In this Dear Brother letter, we find out why Ben was hung on a ferris wheel and how Black got laid in Las Vegas. It’s always the other PCs getting lucky…
Category: Gaming
The schedule for discovery in the White Wolf v. Sony case is currently as follows:
Each party can serve 5 interrogatories and 4 document requests. Responses are due within 15 days of the services. Following that, White Wolf can take depositions from Wiseman, Grevioux, and McBride; Sony can take depositions from authors of the copyrighted works. Depositions have to be completed by 10/24/03. (Perhaps the cause of the recent subpoenas on White Wolf authors?)
White Wolf has till 10/31/03 to file a new or supplementary brief based on the depositions, and Sony has till 11/19/03 to respond. White Wolf has till 11/28/03 to respond to that. The hearing on a preliminary injunction is to be scheduled after 11/30/03.
Underworld will be out of theaters by then, but since Underworld 2 has been signed, the matter is still of importance to Sony. And, of course, there are DVD revenues.
WISH 68 wants to know about something I don’t have a lot of experience with:
Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you’ve never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?
Answer: not really. A couple of sessions of From Light To Darkness and that’s it. It was good; Neil and Soula clearly agreed on how things were meant to work.
In the back of my brain I have a game design which requires multiple GMs. One GM sets background, and one GM plays all the NPCs. I wanted to make some kind of point about narrativist versus simulationist and how a game can satisfy multiple urges, but I forgot what the precise point was, so I’ll never actually write down the design.
Oh, and my game Into the Sunset is pretty much a multiple GM game, come to think of it.
The White Wolf Underworld lawsuit has involved Ken Hite. Fresh from his bi-weekly column comes the news:
Or, in my case, with a subpoena, subcompetently served on my wife while I was out running my GURPS game. I’d like to thank everyone involved in the White Wolf-Sony lawsuit for that. Having seen Underworld (and thoroughly enjoyed it, in a cheap and tawdry fashion), and keeping in mind that I’m not a lawyer, I don’t think it was worth pestering my wife over.
Shocking news. Who’d have guessed that he plays GURPS? (Yes, I know, GURPS Cabal.)
Addendum: Looks like Bruce Baugh got subpoenaed as well.
It’s document time in the ongoing White Wolf v. Sony saga. First off, here’s Mike Tinney’s deposition as described here. At no extra charge, we’ll include Andrew Zaffron’s declaration. It covers more or less the same ground as did Mike Tinney, with a little additional commentary. Paragraph 8 is amusing.
Moving on to new material, we have declarations from Len Wiseman and Kevin Grevioux, two of the three guys who wrote the screenplay. (And of course Wiseman directed it.) Both note explicitly that “I had never heard of any of the Plaintiffs’ works before early in 2003, after the movie Underworld had been shot.”
I should grab Danny McBride’s declaration — he’s the other screenwriter — and I will at some point, but I don’t expect it to much differ. Thanks to Chris S. for hosting these PDFs.
Today’s Monday Mashup concept was contributed by Eric McErlain, who runs the excellent Off Wing Opinion. He suggested Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend some time ago, but I put off using it for a while because I thought it was a little close to Body Snatchers. But time has passed and here we are.
If you haven’t read I Am Legend, allow me to strongly recommend it. It’s the story of the last man on earth, beseiged by a horde of vampires. He defends himself, despite the fact that he has nothing to live for. In the end, he realizes that to the new society of vampires, he’s the legendary monster. My brief summary doesn’t do it justice, but it’s a start.
Mash!
WISH 67 is all about the story:
How do you tell stories in your games? Are there character stories, overarching stories, and/or other kinds of stories? Could you tell a coherent story from games you’ve GMed or played in? Does it matter to you? Why or why not?
I don’t ever strive to tell stories, but it’s nice when it happens. I’m really more interested in exploring the story space than I am in setting out to tell a story. I like it when things happen to my characters and I like it when my characters do things, but I find plotting for a story to be restrictive.
My characters sometimes have goals, but I regard those as plot hooks for the GM rather than indications of where the story must end. I expect goals to change in play. My goals in real life certainly do.
The Dear Brother letters are a solid example of this. Reese actually didn’t have a goal; he had a desire. He wanted to show America the true road. I didn’t know how it was going to play out, and in the end it’s been a little darker than I envisioned. People have told me that it works as a story, and I think it does, but that’s more because I’m making an effort to write the letters as stories — I’m subscribing to the conventions of fiction rather than gaming.
It means that sometimes I talk about things Reese didn’t see, and I take a few liberties here and there, and I leave out great swathes of things that make the campaign interesting. In the end, the differences between Rob’s campaign and my Dear Brother letters illuminate the differences between playing in a campaign — even a story-oriented campaign — and telling a story.
Mike Tinney’s deposition in the White Wolf v. Sony case is mildly interesting, if only for the following paragraph:
White Wolf has been in discussions with Sony Online about it creating a massively multi-player Internet game based on White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and World of Darkness.
It also sets out the course of events which led to the lawsuit. On April 21st, 2003, Tinney sent Andy Zaffron (a contact of his over at Sony, presumably for the EverQuest pen and paper adaptation) email asking for help getting in touch with Sony Pictures:
“I’ve taken a look at a trailer for an upcoming film called Underworld that is to be distributed by Sony Pictures this coming Fall. It looks (from the trailer) as though it borrows fairly heavily from our World of Darkness IP.”
In a subsequent email on the same day, Tinney said:
“When a film like the Underworld comes across our radar, detailing Vampires and Werewolves, who live in secret societies and fight each other, we immediately begin looking for IP similarities. At an initial glance we’re not excited about what were [sic] seeing. Our initial concerns are that the movie looks like it uses themes and elements from our world, character concepts, points of conflict. We’ve crafted a unique and distinctive IP, one that’s a rich blend of old world monster legends with a modern, gen X updated feel and cosmology.”
Which, I suppose, tells us how high the bar for White Wolf IP concern is.
Tinney got a call from Sony, and on May 8th he sent another email to Zaffron thanking him for his help. He never heard back from Sony Pictures after that.
I’m ready to reassert my position as the foremost White Wolf v. Sony blogger, if it please the court.
I got myself a login for the federal court system, and soon thereafter procured a copy of Sony’s response to the complaint. (Thanks to Chris for hosting.) I don’t speak lawyer, but I think it mostly says “We have no idea what your game says vampires and werewolves do, and we did not copy our ideas from you.”
Some fun excerpts:
61. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 61 of the Complaint. Defendants admit the second sentence of Paragraph 61. Defendants state further that to the extent any colorable similarity exists between Plaintiffs’ works and the Underworld movie in this respect, any such similarity concerns material that is not original, not protectable expression, lies within the public domain, and/or constitutes unprotectable ideas or scenes a faire.
Paragraph 61 in the original complaint deals with vampires awakening from extended sleep in a mummified condition. “Scenes a faire,” as I understand it, are ideas that are inherent to the conventional telling of a given sort of story.
67. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 67 of the Complaint. Defendants deny the second sentence of the Paragraph 67 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that the Underworld movie contains no character named “Vee.” Defendants state further that one scene in an early version of an Underworld script contained one extremely minor character named “Vee.”
There’s a fair amount of stuff like that; if I had to guess, I’d say that Sony is trying to make a case that White Wolf was working from a very early and irrelevant copy of the script.
116. Defendants deny the first sentence of Paragraph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that Plaintiff Collins’ work The Love of Monsters speaks for itself. Defendants deny the second sentence of Paragaph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that one werewolf character at one point in the Underworld movie refers to vampires as “Bloods.”
And so on.
Dear Brother #11 picks up after the PCs left Chicago and headed down to Mississippi. Chronologically speaking, these events occurred before those recorded in Dear Brother #10c, but we played them out after we played out the trip to Mexico. If I’d known we were going to do that I suppose I’d have held off on writing #10 until we’d finished playing the events leading up to it — but it doesn’t hurt the story at all, so no harm done.
On the other hand, we did wind up playing out the events described here after we played the events described in the upcoming Dear Brother #12. But this time I knew it was coming so I can write #11 and #12 in chronological order.
(None of this matters or impinges on the entertainment value one bit, so don’t worry. I’m just noting it so I’ll remember what happened years from now when I’m old and grey. And I’m not complaining, cause Rob makes it all work)