Nationality American Occupation Game designer | Name Scott Palter | |
Daniel Scott Palter is a game designer who has worked primarily on wargames and role-playing games.
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Early life and education
Scott Palter received an AB from Dartmouth, then a JD from Stanford in 1972, and joined the New York State Bar before he began work at the family form, Bucci Imports. Palter also playtested wargames for SPI, RAND, Morningside Games and others.
Career
Palter used some of the financial power from his family's company Bucci Imports to fund a new company in 1974, West End Games as a small wargame publisher in New York. The company published straight wargame designs initially, including some of Palter's own designs such as Marlborough at Blenheim (1979). West End Games was able to enable the Star Wars license through the help of funds from Palter's family, to get Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game published in 1987. After a conflict between Palter and designers Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg, those two designers left West End Games in January 1987. In 1988, Palter made the decision to move West End from the center of New York to the more rural location of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Palter liked Torg's system of dice and cards and decided to use that as the basis of a series of new games, and West End ultimately made the system entirely generic and released it as a standalone game called Masterbook (1994). In 1998, Palter had West End Games enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to restructure, and let staff go; as a result, LucasFilm ultimately pulled their Star Wars license, and Costikyan and Goldberg were awarded ownership of their game Paranoia in 2000 after a court battle with Palter. Palter looked for someone to bail the company out, and on March 23, 1999 he announced that the company Yeti Entertainment (itself owned by Humanoids Publishing) had purchased West End and together they had formed a new entity called D6Legend Inc. Yeti purchased West End's remaining RPG properties and brought Palter in to manage them; Palter was also able to relicense the rights to DC Comics and D6Legend was able to publish the DC Universe Roleplaying Game (1999). After the failure of The Metabarons Roleplaying Game (2001), Humanoids Publications decided they no longer wanted a roleplaying company and let Palter go. Humanoids announced a "West End Games House Systems" license, and their first licensee was Palter, who had formed a new game company called Final Sword Productions; he soon put out a giant-robot space-opera science fiction game called Psibertroopers (2002).