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Re: (TFT) TFT II - summary
Craig,
It's been a long time since I had copyright classes in law school, but what
stands out in my mind is what I thought was a relatively low standard when
it came to "originality" for copyright purposes. I like your discussion of
patents and never thought about the game mechanism as being patentable. I
vaguely recall that those processes or mechanisms were very difficult to
protect, like accounting techniques. OTOH, just how original is most of this
stuff anyway apart from the "backstory". Most RPG's have a "player
characters" with stats like Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc...,
distance is measured in squares or hexes, dice are rolled against personal
stats or skills. Weapons and spells are use. There are warriors, wizards and
thieves. Heck, most games have "fireballs" available for wizards. Even a
weapon's table isn't all that creative, is it? D&D had "DM" while TFT and
others have a "GM". Is "DM" copyrightable? How about "hit points"? There has
to be something original in it.
If you took TFT's basic mechanism, and split the three attributes into six,
you'd have a significantly different game. You'd have a game where a wizard
could increase his spell points/hit points without having his muscles
increase as in TFT. You could separate IQ into Intelligence, which measures
the "level" of skill or spell learnable, and Wisdom, which measures the
number of skills/spells a character has. This way a character could be very
smart/educated but only know a few skills or be less educated but know a lot
of lower level skills/spells. Would this be original enough? It changes the
dynamics by expanding the Attributes and provides you with a character not
representable in TFT. It sort of looks like D&D with the six attributes, but
it uses them in a way D&D never has.
Just some thoughts.
Aidan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig W. Barber" <craigwbar@comcast.net>
To: <tft@brainiac.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 5:15 PM
Subject: (TFT) TFT II - summary
OK, I'll summarize:
Anyone can publish TFT perfectly legally as long as:
1) You don't name it TFT (George Dew's Trademark)
2) You don't copy the art, words and tables of the TFT books (HT's
Copyright)
3) You don't copy the actual mechanics of the games... at least... not
closely. (For fear of a court coming down with a broad definition of
copyright).
See? Easy. Just change the name, words and rules and we can do what we
want.
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