Hey AW Hackers – how do you feel about other folks making playbooks for your hacks?
I love the idea, but I’m in this weird place where I see how I would do it differently, but I don’t want to just rewrite other folk’s contributions. So far the game itself is in an early enough stage that the whole framework is still malleable, so the fact that these playbooks are coming from other people is triggering some really valuable conversations.
But in the future I see people enthusiastically contributing a playbook that just isn’t “right”. Am I a dick if I rewrite the problematic parts and put that out there as an “official” thing?
I don’t think so.
I think it might be polite to ask the person–like, “Hey, this is an awesome idea, but it needs a few tweaks to fit perfectly” kind of thing.
Yeah, I agree with Carrie. I mean, I’d be tickled pink if the designer of a game I was making playbooks for gave me specific feedback, even if it was “Hey, I don’t think this fits because X, maybe do it like this instead?”, especially if that came with “And if you do make those changes I’d love to make this an official thing, that cool?”
Its all in how you approach it and how much time you want to devote to overseeing other people’s ideas.
I mean, I could total see review process to make it an “official” part of your game world
Rewrite? No. Publish and distribute? Depends on whether you’re charging, how you market it, etc. There’s also a social angle…would it be hard to speak to the person who created the hack you’re hacking and just let ’em know you’re doing it? Not a request for permission.
Ben Wray , thats pretty much what I’m doing now (and it’s really productive for the design process!)
Definitely not a Dick move. (Those would involve rolling +annoying, I think.)
Bruce Baugh Is that Dick move from one of the Troll-he@rts handlebooks?
Hah! I wish I’d thought of that. Yes, clearly so.
When you get feedback from the designer on your AW/AW hack playbook, roll +sharp. On a 10+, choose three; on a 7-9 choose 1; on a miss the MC will tell you what:
– It’s useful and improves the playbook
– It becomes a part of the official game in some way (hello Faceless!)
– It gives you good buzz
– It inspires you towards your own design
– It shows you where the design is weak and saves you a lot of time bashing against something that’s not quite working
When you tinker with a playbook someone else has made, roll +weird. On a 10+, you grasp what they were after perfectly and create a better fitting playbook. Take 1+1 going forward with sharing and talking about your version, especially with the original creator. On a 7-9, it’s pretty good! Take +1 forward, maybe it’s a variant or something. On a miss, your tinkery is way off or does not fix any of the problems. You’ve just muddied the waters even more and maybe ticked someone off
Upshot: sure, but let the original creator know, and don’t get wedded to the idea that your playbooks are better or whatever.
Yah, it’s not a better or worse thing, it’s more a “this is my vision for how the game works and either I’m not communicating it fully, or they’ve missed something that I feel like I ought to remind them of”
I think for a lot of people, the best combination of getting what you want and not being a dick is to collaborate. If it’s your game and my fan-playbook and you write to me saying something like “I love x, y and z but really feel like a and b are kind of gonzo for the setting” (or whatever) and you wanted to publish a new playbook based on mine but done by you and maybe publish it as if we collaborated (and the more we actually collaborate, the better), that’s likely to tickle me pink.
In my mind, any publicity is good publicity.
In my experience, you can get a long way by asking the creator politely. Also, it’s usually easier to just make the thing and send them the first draft than to try to explain what you’d like to do – it gives the two of you something concrete to discuss and shows you’re not wasting their time.
Rewriting something somebody else has done without their permission is indeed a dick move. It’s also probably illegal under copyright, but the most important thing is, yeah, dick.
I mean, if I rewrote one of your games to make it “better” and released it without your permission? Not cool.
I was unclear – I would never republish someone else’s work. I meant more of a “hey, I rewrote this for reasons x, y and z, if your cool with the changes ill happily make it available”
Nathan Paoletta You should look at all of the player-created playbooks that have been put into trifold format (http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2012/12/all-of-playbooks.html). Many of the people who made them simply took somebody else’s hack and applied it to the trifold format. That is perfectly acceptable and I can’t imagine anybody being upset with you for doing that. If you change the wording of what was written, or change the playbook dramatically, I would say it’s proper to contact the person and start a dialogue about why you think it should be changed. It’s possible they have a reason for what they wrote that you’re just not seeing.
Apart from that, I would only ask that you share any trifold playbooks you make with me so I can put them up on the master list linked above.
Hey Patrick Henry Downs , thanks for that link! The playbooks for my hack don’t really fit well into the standard AW format. If I ever do an AW playbook myself, I’ll def make sure I share it with you, though!
If you just want to make your own custom playbooks for your own game and have them available in a public space (on a forum or uploaded to a website), I would think that you wouldn’t be stepping on anybody’s toes. If you use something which is blatantly somebody else’s work, as long as you’re crediting them I can’t see why they’d have a problem. It’s not like any of us get paid to have a gaming hobby! 🙂