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  1. #11
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    The 2e/3.x/4e debate can only be settled conclusively by ditching character stats entirely at the domain level.

    Many people here have advocated making rulership skills and character details entirely dependent from normal D&D adventure statistics. That's the only way to make a single version of the BR domain system (which is otherwise entirely independent from D&D adventuring rules, anyway) applicable to all versions. I'm all in favor of this.

    I don't think it is really possible to expand Birthright as it is, unfortunately. As long as Wizards holds the copyright and refuses to let us produce and sell product involving the story materials (the original published material or anything new), we will not be able to adequately reach new markets, increase visibility.

    I agree that people value more what they purchase, but we can't sell anything. That means that the only avenue we have open for appreciable expansion of the hobby through marketing/visibility is by producing all that material and paying for marketing, or donating marketing space and efforts on the web.

    Creating and supporting an easy-to-learn free, online community game could work. With enough users, ad revenue could even sustain the hosting of it. But I don't think this is possible unless you can automate the game to some degree. All the other successful free gaming communities that I know of have some level of automation. If we could set up living worlds where people would be able to submit turns and have them processed, that could suffice. That would limit roleplaying more than most PBEMs do, but it might attract more interest that could then get more into the roleplaying side.

    Alternatively, we'd have to produce our own rulership game, abandoning the BR story (to which WotC controls the rights) to another setting. But that won't work because what many of us love about this is the BR setting.

    The last option for expanding the game would involve either buying the rights from WotC (likely prohibitively expensive--would they even entertain the thought if it were less than $10,000?), or trying to enter into some partnership with them whereby they earn royalties off of anything we sell, and we produce and sell things primarily with the goal of making enough money to pay web hosting and minor marketing fees to expand the hobby; no one will ever make any reasonable amount of money off of this, unfortunately.

    So while I think it is an admirable cause to try to expand the BR community, I think it would be very difficult to do so, and I'm not sure we have the unity or energy or desire to do what is necessary yet. I don't think rules are a major driver of new participation even if they are wonderful, so I don't think we should approach rules under that illusion.

  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by Birthright-L View Post
    When I say new materials, though, I don`t just mean extrapolations on
    existing stuff, or even conversions to new editions. I mean actual
    adventure hooks, new character classes, and things that people
    actually go out of their way to purchase out in the gaming
    world. Details on existing materials are good, but people want to
    see the plot move ahead. Maybe the Gorgon needs to die. Maybe the
    continent is invaded by a race from another continent. Maybe there`s
    another conflict with Azrai or his successor. Maybe bloodlines
    suddenly vanish and players need to figure out what happened. Etc.
    I definitively agree with this, the timeline of the setting needs to advance, that will help a lot making the setting more interesting and more lively. I don't know what would be the best way to make the timeline move forward (and agree between ourselves), but it should be one of the first things to do.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vicente View Post
    I definitively agree with this, the timeline of the setting needs to advance, that will help a lot making the setting more interesting and more lively. I don't know what would be the best way to make the timeline move forward (and agree between ourselves), but it should be one of the first things to do.
    What's the purpose of advancing the timeline, specifically? That would have an impact on how you would do it.

    Advancing the timeline will have no impact on attracting new players. The current timeline and disposition of things would be new to them, anyway, so the only way advancing the timeline might help for new players is if it was being done to effectively change the setting to something that we thought was more attractive to new players.

    Advancing the timeline might encourage the current players, or draw old players back in. To do that, though, we would need to discuss and have some agreement about what most people would find exciting. It seems to me that a lot of people are rather happy with the default setting as a starting point anyway. I've seen people advance things a few years to create a fairly specific scenario for a new game they want to try out.

    What I am cautioning against is change for the sake of change. Killing the Gorgon or bringing back Azrai or doing some other drastic thing may significantly change the flavor of the game, but for what purpose? We need to keep that purpose in mind, and not alienate existing players by destroying what they so love about the world.

    WotC advanced storylines in Forgotten Realms to introduce new concepts and reinvigorate a setting with huge numbers of players, many of whom may have wandered away. But they also alienated a lot of people in doing so. Birthright never had that kind of a following. Birthright had less of a following than Dragonlance, and I think the rapid advancement of that storyline down dubious paths by the original authors of the world destroyed a lot of the charm of that setting. I hated what Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickmen did with their endless wars and cataclysms starting 30 years after the War of the Lance. The setting prior to the Chaos War had lots of beautiful flavor and I dearly loved it. The Chaos War, the Dragon Realms, and Takhisis's prophet Mina and all that put Dragonlance through several major changes in flavor of the setting, as well as just strained credibility with me well past the breaking point.

    I would hate to see us butcher Birthright, with a much smaller fan base, in the same way, when much of the reason that it is still played long after its commercial demise is because the flavor of the setting was well-loved.

  4. #14
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    At 03:34 PM 8/7/2009, Rowan wrote:

    >WotC advanced storylines in Forgotten Realms to introduce new
    >concepts and reinvigorate a setting with huge numbers of players,
    >many of whom may have wandered away. But they also alienated a lot
    >of people in doing so.

    I don`t know that FR is the best example of how to go about advancing
    a timeline.... From what I can tell, people were wandering away from
    FR before they advanced it.

    >Birthright never had that kind of a following. Birthright had less
    >of a following than Dragonlance, and I think the rapid advancement
    >of that storyline down dubious paths by the original authors of the
    >world destroyed a lot of the charm of that setting. I hated what
    >Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickmen did with their endless wars and
    >cataclysms starting 30 years after the War of the Lance [snip]

    Personally, I dropped DL after the original Raistlin-godhood story
    arc, because I rather felt I was done with the setting at that point,
    so I don`t have any opinion on the later materials. However, if BR
    has all the "problems" of the Dragonlance setting then we can mourn
    all the way into gaming immortality.... The problem is that BR never
    really even had that story arc. The story arc is setting background
    material. It`s like a chessboard without any moves on it. Arguably,
    the way one game plays out might "ruin" the setting for someone, but
    that`s the way franchises develop. Sooner or later, Captain Kirk
    must die, Vader`s mask comes off or the castaways get off the
    island. Unless the point is that there is no denouement (the coyote
    never catches the roadrunner) then a setting in which nothing changes
    is simply static. A good setting will continue on past such events
    if its strong enough. Personally, I think BR has more than enough
    material in it to survive the death of the Gorgon or an invasion by a
    barbarian horde from across the sea.

    Gary

  5. #15
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    At 02:26 PM 8/7/2009, Vicente wrote:

    >I heartfully agree with this, the timeline of the setting needs to advance, that will help a lot making the setting more interesting and more lively. I don`t know what would be the best way to make the timeline move forward (and agree between ourselves), but it should be one of the first things to do.

    I appear to have some sort of Star Trek thing going on at the moment, so I`ll make the following, rather awkward, comparison:

    Apparently some Trek fans are upset about the events of the latest film. I`m not a rabid ST fan, but I`ve seen all the original episodes, all the NG, Enterprise and most of the episodes from the other spinoffs--but that`s mostly out of a sense of general geekdom rather than a particular fascination with the series. The fans who are upset, though, are bothered by the events of the movie because the diverge from the OS so much, and what was hyped as a "reboot" turns out to be something that has the potential to be season 8 of Dallas. At the start of season 9 one of the characters wakes up to find the whole last year was nothing but a bad dream. The next ST movie could easily cancel all the events of this one. For that matter, they might wipe out any number of things.

    The thing is, alternate timelines are a core concept of the Star Trek universe. They appear in every series. They happen in the movies. They are major aspect of the setting`s action and events. Personally, I can`t say I want to see another 10 ST movies based on an alternate timeline, but if there`s anything to get annoyed about in the movie, the fact that it`s an alternative timeline just doesn`t seem to make a lot of sense to me.

    How`s this relate to BR? Well, one of the things people don`t really fully embrace about the setting is that it is absolutely RIFE with alternate materials. All the Player`s Secrets of X texts start out with alternate regents. The texts were intentionally written with a smattering of vagaries and optional events. The history is intentionally open to debate. Perspective is fit right into the setting material. Is the Cold Rider the servant of Azrai, the son of Azrai, a remnant of Azrai, or an Azrai-wannabee? The setting material doesn`t tell us outright. Occasionally, one of these mysteries is solved. We found out in a supplement that the Magian is a member of The Lost. But even when such a mystery is solved, it`s not really a huge advance in our understanding of things. We know almost nothing about the Lost! The fact that he`s a member of Azrai`s old posse is an interesting bit of character development, and might spark a few adventure hooks, but it doesn`t really alter the conception of the setting.

    So, I`d suggest that new materials be handled in a similar way. There is a concept in the old sci-fi RPG Traveller. We used to say "In my Traveller universe..." and then fill in the blank with some particular homebrew version of things. Later incarnations of Traveller has several timelines available that range from the demise of the vast interstellar empire to one where no such thing happened.

    Nothing is hard and fast in BR. The materials contain suggestions about how to incorporate things, but they don`t require DMs to do so. That`s always the case, of course, but BR didn`t just assume it, it embraced it. That should be the assumption when people come up with new materials for the setting.

    Gary
    Last edited by Thelandrin; 08-08-2009 at 03:39 PM.

  6. #16
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    I wasn't suggesting FR was a model--unless it's a model of what NOT to do I was pointing out that that approach wouldn't work for BR, and the reasons for it don't seem to apply to BR. Neither was Dragonlance a good model.

    o, I`d suggest that new materials be handled in a similar
    way. There is a concept in the old sci-fi RPG Traveller. We used to
    say "In my Traveller universe..." and then fill in the blank with
    some particular homebrew version of things. Later incarnations of
    Traveller has several timelines available that range from the demise
    of the vast interstellar empire to one where no such thing happened.
    That seems like a good approach for BR. I think it's already being done ("in MY Birthright game..."). Perhaps we ought to institutionalize that approach more somehow. I'm not sure how Traveller does it.

    Are you suggesting we provide a few alternate timelines or scenarios/storylines? That would be easier than agreeing on one, for sure.

  7. #17
    Ehrshegh of Spelling Thelandrin's Avatar
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    I like the idea of multiple timelines. It allows people to conjecture about the various futures and gain substance by "wiki-magic", without alienating people who would dislike a single future.

    Ius Hibernicum, in nomine juris. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

  8. #18
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    At 10:11 PM 8/7/2009, Rowan wrote:

    >Are you suggesting we provide a few alternate timelines or
    >scenarios/storylines? That would be easier than agreeing on one, for sure.

    I think we should use the Player`s Secrets of... texts as a model for
    new material, and maybe extend the concept a bit. That is,
    everything should be presented with a timeline option as a way of
    showing the DM/players a way of incorporating that material into
    their campaign, but it should be understood that it is just one of
    several ways of doing things. Other possibilities should be given
    their own little descriptions.

    BR does this kind of thing a lot. In addition to the PSo texts,
    consider the "Playing a Birhtright Campaign" in the original
    Rulebook, the recommendations for player and NPC realms in all the
    Expansions, the lists of adventure hooks and hints. The texts
    consistently present material as a set of possibilities or from a
    particular perspective, meaning the DM can take that view and run
    with it, or give it to the players as misleading.

    Gary

  9. #19
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    In my research the other day I opened the latest version of the birMail program...their map must contain materials I've never seen as they have a continent basically 3-5 times bigger than just the boxed set's map.

    Granted all I have on hand is boxed set, blood enemies, sea/naval, herokings, maybe two others ... but we don't seem to be at a loss for grounds and the need of fleshing out from that perspective.

    What you said about the time & energy thing hangs over me too...as we all gradually lose steam. My focus has to be on balancing out birthright.

    Are we allowed to offer previous versions of editions as a historical type thing? With them axing all online stores (WoTC), I'd hate to have to get a name scrabbler ran (one of the final reasons I went with sql db project).

  10. #20
    Senior Member Mirviriam's Avatar
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    OT: I wouldn't go completely away from class/D&D system, but I suggest ... players choose one of their character classes/skillfocus whatever & that is their acting domain stat for collections etc. That way I can shoehorn the players in to my game without getting complicated. If I have too, all domain characters start out at level 1 & I'll have exp system for domain actions to allow them to level a seperate entity from their normal character.

    From there we deal in raw related bonus - loosely done & totally in the domain of DM Fiat. Pick any skills or whatever 7th Edition will call it & then that's their bonus to completely domain actions if we need a syngergy/spell level etc.

    I have no opposition to a new system independant of D&D adventuring stats based on 2nd/3rd/4th - just I have no time for it either.

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