Villains & Vigilantes Creators Sue Publisher 71
rcade writes "Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the creators of the super-hero roleplaying game Villains & Vigilantes, have filed a federal copyright lawsuit against the game's longtime publisher Scott Bizar of Fantasy Games Unlimited. They allege that Bizar has no rights to publish the game because his corporation was dissolved in 1991, reverting the rights to them. Dee and Herman revived the old-school RPG last year and have been battling Bizar ever since. Sadly, this suit will not be resolved by muscle-bound men in tights."
Re:How About ... (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA?
Brent Rose, the Tampa attorney representing Dee and Herman, told me in email that the suit was filed after other means of resolving the dispute were attempted. "There were cease and desist letters issued by both sides," he said. "We requested arbitration or mediation or even just a teleconference to just try and work things out before filing our federal lawsuit, but our written requests were either ignored or refused."
Re:V&V was a hell of a system - for its time (Score:1, Informative)
The _system_ is outdated. It was published in 1982. Just to give you an example of another outdated system, early D&D had you roll high for some things (attack rolls) and low for others (saving throws). In some cases, low scores were good (Armor Class), but high scores were good for others (hit points). One of the nice things D&D 3E did was to toss all that out the window and say "rolling high is good, high scores are good" across the board.
In this case, one of the dated elements in V&V is the Power vs. Power chart - some powers are better against others, and you needed to look up a chart each and every time. That's an old-school philosophy for RPGs. No charts is better, because there's no interruption in play. And don't get me started on the carrying capacity equation. I'm not afraid of math, but it's really too much. [ (Str / 10)^3 + (End/10)] x Weight / 2 = Carrying capacity, which determines your hand-to-hand damage. Going on, there's three whole pages (out of a 50 page book) on laws. Pre-Internet, that's kind of useful. Nowadays, it's not necessary.
Still, gotta love a system that has separate tables for "Crustacean powers" AND "Mollusk powers".