*Pins her down with well placed ordinance fire. A priest and a cop are immediately dispatched to hunt her down.*

I just think you should stop trying to tell others to get a sense of humor if you're only finding stuff funny as long as it doesn't offend yourself.

Or, to word it differently: Are you calling an attempt to be light-hearted and funny by using a term from a comedy show a grave insult? After all your "hey, don't be so serious!" rhethoric?

And then refusing the apology?

Sheesh. Talk about double standards.

I didn't say it was worse, as is clear in the post. But I can't help finding it rather silly to tell others to find something funny, and then react like a one was shot or cut at a quote from family guy. Both were, if applying the same standards, attempts at humor that backfired. So, how about dropping the double standard?

And while you are at it, maybe think about how it looks if you're complaining about an insult, and then turning around and insulting others ("broken meter in your heads"). (If it was meant to be funny, and a joke, by all means disregard that comment, but such a comment usually means calling someone insane, so qualifies as name calling, technically.)

Copy pasta is your evidence? you have got to be fragging kidding me. Copy pasta exists in all RPG work



Am considering hiring runners for an Op against Catalyst game labs, to make them put Obsidimen in the book
Anyone interested contact me at LTG NA-UCAS-SEA-555-5653

Yeah, when you actually do it.

Now get back to your slave pit and work on fixing those typos with your hammer and chisel.

Well, the trick there is that I don't care how it looks, really. I'll say what I feel like saying -- as the mods can attest -- and not really worry about that sort of thing.

The only way Fortune and I are applying a double standard is if you and Larme are doing the same. For every finger we point at each other, there are three more (since, really, the thumb still kind of points at the other person) pointing back at each of us...or...er...whatever the stupid old saying is.

If you guys can be chock full of righteous indignation over a prank gone awry, it's silly not to acknowledge someone else might be offended at being called, point blank, a stupid dick (Family Guy quote or not, though I'll admit I hadn't seen the apology at the time of my post). However, I can understand where you guys are coming from with your own version of the argument (where it's silly for Fortune and I to let CGL hide behind the "it was a joke" shield but refuse the same defense to Larme and his name calling), but because it's my side of the argument I'm still willing to give myself the benefit of the doubt and keep the moral high ground in my head.

For starters, a poorly-executed April Fool's prank is still, at heart, a well-intentioned joke (which quoting a tv show by means of insulting someone you disagree with on the internet may or may not be). Second, the name calling towards Fortune, in jest or not, came about as a result of the sand-in-the-vagina over the original prank; he drew fire, in essence, attempting to calm people down and get folks to stop throwing stones at someone else. Lashing out at Fortune, who is in no way affiliated with the original offensive prank, makes people lose a few moral-high-ground points, in my book. Thirdly, there's no TOS agreement that tells Catalyst not to publish fake previews to get a chuckle out of everyone, whereas there is a Terms of Service agreement in place that politely tells us all not to call one another stupid dicks.

So while I'll readily acknowledge "double standards" are being brought into play at this point in an argument, in even the worst case both sides are guilty of such. That being the case, I'll fall back on a combination of the "I'm Rubber, You're Glue" riposte along with the "He Started It" defense, and continue to sleep well at night.

Err, well, not "at night," really, since I'm at work right now and it's 3:45 in the morning. But, y'know.

Well, I can only point out that I did not insult anyone, but got insulted by you. So, where exactly is my double standard? Both insulting Fortune through a misfired joke, and insulting me and Larme by claiming there would be a broken meter in our heads is wrong.

I do understand Fortune being angry at the name calling, but I do think he should not be so quick to tell others not to take offense in the same thread - and he should not refuse the apology.

And once again - I did not insult anyone, nor call anyone names, nor told anyone to fix the broken meter in their head. I did point out what I consider a double standard - mainly, seeing something as funny, and telling others not to be offended, and then getting all angry at another misfired joke attempt.

From my point of view, there's

- a lame, stupid "joke" by Catalyst
- heated reactions to this by various people
- a rather patronising defense of Catalyst by Fortune, and some possibly insulting statement of Critias about broken meters
- a rather stupid "joke" by Larme, followed by an apology
- a heated reaction by Fortune to said "joke"
- me pointing out what I see as double standards.

Just a quick reply to all as follow through on Adam's post: please don't expect an apology, the April Fool's joke was a success on several levels, whatever you might think of it. Some people got it, some people didn't. Some found it funny, others didn't. Fine. That's to be expected. But... make no mistake, the "prank" did exactly what it was intended to do.

I do, however, regret not posting the debunk a week earlier, but somethings are out of our hands and things have been complicated what with 5 books in development and imminent parenthood on the horizon. For that delay, I publically apologize.

Those of you who did like the idea can expect to see a full unofficial writeup based on the pdf posted some time down the line - probably after Runners' Companion comes out and as soon as my desk clears (a little). As I mentioned in my post, the rules themselves weren't the joke (pretty much everything else was), but they were thrown together in less than 12 hours and they were definitely not playtested or edited.

That does sound like it was testing the waters though.



The delay in debunking it was, together with the date, the main issues of the thing for me, so for whatever it's worth, that's ok.



The rules did look very balanced already, and I'd put the rules in the companion anyway - after all, expanding the options is the book's point, and the whole companion are optional rules, from what I understand.

Hey a penis is a wonderful device, with practical and enjoyable functions

I call Bullshit

You posted on the dragon threads
it would have taken less time to go "It is a joke guys"

sorry, you were not too busy

No, wait, I am not sorry for pointing this out

I think it comes under the false advertising part of the fraud act in Australia, I am curious to see if it does in America too. When I finish looking up the appropriate sections I will let the thread know. Anyone who studies or practices Law in the US would be appreciated if they could find out and save me time



You guys contributed to the threads in question.

Not entirely incorrect, but not in the way you're probably thinking. As I said in the post, these rules were also intended to showcase the basic framework people can expect for the new character options that will be used in Runners' Companion - you could say it was testing the waters for those.


We are slightly undermanned (for the time being) and these things will happen. If things had gone the way I wished we'd have posted the pdf at 00:01 April 2nd.


Runners' Companion is very much a book about introducing as many options as possible for PCs. I have the first drafts in hand and I can say there will be more than 20 entirely new (at least as playable) character "race" options—including metavariants, new playable races, ghouls, and other more unique options. Unfortunately, even more so than drakes, dragons, even young dragons, will automatically skew most campaigns away from the shadows and that's something that I do not at this point intend to include in a core rulebook.


I was responsible for posting the debunk not Adam, I assumed the responsability of doing it, and I'm the one who got caught up in other things. With that in mind, please refer to my single post in the various Dragon PC threads and "read" it in the current context.

With PC A.I.s, Drakes, Vampires and Shapeshifters, Dragons won't really add much. Especially Drakes seem far too close to Dragons already for that. Really, label the book "optional", and add options - many of the races will be banned anyway in "shadow level" campaigns.

denver...

hmm, imminent parenthood, congratulation, or good luck, depending on ones sense of humor




looking forward to it

Some people thought the joke was funny. They criticized those who didn't for having no sense of humor. Then I made a joke they didn't think was funny, and they exploded with the same fire of righteous indignation they accused us of having. Because it was a different kind of joke, i.e. the kind that doesn't make them laugh.

As far as I'm concerned, that was absolute unmitigated win.

Gratz on the baby inbound Synner, got one myself due to arrive later this year. Want to see what its like working the shadows, live with a hormonally challenged pregnant women for 9 months. It's like being hunted down by angry trolls with cricket bats.

Ok, I am getting confused with that is and isnt a joke and what is and isnt humor. Does this mean Arsenal was or wasn't a joke?

Arsenal was NOT a Joke . . but looking at all the things that were supposed to make it obvious that the runners compendium preview was a joke it very well could be, because most if not all of those hints at it being a joke are in there too . .

Oh, and Syn?
grab Aunty Ancient or at least his Stuff when you're working on the PDF with the unpublished stuff . . and put Obsidimen in there! ò,Ó

lol
thats exactly what I was thinking

Oh now, now, don't go being silly about breaking the law. Everyone breaks the law, all the time; part of the way governments exercise power over the governed, and why lawyers have so much power rather than armies in civilized countries, is that everyone has broken at least a few laws that they could be persecuted for. Whining because a business broke a few laws during the course of doing business is like whining that a baker broke a few eggs while baking a cake.

The way to show support or outrage in a market-based capitalistic society is to vote, with your dollars. If you don't like the things that Catalyst is doing, just factor that into your decision over whether to buy their books. If enough people do this, then you won't have to worry about SR-related jokes, because SR would cease to exist. If that's what you're looking for, then go ahead; you'll get the same thing with lawsuits anyway, and this way you keep your money rather than handing it over to some lawyer.

False statements, including false advertising, generally cannot give rise to legal liability unless they induce reasonable reliance. I think false advertising might be illegal if it could lead to reliance, regardless of if it actually does. But it would be impossible for anyone to rely on the "preview" in any way, especially to their financial detriment. The idea that an April Fool's joke (albiet a failed one) can be illegal is very lolworthy to me as a lawstudent.

Maybe you're right. But what about compensation for the many broken hearts caused by this thread, which was only started because of the prank?

Tehran? Anyone who opposes Lofwyr? The folks who used to run what is now Amazonia?

Heh, I think you're just kidding, but I'll take this opportunity to educate the masses Many people think that you can get legal damages any time something causes you pain and suffering. You can get damages for pain and suffering, but for the most part this is only if it's accompanied by physical damage to either your person or your property. So if CGL publishes something that causes you financial harm, and this financial harm causes you a great deal of mental anxiety, you could get money for that.

The only time when you can get money just for psychological harm, however, is for intentional infliction of emotional distress. But it's almost impossible to recover under this tort, it requires extreme and outrageous behavior, which is a very narrow class of behaviors. Like maybe if you told someone a loved one had committed suicide and blamed them for it in a note, or something.

Now, I'm pretty sure false advertising isn't a civil tort. You have to complain to the FTC, and they'll investigate. If they decide that advertising is false, they'll impose effectively criminal sanctions. But if anyone tried to tell them at the runner's companion preview was false advertising, they'd be saints if they didn't lol in your face. It's probably not even within the definition of advertising...

...great sufferin hornytoads, not that sassinfrassin' Skates & Skateboards Prohibited Ordinance again!!! That one really chafes the hide.

Ok, the original joke might not have been all that funny, but this thread is pure comedy

Sillier torts have worked

Liebeck v McDonalds comes to mind

Oh and previews put out by the production company do count as advertising

Over here it would end up as a petty sessions case and Catalyst would probably be forced to print an apology on their site for the poor joke.

Time wasted does not count as a detriment in the US? Overn here it can be worked out as a financial detriment

You can claim it's a false advertising case if you want, that doesn't make it so. An advertisement doesn't just have to be deceptive, it has to somehow give the company an unfair competitive advantage. Falsehood alone is never actionable, it has to actually hurt (or in false advertising and intellectual property potentially hurt) someone. You are not being hurt in any legally cognizable way by reading an untrue joke advertisement.

I'm tired of people pointing to the McDonald's case as an instance of a silly tort. The lady got deep tissue burns, the most serve kinds of burns you can get, from something that was supposed to be a beverage. It wasn't like "no doi coffee is hot," it was like "this coffee can permanently injure you." And it did. It was certainly partially her fault, but in tort law that simply reduces your recovery. If it was 25% your fault for instance, you lose 25% off your recovery. In Liebeck's case, she was found to be 20% at fault. It was really in no way a silly tort, it's just been blown up as a poster child by people who dislike trial lawyers -- people who either do not understand or willfully distort the reality of American tort law.

As for the Austrailian system... It sounds pretty crazy that you can get a judgment against someone for them posting something on the internet that you voluntarily read which later turned out to not be genuine. That seems completely insane. There is no US tort to encompass anything even close to this. We don't have a "petty session", we have a small claims court, but you don't get to file special cases there. It's just the place you go for regular claims that are below a certain monetary amount. Time wasted can be considered an economic damage, like if someone causes a traffic jam and your delivery company loses money because it can't deliver. However, it is well settled in the US that consequential economic damages, without damage to person or property, can't be the basis of a tort. If they could, then everyone who caused a car crash would be liable for millions or billions of dollars, because everyone delayed by the crash would sue them. If they crash into me, and part of my consequential damages is that I can't work for a week, I can recover for that. But if they just waste my time by crashing into someone I don't even know and causing traffic, I have no claim against them.

Anyway, either your tort law is insane, or you buy into the half-truths of the same anti-tort law people who lie about the law to stir up public sentiment that we have over here Honestly, because our laws have the same basis in the British common law system, I have a hard time believing that Australian law is that wildly different from ours.

In that particular case the franchise in question had repeatedly and willfully breached the safety regulations around the serving of hot beverages, been told to stop it on multiple occasions and persisted in doing it, and a woman suffered very serious injuries as a result.

it's not a particular silly case and drawing parallels seems insane.

IIRC the English Tort system is loser pays all costs.

Tends to keep the filly lawsuits to a low number.

Yes it has some disadvantages but then no microwaved pets suits either.

WMS

No, they don't always, but they may if they feel the suit was retarded, the court may elect to award costs to either party. However, in a tightly contested issue costs may not be awarded for example. The legal test depends on the court in question, and is often something like "In the intrests of justice to do so" or something similar.

i'm pretty sure they can award costs in the US too.

My favorite "crazy tort law" lie is the burglar who broke into a family's garage while they were on vacation, then some stuff fell on him and he got stuck and had to survive on dogfood for a week, then he sued them for an unsafe garage and won. I like it because it's funny, and it shows that the liars don't even care about legal accuracy. It's well settled in every American jurisdiction that a landowner has no duty to trespassers except for a few exceptions. For instance, you are liable if you set up a trap to purposefully hurt trespassers. Or if you see them walking across your property and don't warn them of a danger that exists. Or if you have something that attracts children, like a swimming hole, and you don't do anything to eliminate dangers that will kill the children that will inevitably be attracted to your swimming hole. Clearly however, there's no duty to have a safe garage for a burglar who breaks in...

I don't know where Kremlin KOA gets his information, but I've certainly never heard of any such laws regarding false advertising over here.

You must like me a lot then, because aside from my five day vacation in January, I've been working 60+ hours a week for Catalyst ever since we started up.


Time to do one thing does not necessarily mean that the time could be spent doing something else.

I'm genuinely sorry that some people were really upset by this situation.

*rolls his eyes and starts handing out straws to anyone who's entire week was evidently ruined by this*
Oh these? These are so you can suck it up. You can have two if that'll speed things up.

The dragon joke didn't bother me, but the "joke" version of Arsenal kind of annoyed me.

Still, it was a relief to find out it was a joke, and take it back for the "real" version that didn't have emotitoys (6 dice bonus for social skills - that should have told me it was a joke right there).

Generally, attorney's fees are only awarded when the cause of action is created by a fee shifting statute. One common instance of this is the civil rights violation suit law, which says that if the government violates your constitutional rights, and you win in a suit against them, you automatically get an award of attorney's fees. In regular torts, however, attorney's fees are rarely shifted.

I don't see that it makes much difference one way or the other, though. I'm not really sure, but I imagine that most suits settle in Britain, too. If you take a suit to trial, even if you have the potential to get your legal fees reduced to 0 by winning, you can't guarantee that you'll win. There's still the same incentive to settle, which is that you don't take any risk, and you generally pay some amount that you can afford to make it go away. Though it's nice that totally frivolous suits can't really go forward -- for a suit that has a 0% chance to win, American corporations will often settle for trivial amounts of money instead of going to trial. But if the loser automatically pays attorney's fees, and has a 0% chance to win, then the defendant has $0 liability and will not settle. So no money for frivolous suits virtually ever Not that frivolous suits are as big a deal as people claim they are in America, but I think the English system is a pretty good idea in general...

Ya know, an actually funny joke would have been a preview of SoLA.

IMO, letting it ride for 2 weeks was a bit much, and honestly, I stop looking for April Fool's Day jokes after April 1 has gone. I mean, trick-or-treating on November 1 gets you nothing.

But, except for the couple of lawyers here, would anyone actually sue over something as lame as this? Yeah, I know, some would, but come on!

And as far as Obsidimen being one of the clues to it being a joke, they were hinted at in one of the last SR3 books, Shadows of Asia, I think. So since it is long established that Earthdawn is the 4th world to SR's 6th, and that the mana cycle is continuing to grow, it is reasonable to think they might have been in the upcoming book.

And the bit about large parts of the dragon description being copy/pasted from DotSW, well, you kind of expect that. I mean, it's like comparing oranges to oranges, or dragons to dragons. Since you're talking about the same thing, it would be described the same way. Since it was a "preview", typos and odd asterisks and such were not unexpected, at least by me.

All in all, lame joke fellas.

I'm an australian, but the systems have a deal in common, we've had less time to diverge and are structurally very similar.

And yes, the vast majority (I used to work in the family law sector in a non legal capacity, and settlement rates there where over 90%, and other federal jurisdictions were fairly close.) cases are settled. A similar number plead guilty in criminal trials.

Kidding? I'm hyperventilating!



Well, my strategy would be the other way round: All of this pranking confusion has given me a paranoiac schizophrenia, which requires a therapy in order to make me stop looking out for lame pranks and late "April's Fools" everywhere. This therapy, however, is not cheap (facing that I have spent all of my savings on sourseboocz), and I've lost my job due to my psychical condition. Any chance of being successful with that?

(Disclaimer for anyone at CGL reading this: Nope, I'm not planning anything. Just curiosity about the American law system. )

that would have just been sick and cruel
now maybe "Shadows of Middle America"
or "Shadows of the Pennsylvania Dutch"

oooh I know "Shadows of the Land of the Midnight Sun"!!!

"shadows of Sesame Street"?

No, I don't think anyone would. Courts don't accept retarded lawsuits like it's nothing. They get annoyed, they throw your ass out, and they might fine you a bunch of money. "They maded me mad an' an' I wants munnies!" is not a legal claim, and it could have a deleterious effect on the career of any lawyer dumb enough to file the suit.

That would have to be an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim. But it would fail.

There is an eggshell skull rule in tort law, which says that if the plaintiff was ultra fragile and the defendant committed a tort against them, they are liable for all the harm they cause. If I just tap you on the head, which is battery, but your skull shatters because it's unusually fragile, I have to pay for all that extra damage. Similarly, if I intentionally inflict emotional distress on you, and your mind is really fragile and falls apart even though a regular person would have been fine, I'm liable for all the damage that actually ocurred.

However, intentional infliction of emotional distress requires extreme and outrageous conduct. That's a very high treshhold. It has to be something not tolerable in a civilized society. This joke is several hundred miles below that standard, and thus no matter how much it pissed someone off, even it if drove them insane, they couldn't recover.

The law makes me laugh.

Really? Mostly it makes me cry

I've worked in UK employment Law and now I work for the General Medical Council and mostly its tears and frustration

"Everything is funny from far enough away"

-Me.

not Will Ferrell
you cannot get far enough away for him to be even remotely funny

Oh, yes. I can see it now. The smelly dwarf who lives in the trash can, the gay couple (Bert and Ernie), the Surge'd troll with feathers (Big Bird), the vampire. It all makes sense now.