City of Heroes Tabletop

We here at Great Forge Studios have been working on creating the City of Heroes tabletop role-playing game for the past few years, and we're in the final stretches now. I've recorded a video discussing where we are right now and how far we have to go before November.

This is our introduction video.

Going forward, we're going to keep making videos like this one, as well as posting on our development blog.

My three colleagues and I will be continuing to post on that blog and in this thread to keep you guys posted. We welcome any feedback you can give.

Sounds wonderful but I can see one, very significant, hitch in this plan...


I may have missed this detail in your video but, do you have permission to use the IP? If you do not, and anyone at NC Soft notices, you could be Legalized straight into oblivion.


Other than that, I like the idea and what I've seen so far. I'm not sure it will be a solution that works for me (kind of difficult to Solo a PnP/tabletop game) but please keep working .

I would definitely be interested in looking into a table top PnP version of City of Heroes. I used to occasionally play Mutants and Masterminds, a superhero PnP roleplaying game that was pretty fun. In fact, it was playing Mutants and Masterminds that inspired one of my gaming buddies to start playing City of Heroes. He then got the rest of the group into CoH. We've recently started playing PnP games again--D&D mostly, but a game based on City of Heroes might suit us well, especially if we can make PnP characters based on our existing MMO characters. (Interestingly enough, some of my first City of Heroes characters were based on my Mutants and Masterminds characters)

Interesting, I bookmarked that link as I like the idea of creating a tabletop rpg.

I've always wanted to get into PnP tabletop games, just got a D&D redbox to start learning how to play, but with a CoH PnP game, that would would absolutely be what i would want to play, I'd love to make my main. *wonder if Vengeance will still be used on me in that version of the game...*

Any chance this can also be posted at Titan, in case the lights go out here?

looks intresting , bookmarking .

<glares> i'll be espescially intrested in how spines is handled as obviously its the greatest powerset ever !!

And bookmarked

I'm really interested in seeing the changes and additions you made to powersets to better fit the tabletop style. That and how you handle fighting bigger groups of enemies all at once.

Looks like you guys have put a lot of work into this already, thanks for letting us know about it! I look forward to checking it out when testing time comes around!

Do be aware that I am NOT an accredited lawywer, but even google starts you out with:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyrigh...pter9/9-a.html
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Com...of-the/128756/
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/int.../fair_use.html

Shortest form? Without specific rights from the current holder to the rights, what your doing here does NOT fall under fair use. Citing lack of moneytary gain nor citing creative commons also will not shield you.

I just watched the video you posted and, as someone who's been an amateur board and card game designer in my spare time for about 20 years now, I know how much time and effort you've been putting into an idea with as much theme, backstory, and MATH as City of Heroes!

Thank you for all the work you're doing on this project!

My 1st thought running through my head when i read this thread was

"I know that there was work going on with a licensed version from Eden Studios, but who actually owns the rights right now?"

Your best bet would be to continue with it, but to strip out all references to CoX. Make the 'offical' setting somewhere else, make your own versions of charecters similar but clearly different to people like Posi, and let us take the risks by setting the game directly in paragon.

What NC would see is "Someone is using our IP. Distribution of a tabletop game set within our IP could hurt our future ability to sell products based on our IP."

Paragonwiki and the like are seen differently, as they are aids to using the IP in the form that NC can profit from. (Even so, all it takes is one harshly-worded letter, and the entire Paragon Wiki goes down.)

What you're doing here is offering a replacement.

It's a quite different thing.

Really, the best thing you could do to your project to keep it running would be to strip every last reference to City of Heroes out of it. Sure, you can still call your mechanics To Hit and Defense, those are generic. But every power and every archetype will have to be renamed, and all the villain groups scrapped and replaced.

Basically, even if you are not trying to profit from it, it could hurt NC's future sales. If they, miraculously, came out with a CoX tabletop game next year and tried to market it, its sales could be hurt because it would be competing with your system.

And, as far as the legal system is concerned, just because the IP holder isn't doing it now doesn't mean they won't in the future, so they have the absolute right to shut you down.

I am not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, et cetera.