What Was It About DGP?

[AndreaV]

I've never understood the high status of the DGP material, I always had a very mixed opinion of it. Some of it is great, some of it so so and some of it just plain awful. It also should be remembered that some of it contains canon holes I can put both my size 12 boots through.

 

[PFVA63]

I jumped for joy when Traveller Supplement 7 came out, Traders & Gunboats. At the time, it was an awesome play aid.

I understand some of those deckplans are off, too.

As a matter of fact, I remember when Mongoose Traveller first came out and their deck plans were off.

It happens.

Hi,

Yeah I know, but the design in the Ship Operators Manual are so far off that (like the original Mongoose stuff) they just aren't of real use as a set of 200 dton Free Trader Deck Plans. to me that's a fair bit of a knock on just how useful the Ship Operators Manual is overall. To me its still kind of neat, but flawed. To me, while all the system description and stuff is neat, a booklet that had a good set of plans to go with that additional data (even at the expense of a little less "color" and background info) would have been cooler and probably a bit more useful.

 

[Carlobrand]

I jumped for joy when Traveller Supplement 7 came out, Traders & Gunboats. At the time, it was an awesome play aid.

I understand some of those deckplans are off, too.

As a matter of fact, I remember when Mongoose Traveller first came out and their deck plans were off.

It happens.

Yep, Supplement 7 was way off. And then there was Broadsword, an 800 dTon ship in a deckplan that was closer to 1200 dTons. Best we not even mention Leviathan and its more "unique" contributions, or MegaTrav's Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium. It may not be much of a defense, but DGP didn't do anything other folk weren't doing too.

 

[GypsyComet]

By being very close to twice the proper size, they can be used for combat by the simple act of treating the grid as a 1m grid instead of the listed 1.5m.

GDWs main offenders were the Type A and the Broadsword. The Leviathan was a Games Workshop design brought back over by GDW. FASA ships were all over the place, though.

 

[Whipsnade]

It may not be much of a defense, but DGP didn't do anything other folk weren't doing too.

Quoted for truth.

Getting back to the OP's question, I enjoyed a majority of DGP's work and admired all of their efforts. DGP didn't always hit a home run, but they swung for the fences every time. It was always worth checking out their products.

In their many magazine issues, sourcebooks, and other products there was always something to plunder. Always. SOM is a good example. I don't rate it as highly as many do and I never liked many of the explanations they came up with, but that book is simply crammed full of ideas. Whether or not I enjoyed the feature adventure, their Traveller Digest and MegaTraveller Journal issues always had something to plunder. Always.

You could tell they were running RPG sessions and campaigns. They were using the task system and the nugget format. Their publications were guides to how you could run your own sessions and campaigns. That was just as important as all the maps, library data, equipment, and other goodies they wrote up.

In CT GDW had published deliberately bareboned adventures. They wanted their work to be useful for as many people as possible. In MT, DGP published richly detailed adventures. They wanted to show people how just how rich an RPG session or campaign could be. GDW created the tools for us and DGP showed us what you could do with those tools.

 

[Blue Ghost]

In other words, as unreasonable as ever.

Well, I think it's more of a case of waiting for the right number of zeros on a cheque. Just my take.

 

[robject]

Whipspade hits it on the head. DGP was a creative user of Traveller and its tools, and churned out interesting and useful books as a result.

 

[sfchbryan]

As Aramis suggested, show him what those old books are going for on eBay. Then explain that for the mild expense of having some good quality scanned PDFs made, and by working out a mutually beneficial with Marc/FFE, those PDFs could sit on DriveThruRPG just passively pulling in sales income year after year after year, income that would go to Roger and Marc, rather than to collectors and speculators driving the prices up on eBay. Win/Win, for Roger and Marc.

What expense? If Marc & Rodger could come to an agreement, I have all of the DGP material both scanned & OCRed. I'd pay for the cost of the cd and the mailer to go with it.

 

[DonM]

As per my agreement with Rodge, I include all of DGP's materials in my DMCA searches for Marc.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Hi,

In addition to Blue Ghost's comments, to me its kind of like seeing a movie and/or reading a book and thinking "that was really interesting, I liked that" only to later find out that the story was fairly liberally taken from Shakespeare, Dickens, or Hemingway, etc with just some names and/or the setting being changed a little or some other form of "filing the serial numbers off". In the end, yeah, my feelings about the work in question drops a bit. (I'm not saying I hate it but rather I'm jut saying my feelings about it drops a bit).

*snip*

Yeah, I don't want to harp on this, but one wonders what was going through the minds of the authors when they made the decisions that they did. When I used to work in graphic arts and also worked on commercials, there were large books that you could buy with sample works by artists. Kind of like what Deviant Art and similar websites are today. And I was always curious why some of those artists weren't chosen so the product could be more successful and attractive on the market place. I'm guessing the cost return didn't justify it. Still, it does make one sigh a bit.

 

[shield]

Don M

if roger belives RPGs are dead and he is still on reasonable terms with Marc, why doesn't he sell his "worthless DGP copyright".

 

[Blue Ghost]

One wonders.

 

[DonM]

I've suggested that, I've suggested licensing, I've suggested some alternate approaches.

Rodge just isn't interested.

 

[shield]

Don, very strange, thanks for trying and please continue to pester him on our behalf, lots of us older Traveller fans would like to see the DGP stuff again.

PS. Is Roger holding out for a big payout?

 

[Blue Ghost]

Don, very strange, thanks for trying and please continue to pester him on our behalf, lots of us older Traveller fans would like to see the DGP stuff again.

PS. Is Roger holding out for a big payout?

Ya think?

 

[aramis]

Don, very strange, thanks for trying and please continue to pester him on our behalf, lots of us older Traveller fans would like to see the DGP stuff again.

PS. Is Roger holding out for a big payout?

Probably. And the longer he does, the LESS the property is worth.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Based on my writing forays I can't imagine that mister Sanger is expecting much from the stuff. If he is, well, I'll with hold any comments that might come across as snippy, but are otherwise heartfelt observations.

 

[DonM]

Actually, Rodge doesn't think the IPs are worth anything. He's not looking for a payout.

But I do keep trying.

 

[DaveChase]

I wonder if he would be willing to sell me the rights to 101 Robots?

Dave Chase

 

[mike wightman]

Actually, Rodge doesn't think the IPs are worth anything. He's not looking for a payout.

But I do keep trying.

He doesn't want anything, he doesn't think they are worth anything, he just wants to stop anyone else using them?

What about if he just gives permission and someone else does all the work of scanning and formatting the pdfs?

Put the project up on kickstarter and give him the money it raises and then sell additional discs, pdfs, ebook version via the usual outlets.