Topic on UseNet (rec.games.frp.misc): Why play licensed worlds when they're just going to screw you? Mostly this seems to be a bit of a backlash against Last Unicorn Games and West End Games for losing the Star Trek and Star Wars licenses, respectively. There's one side that blames the RPG companies for losing the license, there's the other side that says "it's not like the RPG companies chose to lose their licenses." That part of the argument is just stupid people versus people with common sense -- you just can't win either way.

The other part of the thread is a certain sort of bitterness of some people who have invested all this time and energy into a campaign based on a licensed world and now there is no material for them to buy. A new RPG company gets the license and puts out their version of the world which is not quite compatible with the old version. Those people struggle on alone trying to keep their game going year after year.

There are several replies to that situation. One is, there's usually quite a bit of material out, buy up the rest and you'll enough to last a campaign or two (except for those pathetic people who play the same campaign for decades). If you don't have it all, then why would you expect a company to have kept making games that didn't sell? It's not that hard to adapt new material to an old campaign (or vice versa). How many people take the given published books and use them as-is? Not that I know that many gamers, but nobody I've met runs a by-the-book campaign.

In the end you buy the books, run a campaign or two, and then you've gotten a lot of use out of your investment. If you never go back to that game you'll have all the memories from the time you did play. It's just hard for me to imagine people playing the same campaign over a decade without playing something else occassionally. Nobody likes being abandoned but you have to move on.

Speaking of being abandoned, season 5 of my Star Trek campaign starts this Saturday (as I write this in early March). With only two seasons left (and probably not having two seasons left of good episodes to use), I'm going to concentrate the last of the Romulan episodes into season 6. Season 5 will be a bunch of random miscellaneous episodes as we take a break from any sort of season-long plot line. Season 6 I want to give Donald a chance to recover the Iconan device which he lost to the Romulans.

Also I'm thinking of ending the series with a big fleet battle using Red Alert! I bought a factory set on eBay so now I have lots of flats and setups and so forth, enough to probably run a 8 or 12 ship battle. We'll need lots of space though (and no cats), so I'll have to think about it a bit. After that I can finally take a couple of years off to work on the Star Trek stories and other projects.

After playing the first couple weeks of Eric's new Erzo campaign, I realize that my campaign sucks compared to Erzo. There's just so much more that I have to work on to make a really engaging experience. Yes, it's only a couple of weeks so there's the newness of it all, but everybody loves it and frankly, I feel bad trying to follow it with my poor offering. I really should have finished the Star Trek campaign before Erzo started.

One thing about playing Erzo, it brings to mind that we're so good about being ourselves. And when we play ourselves, it's obvious to see that we're all more or less neutral evil, as a group. The individual comes first, then the group (though it's close behind) and the only reason we do "good deeds" is because we're afraid of the consequences. People who are evil all the time rarely get anywhere. Being successful means picking your spots when you're evil, and we're so good at that it's scary.