tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13133788436946802242024-03-21T21:43:13.939-07:00Levi KornelsenGames and toys and thoughts on them.Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1313378843694680224.post-26531224670014306602023-02-13T14:00:00.003-08:002023-02-13T14:04:27.451-08:00Black Flag Playtest Feedback 1<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. Lineage / Heritage </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-1e5b9b1c-7fff-e2e2-2e1c-02082c97a43d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The distinction between lineage and heritage does a pretty good job of kicking away the “culture is biological” thing that’s pervaded fantasy gaming since early days, but the heritages quietly (and likely not intentionally) reiterate the concept of “most cultures are mono-racial”.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Setting up your wood elves and your high elves is dead easy and built right in; the wood elves have a Grove Heritage and the high elves have a Cloud Heritage. No sweat.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But something like "If you're from the forested kingdom of Velmet (which is, by the way, 40% Elf, 25% Gnome, and 35% everyone else) you likely have a Grove Heritage" isn't a first-glance option, and should be; lots and lots of settings are built that way around.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beefing up heritages a bit so they stand firmly as ur-cultures to be dropped in that way, and detaching them into a distinct subsection from lineages could get you both. You'd still want pointers in the lineages naming the common heritages and pointers back in the heritages naming the common core demographics, but widening the gap a bit helps regularize some very valuable stuff.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. “Racial Languages”</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The holdover of racial languages, on the flip side, go directly back to “Culture is biological”. Making language being intrinsic to a species across many worlds gets very “All Dwarves think alike” as soon as you look at it for more than a half-second.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And look, I know they’re necessary for full backwards-compatibility, but it would not be terribly hard to actually create a genericized name for each of these, note that each is often and incorrectly ascribed to a heritage despite it being much more complex than that, and move on with the new name. Nobody will be confused if there’s a table that goes:</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Language</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sometimes called</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span> </span><span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Used by</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kharzad </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span> </span><span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwarvish</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span> </span><span> <span> </span> </span><span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stone heritage cultures, x, y, z.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Quahai</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Elvish</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span> </span><span> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grove heritage cultures, x, y, z</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Etc)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3. Heritage Alignments</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Please, just dump this entirely if it’s at all possible to do so. In the cases where a heritage / culture is so deeply committed to or poisoned by set values that a “usual” alignment even makes sense, that needs a lot more than a quick list entry; that’s a few paragraphs of main text needing to be written.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1313378843694680224.post-56941009842403421812023-01-27T08:10:00.003-08:002023-01-27T08:15:18.846-08:00D&D in the Sandstorm<p><span style="font-family: Arial; white-space: pre-wrap;">The owners of D&D, by all indications, would like it to reinvent itself into a game that makes heavy use of digital tools, often including during play. Moreover, they'd like these to be digital tools they control to some extent, and which give them money. Additionally, they want added control over 3rd parties; something much less permissive than the open license of the current era.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-d358be0a-7fff-5378-75a3-2481237e476e"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In hindsight, I think this was inevitable. And not because of corporate greed (though corporate greed set the timetable and the demand list, and did it </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">early</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), but because of the collaborative folk tradition of gamers.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I enjoy OSR stuff; lots. Also indie stuff and…. Uh, basically a bit of everything in gaming. But the OSR stuff especially applies here.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the last couple of decades, the era of the OGL, not only has publishing at the small scale gotten trivially easy, but there has sprung up a massive list of D&D-likes, hacks of it, and basically anything you want.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Complete games in the same conceptual space exist in absurd numbers and high quality, many inexpensive, some free. With a day to search around and another to read and make some notes, you could smash together a dungeon adventure game that suits your tastes passably from just <i>parts</i> of stuff people have thrown out there for free. Kitbash D&D is easy, and the array of options improves every year. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What D&D has is the brand and the network of players. It’s like Facebook; people are mostly there because their friends are there, even if there are better options.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, all those smaller bits are not </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">competition </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with D&D proper at this point, and might never be (there are a couple, much smaller, competitors in the space, but those aren’t really to be feared <i>in and of themselves</i> for Hasbro). Those smaller bits, though, are trouble on an existential level; they’re folk tradition moving back into the space where business says competition occurs, not solely as a business property, but heavily as an incoherent mass that, while it does commerce, doesn't do business properly from a corporate viewpoint, because </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that's not what it's primarily about.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> They don’t draw business to competitive centralization and keep it there; they </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dissipate and erode</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> it. They can outproduce even the leanest team because they’re often doing it for free.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To repurpose an old line from Clay Shirky: Bloggers and influencers and social media didn’t compete with newspapers, but they started to render the institutions of journalism </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">incoherent</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and those institutions are still eroding now.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or, to get all analogous:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The caravan can weather a good bit of blowing sand; it is not competition. But as the wind picks up for yet another go at dumping grit down his tunic, the caravan owner </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">isn't </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thinking about getting up on top of a hill to get a better view. He's thinking, god, this is annoying. And the forecast say it's never, ever going to improve. It’s just going to slowly, slowly get get worse, forever. At some point, it’ll be a sandstorm that’s going to start doing real damage.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time to build walled gardens, new stops, places the sand only gets in after it's mixed up right to build the walls higher. More control, and look for something that the sandstorm can never reach. Much as a fortune has been made trading across this ridiculous desert, time to shut it out.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">DM's Guild, D&D Beyond; keep going until you get something the blowing sand can't get into, that costs too much for them to reproduce, then center the business there and make </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">D&D.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, that means it has to stop being folk art. But nobody really cares about that, right?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…Right?</span></p><br /></span>Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1313378843694680224.post-70053520030848255772023-01-24T00:08:00.010-08:002023-01-26T13:08:28.613-08:00The ORC Project: Founding A Scene?<p><span style="font-size: medium;">I believe that it's possible for the ORC project to actively and powerfully drive a fairly particular, generally beneficial (as in, everyone wins) open-source scene in tabletop gaming, above and beyond just providing the license, and that it wouldn't be terribly tricky to do.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I'm going to break down this down into five parts.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /><b>1. THE LICENSE ITSELF</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Beyond what's already been made clear as the intent (similar in most functions to the OGL, but for any system, irrevocable, held by a party that aims to preserve it), I think the license needs this:<br /><br /><i>Revise any "You may not name product identity" style statements to "You understand and agree that you gain no added rights to closed content" ones. That is, they can still talk about their sources in their text like normal people would, and say that their work is compatible so long as there's no likelihood anyone will think it's "official".</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The absolute reservation of product identity never actually stopped compatibility statements in the OGL, it just pushed people into saying silly "World's Oldest Game" lines. Whatever preservation of brand it added was second to the amount of low-grade frustration and resentment at needing to reword and exclude natural and normal language. Frustrating people who otherwise want to supplement a work and would otherwise like to credit sources openly doesn't create a positive atmosphere - the best it can do is pressure them into a secondary compatibility-stating license that nobody is going to trust and which they'll also low-grade resent. "Official compatibility" programs can and probably should have something more to offer than "We'll stop frustrating you." <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Making this change takes away the biggest barrier to movement towards openness. We're not yet actively forwarding it, but let's continue...</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>2. THE USAGE GUIDE</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It's looking a lot like the license will be released with some guidelines for use; an FAQ, some best practices, that sort of thing.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I believe this usage guide needs to be written to strongly forward this principle:<br /><br /><i>Creators should only make open what they are ready to celebrate others using, and using however they see fit; if you're likely to think people are using it wrong, don't open it up. Be ready to cheer for people that use your content!</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is because it's important to ensure that people don't get Giver's Remorse about putting things out there, and to prime the idea that, yes, it's right to cheer each other on. It's what we do here.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The usage guide should also prime people to consider what their intended use case is, even as it prepares them to accept it often won't be adhered to. If an SRD is meant to allow barebones free trials, does it have the parts for that? If it's meant to make it easy to allow supplement-writing, does it give access to everything needed? If it's meant to put forward ideas the creator thinks ought to be in more games, does it frame them and show why people would want to? <br /><br />Additionally, the usage guide should contain a discussion about the natural (nominative) use of trademarks in the text. That they are not forbidden doesn't mean "anything goes" - you can't indicate compatibility in a way that makes people think you are "official", you can't use someone's trademark casually in the text in such a way that will make people believe it's your trademark, and if there's likely to be any question whatsoever, it's good to put a disclaimer at the front of the document (often around the credits) that goes like "Thus-and-so are trademarks of Actual Holder, and no challenge is intended by their use".</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, the usage guide should suggest providing a copy of any SRD or open content document to one or more repositories set up specifically (by the project proper or early volunteers) to hold such documents, in addition to maintaining your own copy. Nothing mandatory, just a note that this is a good practice (we'll get to why in a second).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>3. THE REPOSITORY</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Whether "official" or disparately volunteer-run, the repositories set up to collect SRDs and open content documents should generally be relatively minimalist, ideally pretty easy to search and download from, but <i>especially</i> easy to spot "what's the new stuff?". Hold on one more second again, and the reason will be clear.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>4. DURING RELEASE</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When the license goes public, as a minor note in communications, forward the notion that "For those of you wanting to track, report on, or showcase new stuff as it comes out, there's this / are these repositories for SRDs and open content docs that we're hoping people will use, which you can keep an eye on as well as your usual channels."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>5. THE EARLY COMMUNITY</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Beyond the official project, which will be trying to line up a fair number of larger SRDs for release right off the bat, people who are in the general field of interest for ORC can prep for launch by lining up and system-neutral or drag-and-drop game component things they have, and holding those ready to also release in the early days of the license, as open content documents that can also be dropped into the repository (or repositories) to help prime the scene.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WHAT ALL THIS DOES</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So, now you have a bunch of creators and mashup folks who aren't giving away their ability to lift up each other's works in their own, aren't mildly annoyed by the license terms in this regard, and are primed to celebrate each other. They're putting things with clear usage cases (and plenty of "or whatever else you like") into centralized places where designers and hackers can look - <i>and also where youtubers, bloggers, and others can pull from to tell everyone "What's new in the world of ORC?". <br /></i><br />And if that ease of finding material for review and reportage results in any amount of "showcasing", that's free press, which in turn becomes a new reason to create open content and put it where it can be picked up and showcased.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Everyone wins, and we <i>potentially</i> get a virtuous cycle, building upwards.</span><span> Even if it's not a major effect, there's no loss; each piece is positive unto itself.</span></span></p>Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1313378843694680224.post-63082468637101741262023-01-20T10:19:00.005-08:002023-01-20T10:31:45.045-08:00Don't Expect A Morality Clause In ORC<p><span style="font-size: medium;">While we're waiting for the first draft of the ORC, a recurring question has been "Is it going to include a morality clause?". <br /><br />Eric Mona, publisher at Paizo, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cere7NaiqJY&ab_channel=RollForCombat">got asked this on-stream,</a> and he had to do a little back-and-forth preamble, but the answer was "Probably not; if you have material you don't want terrible people to use, take care with how and if open that content up".<br /><br />On top of this, the official ORC discord has been discussing this over and over for it's first 24 hours, and there too the rough consensus appears to be "Yeah, we mostly don't want one".<br /><br />Reasons why not vary, but include:</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">- I don't want to police everything downsteam of me; I certainly don't want to eat some kind of trouble for not policing it.</span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> - I also don't trust anyone else to police use of my content, especially if that someone else might shift over time.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">- Policing this would mean court time and expenses for someone, and isn't that exactly what we're trying to avoid here? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">- That's not what "Open" means, as regards open content.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">- Enforcement of this would vary wildly by jurisdiction.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">- It would be a chilling effect, not just on those it's aimed at, but also on people that such clauses have often been bent around to harm; they wouldn't trust it, and for very good reasons.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of which are fairly strong arguments, and appear to be consistently winning the day thus far. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So, yeah: Don't expect a morality clause in ORC.</span></p>Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1313378843694680224.post-44473816062447279032022-09-20T12:42:00.014-07:002022-09-23T18:27:22.262-07:00The Ethical Generation Of AI Art<p>There's been a lot of discourse in the TTRPG space as regards AI art, and I've spent a lot of time thrashing out arguments about it's presence and use<i> in that space. </i>Eventually I decided to compile my bits and blog it out so each thought can find it's proper length. So here's that.</p><p><span style="color: #990000;">(This piece has been updated. Updates are in dark red.)<br /></span><br /></p><p>...</p><p>First thing, I want to settle my basic ground on some stuff:<br /><br />1. Nobody is obligated to hire or not hire artists. <i>Single instances</i> of the "stole a job" argument are nonsense in both directions; it's not a strong point to say that it did or a defense to say that it didn't. If you're arguing on the basis of Bob Hiring An Artist Or Not, you're not on useful ground; Bob gets to hire who he likes or not. However....<br /><br />2. Everyone <i>is </i>to some extent responsible for the systems they patronize, fund, and enable, and their wider impact on how things work. If AI art pushes an local/sub/whatever economy in the aggregate that centralizes money in the hands of tech company owners who do not pay living, working artists, while drawing on the labor of those same living, working artists, that IS a problem - and Bob, if publishing, is a contributor to normalizing that problem.</p><p>3. Referring to a shift to AI art with metaphors regarding industrialization may very well be apt, but doesn't actually tell us if it's good or not. Kicking your clogs into the machine can legitimately be the ethical decision, and "someone's going to be the villain, may as well be me" is a negative ethical stance, not an acceptance of a new neutral.</p><p><span style="color: #990000;">4. Having an AI sample from artwork <i>appears</i> to be legal, so long as it doesn't breach terms of service for hosting sites or the like (which... scrapers <i>have </i>done, so put a pin in that), but if it reproduces something especially close to a trademark or copyrighted piece, that could easily be infringement. While we should properly be concerned firstly with whether it's ethical, so far as legality goes, the answer is that it's not fully settled, at least not so far as stock art sites are concerned:</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDsMGm3rssvirmW-Nggb42EXSNaBjVCzsoUJmLlisrLPsb6o9UIOyJpZI04eQvZds6oVGtB-Qk9LwE1CzImz_6YJIRCD46VWsP2rnoJf06EBpUKoLJqADgr8QHKVRryK22669saHxHxb_63liTrVwM3jZstJmSOiMbaRKgXrELwpsoFtDAYW1QbNe/s1792/FdNEqQlaMAEjvEN%20(1).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1792" data-original-width="828" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMDsMGm3rssvirmW-Nggb42EXSNaBjVCzsoUJmLlisrLPsb6o9UIOyJpZI04eQvZds6oVGtB-Qk9LwE1CzImz_6YJIRCD46VWsP2rnoJf06EBpUKoLJqADgr8QHKVRryK22669saHxHxb_63liTrVwM3jZstJmSOiMbaRKgXrELwpsoFtDAYW1QbNe/s320/FdNEqQlaMAEjvEN%20(1).jpg" width="148" /></a></div><br /><p>5. Following up from the infinite digital arguments of the past on Theft vs. Piracy, it's probably worth getting the term of accusation correct - what's the specific bad thing AI art generation is generally being accused of? In most cases, the terms are almost certainly <i>remix </i>and <i>plagiarism</i>, so that's what I'll be using later on.</p><p>This leaves us with two big questions:</p><p>Will AI art worsen our local/etc economy as in (2), and should it be avoided on that basis?</p><p>Are AI art programs basically plagiarism or unethical remix engines, and should they be avoided on that basis?</p><p>So let me bash on those separately:</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Our Local Economy<br /></span></b></p><p>We don't know with any certainty what the <i>scale </i>of the impact is here because the reactions we've seen are people enthusiastically jumping on it and sharing it around, and people reacting to that, and a lot of shouting. We don't know if buyers of games will buy things made with this art as a novelty, as a regularity, if they'll get sick of it quickly. We don't know if it will improve and do better on things like eyes and hands and cross the uncanny valley forever, become indistinguishable from other art, all of that. There are a lot of sellers of AI stock art suddenly, and will likely be a rush of things with AI art in them, yes, but scale also requires a lot of <i>buyers, </i>or it's just a failed fad people wasted time on.</p><p>I'm also unsure of the <i>tone </i>of the impact economically. If the people using it are, in the aggregate, using it to replace free or public domain art, it's not doing a damn thing to the local artists. If they are, in the aggregate, using it to replace stock art, then it's a loss to to stock artists. If they're most often replacing their own efforts, then economically it's just a labor-saver (this is me, by the way; the "artist I would be replacing" is <i>also </i>me). If it's taking the place of commissioned art, again, it's a loss to commissioned artists.<br /><br /><span style="color: #990000;">I suspect that it's going to be a loss to stock artists, after a lot of shaking and tinkering and etc etc etc, but not nearly so much so to commissioned artists. And even this is somewhat in question, given the very recent (as of this update) rejection of AI art by a number of Stock Art sales sites. Still, though, for many designers, generating their own good-enough AI art is often cheaper and faster than finding a good-enough piece on stock sites.<br /></span><br />If the art improves technically and is normalized to an extent that it creeps up the ladder of where it's accepted, it may bit by bit edge out commissioned art. Of course, many artists work both sides of that fence, even using stock art to attract commissioned clients, so to them it doesn't matter if it's a load of bricks or a load of rocks that looks like it might be hanging above them.<br /><br />On the other side, the writers are <i>also </i>often broke, and AI may prove to be an economic gain to them; getting to do their thing at the level and in styles many consumers demand even though they're not walking in with significant capital. </p><p>It <i>may </i>be a win-lose deal, such that eventually what we get is that the writers are less often broke but there aren't half as many artists working in TTRPGs... And I would say that as an <i>end state</i> that's ultimately neutral or even maybe mildly positive (everyone still here is making, on average, more money) economically, but the path from here to there is littered with vanished opportunities for artists or (if the scale is large enough) even dead careers - a potentially grim road to a very mid-range end. </p><p>Now, if it enables independent designers to compete in such a way that it lowers barriers to entry and make the kind of money that lets them hire artists, <i>and they do so,</i> then it's a gain for both. But here's where that creep up the ladder might fit, driven by "Well, I could hire an artist now, or run ads? I'll run the ads." and similar line-item decisions where the projects get better but the artists stay out in the cold. </p><p>Ultimately, to me, this all reads as a reason to be <i>wary </i>overall, but it's all shaky, filled with maybe-if and maybe-not, and as a result it doesn't set a lot of bright, rigid lines about acceptability or action. It does draw one, as an absolute, and it goes like this: </p><p><i>Even on purely local-economic grounds, it's <b>definitely </b>good to frame AI Art as being, at best, for experimental, starting-out, and no-budget work, and it's <b>definitely </b>good to sneer loudly at projects that can afford commissioned art that are using AI Art instead. No, they don't have an obligation to hire any set way, but we probably should treat them as if they did, so that usage "up the ladder" won't be normalized. </i></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Remix Engines</b></span></p><p>At this point, it's common to introduce some analogy to photobashing or collage or DJs, and I've done that before, but I want to bite that particular hand for a second.<br /><br />If Jimmy walks into a room with a copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and walks back out later on with "Jimmy's Great Romance", which is plainly a R&J with minor changes, we don't need to give a shit what happened in the room. If Jimmy has a thousand monkeys at typewriters in there, and he merely selected the closest matches to his book and then sent those around for monkey-editing a hundred times, he has invented a really astonishing way to plagiarize Romeo and Juliet, but <i>he's still doing that.</i></p><p>It doesn't matter if the AI cuts them into confetti or vectors or alien algorithmic patterns Which No Man Can Know. If it later reproduces a work it disassembled to a close enough extent to be a minor reskin, we can reasonably call it plagiarism. If it often reproduces works somewhat, enough that it's notable but clearly not the same work, we can reasonably call the product a remix, and judge it by standards common to other sorts of remix art. If the influence exists only really at the level <i>of </i>influence, we can call it "inspired by", and not worry about it much. And yes, these are subjective levels, and always will be. So it goes.<br /><br /><span style="color: #990000;">As an aside, at this point, there's often someone in arguments that says "AI can't possibly reproduce a piece closely enough that it'd be plagiaristic! That's not a thing, because [discussion of the monkeys in the room]". To which I can only say, here's what happens when I type "Van Gogh Starry Night" into Midjourney:<br /></span><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK3vPiwFKU_NMj_daA2blm02kFF1cWoUrC-xhuqzo1slsw_N9k-_AnbzplOOavWP4Zwpt52wRY9uNFkcvPUBjJ0wD3CppxwZ4_aWnji5gEUvSXiP_B-VI25AIheyJkI74ziWMuVcaac0YTd9baV1nl0Z-GoPELn7nfbzqurcSgwmBxRPmJa9Tiznu/s512/LeviKornelsen_van_gogh_starry_night_b9c4309a-faa8-4e0b-b875-28e54fa1969d.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK3vPiwFKU_NMj_daA2blm02kFF1cWoUrC-xhuqzo1slsw_N9k-_AnbzplOOavWP4Zwpt52wRY9uNFkcvPUBjJ0wD3CppxwZ4_aWnji5gEUvSXiP_B-VI25AIheyJkI74ziWMuVcaac0YTd9baV1nl0Z-GoPELn7nfbzqurcSgwmBxRPmJa9Tiznu/s320/LeviKornelsen_van_gogh_starry_night_b9c4309a-faa8-4e0b-b875-28e54fa1969d.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Everything I have seen to date leads me to believe that AI Art programs fundamentally act as remix engines, which on (at least seemingly) rare occasions pull too much from a given source and push over into the realm of plagiarism, but are likely sometimes are original enough by virtue of randomness to claim that no influence rises above being an inspiration. The designers would like them to reach the level of pure inspiration, and their most ardent fans claim we've already arrived, but honestly it doesn't seem like we're there yet. Moreover, when such a program happens over into plagiaristic territory, it doesn't know that, and doesn't pass on enough information to the user for <i>them </i>to know it.<br /><br />So, this means that <i>most </i>AI Art has three major ethical issues in general use, which when they're taken together make it at least "kinda shady" and at worst "straight bad".<br /><br /></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Users may arrive at plagiarism incidentally.</li><li>Only willing or public domain sources should be used at the level of remix (being inspired by others is inevitable in art, and AI can be allowed that standard, I'd think). </li><li>When remix is done, at least the primary sources of the mix should typically be credited, and this isn't built-in.</li></ol><p></p></blockquote><p>AI art programmers can work on these (and bloody well should, and in some cases definitely are or aren't) by limiting their datasets to willing and public domain artists, working to get their thousand-monkey room to "grind finer" toward inspiration, and ideally to toss up a credit when a major source exists.<br /><br />But users can also make significant strides towards or against these things. Take a moment to<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-artist-is-dominating-ai-generated-art-and-hes-not-happy-about-it/"> read about Greg Rutkowski</a>, then come back.<br /><br />...Okay, so, that's not cool, obviously. Right? That's users actively calling an artist in as a major source on the remix - an artist who feels threatened by what's being done with that remixing, and then drowning that artists search results with bad crediting.</p><p>But then, on the flip side, consider the following piece, which I quite like (you might hate it, but hey, taste):<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kFgnrbFIiFflRSR7B7F8VZzBgXERzs7tD5VOfb0kbOcFvEEwwPTgYLuBDhdDr24ZlYdktvjoPv9YHgOV4noXqerx_vWe3IdsCgF8U3vmQ-sS0IHzBkfvmBL8O007g8-e_JZgNlqmz46iMzL3bX_1jmAIXBLyOey51vchYsFNA6UBZWaFlWMfLg0c/s1536/Tower.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_kFgnrbFIiFflRSR7B7F8VZzBgXERzs7tD5VOfb0kbOcFvEEwwPTgYLuBDhdDr24ZlYdktvjoPv9YHgOV4noXqerx_vWe3IdsCgF8U3vmQ-sS0IHzBkfvmBL8O007g8-e_JZgNlqmz46iMzL3bX_1jmAIXBLyOey51vchYsFNA6UBZWaFlWMfLg0c/s320/Tower.png" width="213" /></a></div><br /><div>That was generated in Midjourney by feeding it the address of a photo, a subject, and an artist for style, specifically:<br /><br />/imagine prompt: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/450000/velka/george-town-clock-tower.jpg clocktower in stained glass by Edmund Dulac --iw 1 --ar 11:17</div><div><br />Which means that it's a remix whose <i>primary </i>sources are Alix Lee (the photographer who took <a href="https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=446542&picture=george-town-clock-tower">this picture</a> and put it in the public domain) and Edmund Dulac (a classical illustrator in the public domain). I know who they are; I know I'm not in plagiarism land, my main sources are public domain, and <i>I can credit them.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>All of which goes into my view, which is that on a personal level, AI Art is ethically much like a power tool with deeply insufficient safety guards. It can be used ethically, but it requires an active effort to do so, and we need people to actually be putting forth some effort towards doing so and improving it along those lines, users and programmers both.</div><div><br /></div>Levihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04247835570586914825noreply@blogger.com