End of the Decipher License?

[Cut]

Except we don't have the license so it would be illegal for us to publish and distribute it, even if we did it for no money.

Yeah are right of course. But we (at least I was) were following the train of thoughts by Tobian, what was to do if we (this comunity) would aquire the rights (never gonna happen, but you're allowed hypotetical thinking, aren't you)
to do a Star Trek RPG ourselves.

[Dan Gurden]

Argh. With the RPG field as it currently stands, whoever has the license after Trek XI comes out - please God let it not be Decipher - will, I think, most likely end up taking the route that Wizards is currently following. To wit, that the demographic possibilities for marketing a miniatures-based game will be explored, and - if the opportunities for making the cash registers ring is there - end up releasing a game where the RPG stuff is more or less an afterthought.

Although...

If the demand was for a ship combat system with miniatures, that would be nice as Star Trek ships are a mixed bag with the best models either out of production or not available...

And as was said before by those of us that did not translate over to CODA, its hardly like the continuity police call at your door and take the old books away. You can always play your own trek, only then you get to add Character/Starship miniatures.

See. Every cloud has a silver lining.

[tonyg]

A semi-reasonable apporach would be to write a generic rule system that we could distribute, and then a sepapate fan-zine like sourcebook that covers the Star Trek setting. There are enough fan produced stuff to play in specific settings that I doubt it would be an issue at Paramount/VIACOM.

But any sort of official Star Trek line would require a license and $$.


Still, having a rule system worked out before making a pitch isn't a bad idea.

[PGoodman13]

Is it just the poor proof reading that you don't like about MGP Babylon RPG or is there more?

The sheer volume of it, along with their poor editorial standards. Too much to buy and too much correcting things that shouldn't have needed it.

There's also the whole D20 thing, which I didn't think was a great fit for B5. It could have worked if there wasn't so much else going against it....

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Or write Trek material and get various people to do different rulesets for their favourite systems.

[tonyg]

Or write Trek material and get various people to do different rulesets for their favourite systems.

We do that here already.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

We do that here already.

Exactly.

So, uh, nothing to worry about!

[tonyg]

Exactly.

So, uh, nothing to worry about!

Not really. I think most of us have all the CODA Trek books, and the talent avalaible at this site can easily be demonstrated by noting just how many people here have go on to publish something profesionally, or by the high quality amateur products such as KIllerWhale's ESO.

Frankly, if a new Star Trek RPG related product is never again produced, we'd all be pretty well set.

I think the bad stuff is along the lines of:

1) Losing the the ability to get books at your local gaming shop.

2) Losing the eenjoyment an ideas gained from reading a new supplement (one of my pleaqsures as a gamer).

3) Increased difficulty in finding/recruiting new players, since new players are unlikely to be picking up "orphan" RPG.

4) THe frustration of never seeing stuff that we knew was in the works or worse, completed, but never published. Stuff like the Klingons book. (Once again a big thanks to the authors of ICON and espeically Steve Long for getting as much of the ICON stuff out of the net, especially SPACEDOCK.)

[The Tatterdemalion King]

1) Losing the the ability to get books at your local gaming shop.

Yeh, this does suck. I'd like books that included all the errata and everything too, though...

2) Losing the eenjoyment an ideas gained from reading a new supplement (one of my pleaqsures as a gamer).

So we need to start making more new supplements!

3) Increased difficulty in finding/recruiting new players, since new players are unlikely to be picking up "orphan" RPG.

That's probably something that varies widely with the group. Half of the games I've played in my current group we barely reference the rules...

4) THe frustration of never seeing stuff that we knew was in the works or worse, completed, but never published. Stuff like the Klingons book. (Once again a big thanks to the authors of ICON and espeically Steve Long for getting as much of the ICON stuff out of the net, especially SPACEDOCK.)

That does suck. We should ask Sjohn if there's anything that he's dredged up.

On the other hand, most of that stuff was written half to three-quarters of a decade ago. The rewriting (mental or otherwise) we'd have to do with most of that material kind of lowers it's... necessity? At least with things like the Klingon material. Even the Sky Pirates material is hard to incorporate in places–the Rigelians in the show probably need a bit of futzing with too.

So, long story short, after a few short spurts of 'official' material, Trek tabletop gaming returns to the same place it's been most of the last few decades. Cadres of enthusiasts producing material by themselves, for themselves.

[Balok]

After watching what they did with B5, I couldn't be less enthused about Mongoose getting Trek. Their quality-control makes Decipher look like anal-retentive spelling bee champions in comparison...and most of you know what I think of Decipher's editing.

I'll take a comparatively high-quality presentation over a high volume of stuff any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

I bought "The Ultimate Arcane Spellbook" back in the day and can attest that Mongoose has always had terrible quality control. Their editors... don't. The PDF of errata for that book ran to forty (40) pages, or slightly under 20% of the book's page count.

No, thank you. The Mongoose model is to throw anything out there, and then fix it with errata later. Since they give away the errata, I guess they think that's okay. I don't like it when Microsoft does this with software, and I don't like it here.

I would likely not purchase a Mongoose authored rule set.

[Cut]

I have heard a lot of bad things about older Mongoose products, but I do own some newer stuff, and I like it. The second edition Babylon 5 RPG book is a good one and the quality control there may not be perfect, but not too bad at all...

[black campbellq]

I agree on the B5 game -- Mongoose quality control and product was crap when it was a generic D&D module clearing house, but the current edition on B5 is lookng pretty good, with not the level of typos, and other editorial problems that even the first edition had.

Personally, I'm really liking the Serenity RPG system. Don't know how well it would handle Trek; I'm really partial to the CODA system, save for the damage characters can take -- seems excessive. It reminds me of a fixed version of the d20 system, with the attributes score/mod set up and the abilities/traits system.