Author Topic: Writable Books?  (Read 3495 times)

Amon-Si

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Writable Books?
« on: December 13, 2012, 12:21:49 AM »
Right, I know we have writable parchment and printable books derived from that, but can we write directly in blank books to create IC journals, etc, rather than ask a DM to introduce them? If so, awesome. If not, please implement! lol.

Fierna

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2012, 01:55:40 AM »
Oooh! Yes Please.

herkles

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2012, 02:02:42 AM »
I would love this as well. so yes please


Troukk

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #3 on: December 13, 2012, 07:36:20 AM »
Ugh... I hate to be Mr. Killjoy  :(, but I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and defend the position of "no writable books":

In general, it sounds like a good idea, but it carries the risk of destroying the current RP that is happening with in-game books. There are many characters that have gone great lengths to get their hands on certain tomes, and it would be kind of lame that now any character can replicate such books with the @write command. Let's not forget that a lot of cool RP derives from the finding, retrieval, study, and teaching of tomes.

If there is no way to prevent that from happening, my opinion would be to keep things the way they are. We have a great DM team, and we can always ask for help when we want to write our own custom book, journal, diary, etc.
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Mayvind

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2012, 07:47:59 AM »
Ugh... I hate to be Mr. Killjoy  :(, but I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and defend the position of "no writable books":

In general, it sounds like a good idea, but it carries the risk of destroying the current RP that is happening with in-game books. There are many characters that have gone great lengths to get their hands on certain tomes, and it would be kind of lame that now any character can replicate such books with the @write command. Let's not forget that a lot of cool RP derives from the finding, retrieval, study, and teaching of tomes.

If there is no way to prevent that from happening, my opinion would be to keep things the way they are. We have a great DM team, and we can always ask for help when we want to write our own custom book, journal, diary, etc.

You know about copy press in Dementliue right ? they can copy any ingame book you find.

Amon-Si

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2012, 08:38:36 AM »
Ugh... I hate to be Mr. Killjoy  :(, but I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and defend the position of "no writable books":

In general, it sounds like a good idea, but it carries the risk of destroying the current RP that is happening with in-game books. There are many characters that have gone great lengths to get their hands on certain tomes, and it would be kind of lame that now any character can replicate such books with the @write command. Let's not forget that a lot of cool RP derives from the finding, retrieval, study, and teaching of tomes.

If there is no way to prevent that from happening, my opinion would be to keep things the way they are. We have a great DM team, and we can always ask for help when we want to write our own custom book, journal, diary, etc.

You know about copy press in Dementliue right ? they can copy any ingame book you find.

Yep, that ship sailed about a year ago my dear nublet :)
I just want to do it without the printing press mark.

Troukk

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #6 on: December 13, 2012, 10:19:11 AM »
Ugh... I hate to be Mr. Killjoy  :(, but I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and defend the position of "no writable books":

In general, it sounds like a good idea, but it carries the risk of destroying the current RP that is happening with in-game books. There are many characters that have gone great lengths to get their hands on certain tomes, and it would be kind of lame that now any character can replicate such books with the @write command. Let's not forget that a lot of cool RP derives from the finding, retrieval, study, and teaching of tomes.

If there is no way to prevent that from happening, my opinion would be to keep things the way they are. We have a great DM team, and we can always ask for help when we want to write our own custom book, journal, diary, etc.

You know about copy press in Dementliue right ? they can copy any ingame book you find.

Yep, that ship sailed about a year ago my dear nublet :)
I just want to do it without the printing press mark.

I still think the case is different, my dear veteran.  :D

The Press is fine because of two reasons:

1) You have to be willing to take the IC consequences of giving that book to someone else to have it copied. Now a stranger knows you not only have that book, but also now have a copy or two. I know at least a dozen books you wouldn't want people knowing you have them.

2) There are many books that hold their value precisely on their originality. The press mark avoids devaluating the original, because the other book will present itself as a copy.


I'm even going to guess that the press is the way the developers brilliantly answered to your request, while attending my concern. Players can publish books, but they can't devaluate the original samples.
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Elfric

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #7 on: December 13, 2012, 10:23:27 AM »
Ugh... I hate to be Mr. Killjoy  :(, but I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and defend the position of "no writable books":

In general, it sounds like a good idea, but it carries the risk of destroying the current RP that is happening with in-game books. There are many characters that have gone great lengths to get their hands on certain tomes, and it would be kind of lame that now any character can replicate such books with the @write command. Let's not forget that a lot of cool RP derives from the finding, retrieval, study, and teaching of tomes.

If there is no way to prevent that from happening, my opinion would be to keep things the way they are. We have a great DM team, and we can always ask for help when we want to write our own custom book, journal, diary, etc.

You know about copy press in Dementliue right ? they can copy any ingame book you find.

Yep, that ship sailed about a year ago my dear nublet :)
I just want to do it without the printing press mark.

I still think the case is different, my dear veteran.  :D

The Press is fine because of two reasons:

1) You have to be willing to take the IC consequences of giving that book to someone else to have it copied. Now a stranger knows you not only have that book, but also now have a copy or two. I know at least a dozen books you wouldn't want people knowing you have them.

2) There are many books that hold their value precisely on their originality. The press mark avoids devaluating the original, because the other book will present itself as a copy.


I'm even going to guess that the press is the way the developers brilliantly answered to your request, while attending my concern. Players can publish books, but they can't devaluate the original samples.


So by that logic, we can make a happy mask book salesman?

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APorg

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #8 on: December 13, 2012, 10:25:45 AM »
Writable books would be really awesome, and really, it's just a difference in presentation from writable parchment.
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Misted_Horror

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #9 on: December 13, 2012, 02:00:00 PM »
It's one of those things that can be exploited, you just trust it not to be. Much like the @seatme command.

Mark Johansen

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #10 on: December 13, 2012, 02:29:22 PM »
perhaps we somehow could mark the real books with a quality stamp? that ain't on the custom books. like with armor and weapons having "Matrial: Steel" kinda thing.

Zhernebog

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #11 on: December 13, 2012, 02:46:06 PM »
Aside from the potential copyright issues and devaluing the original is there truly any other downside to crafting your own books?
I think it's a neat idea and opens the possibility toward extending rp, but Misted horror brings up the point of trusting the servers community. We trust the community just by spending the time and effort to play here IMHO, :and,books seem alot less gamebreaking than hips or timestop or any other potentially abusable system.

Gary T

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #12 on: December 13, 2012, 03:10:02 PM »
Copyright laws date from the early 18th century and arose from devlaluing of the originals.  In a medieval/fantasy society that would have just been one of those unfortunate facts of life you had to live with.  Probably one of the reasons why some people do not believe Shakespeare wrote every play that has been attributed to him, or may have not even been all the same person.  We still do nut know who wrote the English morality play "Everyman" even though it is considered a classic of early English literature.  Could just make for more interesting RP?

Amon-Si

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #13 on: December 13, 2012, 03:45:59 PM »
I still think the case is different, my dear veteran.  :D

The Press is fine because of two reasons:

1) You have to be willing to take the IC consequences of giving that book to someone else to have it copied. Now a stranger knows you not only have that book, but also now have a copy or two. I know at least a dozen books you wouldn't want people knowing you have them.

2) There are many books that hold their value precisely on their originality. The press mark avoids devaluating the original, because the other book will present itself as a copy.


I'm even going to guess that the press is the way the developers brilliantly answered to your request, while attending my concern. Players can publish books, but they can't devaluate the original samples.



Step one, sorry for calling you a nublet, your points are absolutely fair. :)
All good points, with a small but from me. I'd like there to be the option of forgeries as well as completely original personal work, hand written as it would be in Barovia which has no press. Make it just like the letter system so that to get a copy right you really, really have to know how to do the layout, get the spelling right, and so on. At the moment, if someone tried to write a copy of some of the books we have by transcribing (Which I've done with letters and IC notes) It takes a lot of effort to do correctly, and due to the chat box letter limit you can mess the structure up royally with ease. :) (Took me better part of 20 min to copy a relatively short set of notes, for just one copy!)

Dobian

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #14 on: December 14, 2012, 01:25:50 PM »
I'd love to see it added, personally, as there is a book right now I want to produce.   :)


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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #15 on: December 14, 2012, 01:29:42 PM »
I'm in big support for this not for the reason to copy books and other hidden goodies, but so that those characters that are writers can actually write books and "publish" them out to the world.

An example: My character Linnea wrote her first novella. I've sent it to a few DMs for publishing a few months ago but hey! They got real lifes y'know, so in a time like that, having a writeable book where I can do the job myself and save them time to do more important things like add new content, and fix bugs is perfect.

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Troukk

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #16 on: December 14, 2012, 03:47:04 PM »
LOL, with such overwhelming support to this suggestion, maybe developers should consider it. I'm literally the only one against it  :lol:. This is a good community, so we can trust such a feature will not be exploited.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2012, 03:48:40 PM by Troukk »
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Bodhidharma

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #17 on: December 14, 2012, 06:59:44 PM »
I'm for the idea, I find it strange that you can print press copies of a book but not hand-write them like people did in the old days.

Also the printing press mark on books fade after a reset so there's no way to tell if its a printed copy or not.

Honoun

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #18 on: December 14, 2012, 09:01:39 PM »
LOL, with such overwhelming support to this suggestion, maybe developers should consider it. I'm literally the only one against it  :lol:. This is a good community, so we can trust such a feature will not be exploited.

Well if you want I can be against it if you like, but I would only be pretending  :P

Feronius

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #19 on: December 15, 2012, 03:33:38 PM »
If the only suggestion here is to have the "parchment" writeable object added with the icon / description of a book instead, then why not?
I mean.. there's nothing stopping you from using the current paper icon as if it was a book. Or the pages of a book. So there isn't really any harm in it.
(Although I guess there is no real need for it either, but it would be a nice touch to have a writeable book cover to pick from, instead of just paper. Just like people suggested rolled up scroll variants to be sold.)

Green Monster

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Re: Writable Books?
« Reply #20 on: December 26, 2012, 10:19:21 PM »
There is zero IC reason why we shouldn't be able to buy a blank book and write in it. The main benefit would be a much higher character limit, the drawback would be it would weigh one pound instead of zero. There is also no IC reason why you shouldn't be able to copy out, by hand, any book you find. It would take ages of boring, tedious work in-game to do it, but hey, if you want to, you should be able to. Sure, there's the risk that people will plagiarize other's work, but the highest social level we have is Dementlieu's rennaisance era, which had zero copyright protection, and what, exactly is the worst that will happen? Someone will plagairize and sell someone else's manual to alchemy or something? As has been pointed out, you can already do that with the press.

Speaking as someone who's old character was charged with trying to sell another character's book on herbalism (with permission), I can tell you that such things are not big money-makers.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2012, 02:28:19 AM by Green Monster »
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