The HC Next Gen forums are available to anyone with a HarpGamer account and might at some point be opened to anonymous visitors.

This creates some difficult situations:

• Intellectual Property Protection - Specifically the Harpoon 3 Paper Rules, Annexes, and Supplements.
  • Whenever possible do not quote vast swaths of the rules or pages of platform data. Reference the rule or data reference instead (ex. See 4.2.1.2, ex. Rule 4.2.1.2, ex. Rule 4.2.1.2 Submarine Astern Movement, ex. Annex D Aster 15).
  • Mr. Bond is very encouraging, tolerant, and understanding of such discussions, let's not take unfair advantage of his approach.
  • If you need to stamp your posts with certain copyright provisions we won't take offense but please realize that your posting indicates your willingness and acceptance of the posted materials being used in one or more projects. We will review, and almost always honor, requests to be listed in program credits.
• Respecting Others - Can you say Golden Rule
  • This is not a democracy, TonyE, Miller7219, CV32 are the decision-makers but we will listen and weigh every reasonable contribution to the effort and in fact depend upon those contributions.
  • Heated debates can lead from and to insightful discussion just try not to make it personal.
  • TonyE isn't a big fan of profanity, avoid it like the plague please.

From my part, use whatever you wish of the ideas I propose. I make my living in a totally unrelated sector. There, you have it in writing.

 

Re: the netiquette of the debate itself, however, what about "quoting" other games' mechanics as examples? During the IRC chat we named some third-party games (not all of them naval based) as possibile guidances. However, I understand that it would be completely different to name other intellectual properties in a debate about a HCE rewamping ("hey, let's do this like they do in game XY!...")

 

I think that quoting other games as examples would be acceptable, but I would like some guidance here.

Reckall, I agree that quoting how other games work is entirely acceptable, especially given the IRC example. From that information a person can't start to piece together that game. My worry is the opportunity to have quoted a large enough % of the paper rules booklet by the time we're done that a person could recreate the booklet without having purchased the paper rules. That is what spurred my intellectual property concern. Certainly bit and pieces will get quoted for discussion but hopefully not huge stretches since we have the nice rules references.