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Don Quixote, in the days before copyright, had an unauthorized sequel. It did not stop Cervantes from writing his planned sequel. "Night of the Living Dead" fell into the public domain due to failure to have a copyright notice. Did that stop George A. Romero from making a series of highly-rated...

The only reason we have the Autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant is because he was dying and knew that his wife would get the profits from it. My frustration with copyright based on the life of the author is that it makes a lot of things much harder. In the US, basically, anything published before...

Meh. Seven is short for my tastes, but JK Rowlings are more common then authors who take a lifetime to see a profit. If you publish something, it's going to make most of its money back in a few years. It's more likely to stay in e-print now, but if it wasn't big when it came out, nobody is going...

If you go back a couple pages, you'll find that you replied to me replying to someone else I was very careful to say that every hardback Pathfinder book has a higher review. With a goal of providing a baseline for what it means for a recent RPG book to have a bad star average on Amazon. I...

And I wasn't and aren't. What Islands book? If I can distract you from edition warring for a second, you'll note that almost all of the other 5E hardbacks all have more reviewers then SCAG. If what you said was the tautology that sales rates tell us more about sales then reviews, I'm not...

Objectively, it has fewer stars than any other 5E hardback book by a full star. If we want to broaden the comparison pool, it has fewer stars than any Pathfinder hardback book. There were a few 4E and 3E hardbacks that dropped below a 3.4, but most of them are at or above 4.0. This has received...

But as a measure of quality, they're better than sales. Unless Avatar was really the best movie of all time (#2 adjusted for inflation). In any case, it proves what I was claiming; that the reviews on Amazon are pretty bad. Nice way to turn it into an edition war. Let me repeat a statement...

Right now on Amazon, SCAG has 3.4 stars. For some rating sites, that might be pretty good. Amazon is pretty biased towards 5 stars, though. The 5E DM Screen gets 4.0 stars, Out of the Abyss is 4.6, Princes of the Apocalypse is 4.6, 5E PHB is 4.5, etc. The lowest Pathfinder hardback book I found...

http://theonyxpath.com/shattered-smothered-covered-chunked-diced-peppered-capped-and-topped-monday-meeting-notes/ is this week's notes. Given "Very pleased to say that we’ve been OK’d to go ahead with the Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter that we’ve planned for...

The Onyx Path weekly mailing is mixed. They didn't talk to Paradox before the sale, and haven't really talked in depth to them now. They say "Paradox has been nothing but friendly in their communications with us so far." and the head guy at the new White Wolf "and I will be talking in detail...

It's a trademark issue, not a copyright issue. Darkmoor is a lot closer to Blackmoor then those names. It was slightly confusable to me; I had to look up Blackmoor to make sure it was Blackmoor instead of Darkmoor. It probably doesn't matter much in the long run, but we do have a lot of...

Blackmoor is a copy of Dave Arneson's name for his setting, and Darkmoor a close rip-off. I'm not sure that Arneson's heirs or licensees have enough of a trademark to sue, but it's really not cool.

D&D 3 SRD: "Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others. "Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. I have a hard time giving any meaning to "dignity" and "oppressing" if they...

If the Monster Manual described a vampire as a shambling unintelligent creature that eats brains, I'm sure most of us would agree that that was wrong. Likewise, we all have our own idea of what the word "deity" means, and we are free to believe that WotC is misusing the word in their texts. It...

No, but it doesn't mean those things are games, gods or religions, either. What's your point? Does anything in D&D actually say that this bizarre monotheism is part of D&D worlds? Because in the real world, most people worshipped many gods, at least casually. According to what? What says...

For what? People believe in a lot of things that aren't very credible. Ever heard of Tiamat? Romans didn't, nor did they know anything about her world. Again, you're acting like a 21st century person who can look up the results of careful post-Renaissance archeology on Wikipedia, not someone...

What does finding departed souls in the afterlife--I'm not sure which spells you're referring to, exactly, but anyway--have to do with the existence of the gods? You drop someone like me (but not a D&D geek) into one of these worlds, and I might have such skepticism, especially if I ran into a...

Maybe in the Forgotten Realms, but Dragonlance has a tiny number of people who can contact and travel to other planes. It's hard to tell, since they're games first and alternate universes second, but on most worlds I think the average farmer could be two hundred miles from the nearest person who...

And you're saying there are no Chinese or Indians? I certainly don't know that, and would welcome their discussions. The point about Marcus Aurelius is that when looking at the Roman Empire, judging it by the standards of Europe teaches you little to nothing about the Roman Empire. There are...

I don't get it; why is it okay to exclude the non-Western World but not okay to look at the US as the US? I'm not telling anyone to leave, but I don't think it reasonable to boil down American politics to everyone is right of center just because Europe does it that way. Both Marcus Aurelius and...