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Old 12-09-2017, 02:10 PM   #311
johndallman
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Most engineering work is not about making inventions. There are few new inventions in most road bridges, but you still need civil engineers to design them and supervise construction. Most of the design work in a new car model is not patentable, but you still need mechanical engineers to design them, and so on.
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Old 12-09-2017, 02:27 PM   #312
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

But the companies who build the equipment necessary to construct the bridges and the companies who build the cars benefit from thousands of patents and would likely have never started without patent protection. I am not saying that you cannot have a world without copyright or patents, Centrum is an example of a perfectly functional advanced society without either, you just cannot have a capitalistic Western society without either copyrights or patents. Of course, excessive length of protection can hinder innovation, which is why the original laws only offered protection form 14-21 years, to encourage investment without stifling innovation.
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Old 12-09-2017, 07:49 PM   #313
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Try this idea. In this Q5 world FDR lived to fill out his last term. Discovering that Truman was a highly capable ally he soon discovered that he could push his agenda with profound effects. He pretty much gets his ecconomic bill of rights though and makes a major jump on civil rights. Truman gets elected in 1948 and serves two terms pushing FDR's agenda.

Federal spending on the arts, which had pretty much been shot down by the GOP in the mid 1930s, gets massively revived. At the same time Frederick Wurtham, and most of the others associated with the Frankfurt school never came to America. Without American university support the Frankfurt scool failed to survive WWII.

All this added up to is a far more vibrant and active American Arts scene both popular and high art. Add to this the simple fact that bitter legal struggles prevented the widespread introduction of TV until 1960, when courts proclaimed the whole case ridiculous and dismissed as bordering on fraud. Thus, pulp magazines, comics, the Sunday Funnies, and serial radio, all get an extra decade of popularity.

The art from this parallel, both high and low, is highly popular.
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Old 12-10-2017, 06:27 AM   #314
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Quote:
Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
When you have really cheap and quick transportation it doesn't make compelling economic sense to grow something at home that is already easily available elsewhere. Which is why I expect that that they just buy books locally and bring them back rather than going to the trouble of publishing bootleg editions
Except that any time you buy a significant fraction of the supply of anything on another timeline, you run the risk of raising suspicions that endanger the secret - I personally think "secret trade" is one of the big logic holes in the setting.

For an author as popular on Homeline as at home, you'd be buying half the books printed and having them vanish from the sales chain. People will notice. For an author *more* popular on Homeline, or living in the "past" before his local reputation is established and/or the local population is much lower, the discrepancy is even more huge.
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Old 12-10-2017, 02:33 PM   #315
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

A no patent or copyright world would be interesting, but definitely not more technologically advanced, likely floundering around with a strange mix of TL 5 to 7 across various industries.

Any technology with a significant investment cost and long payoff period would be dead on arrival. For example, medicine: surgical techniques would likely be reasonably advanced due to them being shared, but there would be no X-rays and all pharmaceuticals would would be limited to what could be discovered easily or by accident. You'd be getting your cancer cut out and all you get is aspirin and alcohol.

Entertainment, however, would be insanely dynamic. You'd get one shot at popularity and success and before copycats devour the market under you. Their equivalent of Game of Thrones would have to be published all at once. I'd expect Lightning fast production and a crap shoot for quality. Could be a gold mine for B-movies of new or obscure properties.

The only way to really differentiate yourself would be quality or price, a huge range of functionally identical products.

For outtimers, however, this would be a great place to make a local fortune on imported products. Set up a business or just sell goods stolen from another universe and pick up some local gold or uranium for sale in another world. Good for an investigative or trade based campaign.
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Old 12-10-2017, 02:46 PM   #316
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Now that's a good idea. It's not so much what they have that we'd want. It would be what they'd want and perfectly able to understand but couldn't invent/make themselves.
If asked about that trade idea I'd have assumed the only way for that to work would involve trading higher TL items to lower TL worlds. But this is a nice spin on that idea.
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Old 12-10-2017, 02:50 PM   #317
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Regarding the development without copyright, one of the major groups to do with some areas of development in TL5 and 6 was bored english clergy. Other areas where research funding can be found is industry groups and governments, so maybe industrial efficiency, weapons and "greater good" developments (dependant on the bill payer's definition of greater good) may be more advanced than the worlds norm.

Standardisation might be a bit hit or miss though, if ideas get copied rather than shared defacto standards would be more common than official standards.
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Last edited by (E); 12-10-2017 at 02:54 PM.
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Old 12-10-2017, 02:51 PM   #318
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyneras View Post
Any technology with a significant investment cost and long payoff period would be dead on arrival. For example, medicine: surgical techniques would likely be reasonably advanced due to them being shared, but there would be no X-rays and all pharmaceuticals would would be limited to what could be discovered easily or by accident. You'd be getting your cancer cut out and all you get is aspirin and alcohol.
You're aware that for-profit IP development isn't the only way R&D can happen, right?

And that trade secrets aren't an entirely hopeless basis for for-profit development either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyneras View Post
Entertainment, however, would be insanely dynamic. You'd get one shot at popularity and success and before copycats devour the market under you. Their equivalent of Game of Thrones would have to be published all at once.
...What, you think people won't have any interest in the official sequel written by the original author as opposed to some hastily-assembled knockoff continuation?

The problem isn't 'one shot at popularity', it's that without copyright if the first print run of your book sells the second print run is probably being sold by someone else who isn't giving you any royalties.
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Old 12-10-2017, 03:00 PM   #319
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyneras View Post

Any technology with a significant investment cost and long payoff period would be dead on arrival. For example, medicine: surgical techniques would likely be reasonably advanced due to them being shared, but there would be no X-rays and all pharmaceuticals would would be limited to what could be discovered easily or by accident. You'd be getting your cancer cut out and all you get is aspirin and alcohol.
That's probably not particularly true. Yes patents helped some, but it's not like there was no complex technical development before, or that everything after was driven by them. X-rays for example were discovered and largely developed as open literature scientific research - Roentgen never patented the fundamental concept of the x-ray tube. Notice too that lots of stuff that is out of patent or copyright is still made only by a few (or one, or zero) manufacturers. It still takes money, and people with the relevant knowledge of which there aren't necessarily vastly more of than the original research team whether they can file a patent or not, to build production lines. There's a lot of hype about the value of artificial monopolies that's at least as silly as the hype about how wonderful the lack of them would be.


Quote:
Entertainment, however, would be insanely dynamic. You'd get one shot at popularity and success and before copycats devour the market under you. Their equivalent of Game of Thrones would have to be published all at once.
Why? The copycats are no more the "real" thing when they're mass produced than when they're fan fiction, and fan fiction sites haven't noticeably killed, to use one really obvious example, Harry Potter. In a way new entertainment is better off than anything else, because every bit of it is a unique product, and it can't be copied until after it is created.
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Old 12-10-2017, 03:13 PM   #320
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Default Re: [IW] Ordinary Worlds with valuables!

It will be observed that mass entertainment predates the establishment of effective copyright. To take the opposite view, I've sometimes wondered whether, if Shakespeare could have profited in perpetuity from the royalties of Romeo and Juliet, he would have produced so many new plays afterwards [and it will be observed that the fact that anyone could write a play with Hal and Falstaff did not stop people from coming in droves to see his Henry IV part II.] Perhaps if George R.R. Martin stopped profiting from each book shortly after it was published, we would have a few more volumes by now.

EDIT: Does this perhaps imply that a hypothetical parallel with historical writers but with less than historical copyright protection would have resulted in those writers producing more works than they did on Homeline? If so, and even if there was a consequent reduction in quality due to less time spent per work, there is surely a market on Homeline for those works. It's not as if the expenses are high- if the works are out of copyright, then by definition the rights are free to acquire on that world, so you just need to acquire one copy of it, and then start the printing presses running on Homeline.

Further question: the extreme degree of parallelism between many worlds, which results in identically named and genotyped people long after historical divergence should have made this impossible, might result in them writing works with similar correspondences to Homeline works still under copyright. Myth Parallels make the question of copyright even more confusing. If I find a world corresponding to Lord of the Rings (a world based on Oz is apparently canon), can the Tolkein Estate keep me from publishing My Adventures with King Elessar even if they are non-fiction? [Further Edit:] If not, then I can imagine derivative works of fiction masquerading as non-fiction accounts to avoid the lawyers. Adventure hook: travel to Gondor, and try to find some way The Further Adventures of Mary Sue more closely resembles Tolkein's account than the real thing, thereby proving it to be criminal copyright infringement in addition to mere bad writing.
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Last edited by ravenfish; 12-10-2017 at 03:38 PM.
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