INPUT GUIDE: CAPTAIN'S LOG 26

DOES WEB = UNPUBLISHABLE?

    Sometimes players who have designed new material ask us if putting it on a web site will reduce the chances of it being published. The simple answer is "yes, it will, since other players could become upset if asked to buy a product which contains a lot of material they already got for free on the web."

But things are rarely that simple.

• There are thousands of new ships and at least a hundred new races on the web, as anyone who has tried even a simple search already knows. We have, and will, published a few things here and there which had a brief or preliminary posting on the web. In most cases, we make changes to ships or scenarios based on playtesting or to make them fit into other parts of the history, so the published item is often different enough that players do not mind if four or five of the eighty ships in a given product are evolved versions of something seen before.
   
• Certainly, the choice to put your design on the web (within the posted policy) is yours to make. Putting it there might well reduce its chances of publication, but then, its chances are slim anyway. There are LOTS of proposed new ships (at least two hundred per year) and the number of "slots" for them is minimal. If you take a product like R7 or J2 which have 80 or 90 ships, only a half-dozen of them are outside designs since the others are "designed to type" based on the new classes and missions created for that product. We are planning to publish Module R9 (The Ships That Never Were) which, by definition, will not have "six new classes" that the various races have to fill. By the same token, we give free copies to about ten outside designers for each product, and if R9 has 90 outside designers we may have to change that policy or we couldn't afford to print it!
   
• Some have criticized the policy of not publishing ships that have been on web sites as unfair since a designer must give up the chance for others to admire his design in order to gamble for a tiny chance of publication. That is an unfortunate fact of the situation, but as you have seen, players don't like to pay for things they already downloaded for free, and this policy (in place for about four years) hasn't slowed down the pace of newly uploaded ships to any real extent.
   
• Others have criticized the requirement to copyright the ship to ADB Inc. as a requirement for posting it. This policy is needed to keep someone from using a web site to promote pirate products that violate copyrights, but beyond that, ships designed for use with SFB are a "derivative" of ADB Inc. copyrights and cannot be published unless our permission is given. (Remember that no product based on, for use with, or using elements of SFB can be published without our permission. That's not just our policy, it is copyright law regarding "derivative works".) You were either willing to give away your design (in which case why do you care if you transfer the copyright to us) or have us publish it (in which case you would get compensated at the established rates).
   
• Still others have said that the web policy means we want to keep players from seeing outside designs, but that idea just doesn't make sense given thousands of ships published on line under our policy with the appropriate notices. If we wanted to keep SSDs from being posted, we could simply (within our copyrights) refuse to give permission and hire a cybercop to hunt down web sites that violate our copyrights and tell their hosts to remove the SSDs. Our policy clearly is intended to allow, and encourage, web publication since we, being creative people, want to recognize and reward other creative people.

CAN I DESIGN A MODULE FOR YOU?

    We get asked this question now and then, and the answer is "it depends". If you are talking about a module that is entirely your own work (or the work of a group of people you represent) and which is not something already on the list of products we are considering, there is every chance that it could be published as an E-module, or perhaps even as a regular module. Feel free to contact us about what you want to do and we will discuss it with you. A few guidelines and notes may be appropriate here.

    When it comes to modules we have already discussed doing (such as Module V Operations or Module X2) we are not really looking for someone to design the entire module. If we were, we would have published one of the many "complete" designs already sent in for "the list of modules we might do". Some people get really upset when told that we are not interested in publishing their version of X2 or Y2 or R9 or whatever, but honestly, folks, where in the constitution or the Bible or the holy tablets of Klinshai does it say that any given gamer out there has the right to decide that he and he alone is going to design a specific new product we have already talked about doing ourselves?

    Sometimes a gamer will ask us to contact him when work begins on a module as he wants to be part of the project. Some are angry when told we just do not do this, but there is a reason we don't. We did it a couple of times and when it came time to contact people, what happened? Half of them had moved, and half of the rest were no longer actively involved in SFB. Of the remainder, some could no longer find their files of ideas and others had realized that their ideas from years before no longer "fit" because of the way the universe had evolved. So what we do is, when we start serious work on a new product, we publicize this fact in Captain's Log and on the BBS. If you aren't reading one of those two sources, you probably aren't interested in working on the product anyway.

    Some have offered "insights" into the design of a given product. We invite these people to post their ideas in the relevant BBS topic or send us written (or emailed) copies we can put in the file. That way, even if life has taken you out of SFB, your ideas will still be considered and might well be used. A few people become very angry that we will not immediately stop work on all projects in order to discuss their ideas on one of the many projects on "the list of things we might do someday", and more than one of them has gone ballistic on a news group about how mean and evil and stupid we are to refuse to do just exactly what he wanted the very second he wanted us to do it. Seriously, if that was the case, what are the odds that we could finish discussing your ideas before someone else demanded that we drop that discussion to discuss their ideas? And how could we possibly discuss your ideas for a module we are not working on without reviewing everything already in file? Clearly, the best and most fair way to deal with such matters is to place your material in the file for that project and review it when it is time to work on that project.

    When it is time to work on a long-discussed module, we sit down with the staff and experts from marketing and production and create an outline of what we want the product to accomplish. At that point, we open the file and review dozens (often hundreds) of ideas and proposals sent in over a decade by many players. We look for cool new ideas to add to the mix and for solutions to problems we haven't cracked yet. It would be impossible for any outside design, sent in by someone who knows nothing about the future plans for the company, to exactly do what needs doing. More than one person has declared this to be a "poor attitude" but all they really mean is: "What? They didn't take my idea and reject all others?" As long as we are gambling our money, we're going to have to make the core decisions about what goes into a product. But we also know that we need a lot of creativity to liven things up, and we get it from the submissions in the file.

ADB Inc. is proud of its record of printing more player-written material than almost any other game company.