Discussion Over Rules

[Labster]

I'll just point out that the "greater rules of Yuku" no longer apply, as Bob owns and operates these forums himself now.  That means that "have fun and play nice" is the high law of the land.

[Bob Schroeck]

Heh. Indeed it is.

[Black Aeronaut]

This thread is pretty much what it says on the tin.  This is a special thread so that people may comment or debate about rules for There's Nothing Better.

It came to mind that I need this when posts started showing up in a thread that I thought I had locked.  Sorry folks!  Said posts have been relocated to here.

ETA:  Whoah!  Did not expect those posts to go in above this one.  Oh well.

Anyhow, you guys certainly have a point there.  We now have a much broader scope to work with, and that means that we may need to make some changes.

Initially, I was going to say that NSFW content would be allowed, provided that:

1. All NSFW threads clearly have the NSFW tag appended to the thread title, and
   
2. We try and keep the squick factor down.  As long as it moves the story along, then fine.  But if it's just there for the sake of being there...  That's a big fat NO.
   

Thoughts?

[robkelk]

Agreed on the NSFW suggestions. Also, somebody could end up in jail for writing a NSFW scene that includes a character below the age of consent ... so let's not do that at all.

[Labster]

I think to myself, hey, I'm surprised this thread isn't locked, probably got unlocked during the move. I bet he'll lock it after I post. It turns out I'm a great prognosticator.

I was just trying to note the new site rules, not make a push into NSFW content. It doesn't really matter to me the standard, because I don't have a desire to write sex scenes. BA's rules sound good enough for me.

I do worry about Rob's logic, though. Someone could end up in jail for writing a scene with Belldandy in it, at all, because it could be considered blasphemous. Basing our editorial decisions on the laws of any country other than the one we're hosted in seems like folly to me, and almost all forms of speech are legal in the United States. (Exceptions in include threats, libel, national secrets, and other things very unlikely to come up in fiction.) Even then, we're skirting the edges of copyright law by the very nature of fanfic (something something transformative uses). The law is not a good justification for community standards.

[Black Aeronaut]

Well, look at it this way, Labster - in doing so you pointed out a need to me, and that need has been rectified.

In regards to legal issues....

....To my knowledge, as long as pictures, video, or audio of actual underage people are not involved, anything goes. That said.... I think the whole thing with 'keep the squick to a minimum' will suffice.

And with regards to copyright law... I think maybe a preamble in the READ THIS FIRST posting claiming everything posted in this subforum falls under a suitable Creative Commons should help. Agree?

[Labster]

A Creative Commons license might help other readers, but it doesn't offer any defense against copyright infringement. Not outside of social signaling to jurors, if they know about CC.

So the particular edge we're skirting on copyright law is that fanfiction is fundamentally built on other people's commercial work. There are a whole set of tests to determine whether something is infringing: Does it copy a significant proportion of another copyrighted work? Is the work sufficiently transformed from the another work -- is it significantly original? Is it being used for literary criticism? Does it reduce the ability to collect revenue, or otherwise divert revenue from the base work?

All of these are fundamentally continuums, and real results are based on the case law that has developed. But none of the tests relate to how it was distributed, i.e. the license. Selling the work is more likely to be infringing, but that's also orthogonal to a Creative Commons license. Nothing in the license prevents a creator from also selling his work. If you get sued for selling the fic, the license is irrelevant. If someone else gets sued for reselling your fic, the corporation does not bring the CC license into it at all because they want all the damages -- they won't want to give you any. It only makes a difference in asking others to play nice. I mean, you could sue for infringement of your fic, but like Peter Thiel says, "If you’re a single-digit millionaire ... , you have no effective access to our legal system."

Anyway, I'm kind of a fan of CC-BY. Attribution is all I care about. It's my default license when I get a choice, because then people can just do whatever as long as my name stays attached. I didn't have a choice on All The Tropes, because Eddie forced my hand into CC-BY-SA.

[robkelk]

... Basing our editorial decisions on the laws of any country other than the one we're hosted in seems like folly to me, ...

Alas, the country I'm in disagrees on that. Although that stance also relates to "community standards"; the community in question is an entire nation.

...  Selling the work is more likely to be infringing, but that's also orthogonal to a Creative Commons license.  ...

Unless we go with one of the NC licenses, the way we did with Fenspace.

I'm less worried about copyright than I am about trademark - we aren't copying chunks of text or video and one cannot copyright a single word, but one can trademark an image or a name. We have to be careful that we are not appearing to be in competition with the original works (which is why so many of my scenes and stories are written in a way that doesn't re-provide information that's in the original works).

[Labster]

Edit Reason: Please be sure to mark OOC commentary in [IC] threads. Really, I should just make it policy to keep OOC comments out of [IC] threads entirely. )

I guess I should have marked it.

But then is C&C supposed to go in a random OOC thread? If we go with that policy.

[robkelk]

We've had OOC commentary in IC threads in the past. I'm not too worried about this.

[Black Aeronaut]

Yeah, it's just a clarity thing. I can't speak for anyone else, but for second there I thought that was supposed to be IC until I backed up and reread it a bit more.

[robkelk]

Hmmmmm... when we get to that point, we should game it out, assuming everybody plays tabletop RPGs. I'm willing to GM. I'm sure there are any number of virtual tabletops out there with logging capability.

We'd need a game system that can handle the wide range of powers everyone will have by then. V&V, GURPS, BESM... any other possibilities?

[Mamorien]

Hmmmmm... when we get to that point, we should game it out, assuming everybody plays tabletop RPGs. I'm willing to GM. I'm sure there are any number of virtual tabletops out there with logging capability.

We'd need a game system that can handle the wide range of powers everyone will have by then. V&V, GURPS, BESM... any other possibilities?

A Cortex variant? Fantasy Flight's Genesys? Oddity High or some other PbtA game? (I'd suggest Trinity Continuum: Aberrant, but it's still only in first draft.)

[Black Aeronaut]

Not my area of expertise. Bob, care to chime in?

[Bob Schroeck]

I'd lean toward GURPS, myself, and not just because SJG has been known to give me money.

V&V, even in its newest release, would require too much tweaking and massaging of power definitions to fit some of the characters -- for example, neither the electrical nor magnetic powers allow for something like Railgun's signature ability. It also links many/most/all powers' strength/range/etc. to attribute levels, which makes it impossible to create a physically/mentally average person with a world-class talent.

A point-based system with some flexibility would make it easier to model the more unusual powers, so either Champions/Hero or GURPS, and GURPS is designed with both the real world and compatibility with other systems in mind. And its 4th edition is finally broad enough to build Doug.

Mind you, this is skewed by the fact that I don't know BESM, Cortex or Genesys, and I haven't yet read the PDFs I downloaded about Oddity High.

[robkelk]

Everybody either has or can acquire V&V, Champions, or GURPS, which I can't be sure of for the other games. If V&V isn't capable of simulating Railgun, then it's out. And I already have GURPS, so...

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, V&V does have a couple "wild card" powers which you can use to do railgunning -- that's how I got Doug's in -- but you'll have to really warp the basic mechanics to make her fire as fast and hard as she does.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, here's a little something from my dev file for DW-S.  It's a clip from one of the discussion threads on rpg.net for Shadowjack's "In Which I Watch Sailor Moon", and it's about quantifying the Sailor Senshi's uniforms in GURPS terms, based on events in episode 110 involving Neptune and Uranus:

(Assumptions-Neptune and Uranus were being shot at by an M61 Vulcan cannon firing solid slugs.)

GURPS 4th Edition

Okay, the stats for the M61 Vulcan shows a 6dx3 pi++ (6dx3, multiply all damage that penetrates armor/DR by 2). The average roll is going to be about 21, so call it 63-64 points of damage. And, anything that gets through is multiplied by 2. Also, our girls will take one HP in damage for every ten points they take if they're wearing "soft" armor that stops the attacks (blunt trauma damage). But...if they let any damage through, it's salami time (no blunt trauma damage, but all damage is multiplied by two-so, if even one point gets through...), we have to assume the upper range-108 points of damage per hit.

It takes a LOT of rounds to batter them down....so, I'd say they have about DR 110 with the limitations of Soft Armor (-40%), which means they can start taking blunt trauma damage to knock them down to 1/3rd HP, probably with a few levels of Hard to Kill on top of it. If you want to make them able to do the whole "withstand earth-shattering magical attacks" I'd buy some more DR with the limitation of "only versus magical attacks".

Hopefully this helps give you a place to start quantifying.

EDIT: I also have notes about the Senshi in Nobilis terms, even though I know nothing about the game system...

[Rajvik]

I have gurps, but I also have BESM. and that is specifically meant to be for anime based game builds, so taking a look through the rules and powers as you have the chance might turn out profitable

[Labster]

I can't believe all of this planning on dungeon crawls is the result of a throwaway joke of mine.  I guess the idea of Dirty Pair came from a joke, too, so the muses work in mysterious ways.  I've never played GURPS so I'd be curious what a build for Sakura Kinomoto would even look like.  Shaoran would be much more straightforward, and everyone else is basically a crunchy.

At the time I was thinking about the fact that I was going to run a D&D session for my characters to play in.  The objective for the game is actually to help train Sakura, as RPGs teach all sorts of precious life lessons like "rely on your comrades" and "don't forget to look up".  With the second goal of having fun for everyone, of course.

• Sakura - wizardish (something with low spells/day, high flexibility?)
  
• Shaoran - Fighter
  
• Tomoyo - Cleric
  
• Osaka - Gnome Diviner
  
• Tomo - Thief (Fujiko expy)
  
• Kaori - Paladin
  
• Possibly added later: Hjørdis and Uffe (from Rita, because let's throw in Danish TV too)
  

The story on Osaka's character is that I once had a GMPC in an Eberron campaign called Sonrisa d'Sivis.  Since my players were mostly minmaxers, I went for a suboptimal build to keep her out of their way: a gnome diviner, wasting a feat to get the magical notary ability of House Sivis.  But the character concept was Luna Lovegood plus Osaka.  Read in-universe fantasy books, comes up with wacky theories from divination, very few of which were 100% true.  She had a little Audrey Horne thrown in too, since the plot was loosely based on Twin Peaks, as she was more willing to take risks for justice than you'd expect from someone like her.  The players caught the Luna reference right away, but missed the other part as they had never seen Azumanga Daioh.  But they learned to keep her away from large knives anyway.

OK technically I have played GURPS once but I managed to critically derail a Discworld game during the first session, lol.  So I don't remember all that much.

Do we have any kind of timeframe for when Act 2 actually begins?  I'd at least like to get my hatsuyume segment in before shit starts hitting the fan, so that would be January 1.  Always a good time for prophetic dreams.

[Black Aeronaut]

Oh, no worries. I don't intend to have the shit hit the fan quite that quickly. I'd say we have until mid-spring at the earliest, autumn at the latest.

But from what I've heard about BESM, that might actually be our best bet. Does anyone have any source books they wouldn't mind sharing?

[Black Aeronaut]

Oh, hey, here's something...

https://infohost.nmt.edu/~guild/downloads/fastplay.pdf

Addendum:

Here's an important bit for us to consider:

The Tri-Stat System premiered in August 1997 with the first printing of Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Since then, the game system has become Guardian of Order's master rules base for all of our licensed role-playing games and resource books as well: Sailor Moon; Tenchi Muyo!; Dominion Tank Police; Demon City Shinjuku; and Ghost Dog. Future licensed anime RPG releases such as El Hazard will also use Tri-Stat.

So yeah. A 'Good Fit' is underselling it. Try 'Actually Made and Licensed For' a lot of the stuff we got in setting already.

NOTE: I had to transcribe it because apparently this is one of those effin' protected PDF's. God forbid a GM might have to copy-paste something!

[Black Aeronaut]

Okay, so after recently discovering that BESM actually has source books on the likes of Tenchi Muyo and Sailor Moon, I think it's pretty safe to say that BESM is the rule book for us to adopt. Even with just those two franchises covered, it's safe to say that given the elements at play in both those settings we can easily adapt just about everything to BESM. (And wasn't there supposed to be a BESM done for RWBY?)

In fact, I think we should put it to use for most character-vs-character combat sequences, both as a means of making things interesting, and to make the fight scenes that much easier to write. (I'll leave a caveat for do overs in the event that a battle results in something that completely derails the plot from where we want it to go.)

Thoughts?

[robkelk]

Those rules are second edition BESM, where all settings had the same point costs for skills and attributes. Sailor Moon and Tenchi Muyo stats are for first edition BESM, where they changed costs from setting to setting so that all characters could be built on the same number of points. (It was very expensive to be a good cook in BESM/Tenchi, because that's all that Sasami was good at...) Assuming we can find those stats anywhere, it'll take some work to convert them.

[Rajvik]

Since it was my suggestion I am behind this