their stuff (on DTRPG it is your order #), but it's entirely dependent on the publisher when you get them through DTRPG, as I have some books from By Night Studios that do it, and some that don't; same with OPP. There are also other hidden watermarks that will be looked for if something shows up on the intertubes, since the hidden stuff is harder to clean out without intense knowledge of Adobe. -
The Starfinder PDF's are still out there and very easily pirated. If that was their intention, it didn't work.
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Isn't all the Paizo stuff still covered under the OGL or whatever it was an has to be made available? Maybe not in fancy pdf version, but the strict text rules?
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@wildbaboons Maybe the Pathfinder stuff, but Starfinder is brand new. Not sure it still falls under the open licensing.
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@wildbaboons
OGL has to post the rules, but noting else I believe. No idea how Starfinder, as a Pathfinder + SciFi functions there.@Lithium
Didn't say it was working. Just said that it's what I had heard as to why it's not on DTRPG.