1KM1KT Free RPG Community

Its been about a year now, and the how to design a RPG articles haunt me. They attack me at nigh as I try to sleep, or in boring days where I can focus (pain is a little bit of an issue). Yet I have not advanced any further with my contemporary world spec forces game. Though in the last few months my pen has written and used up pages in my take anywhere notebook, so much that I see my take anywhere notebook as more entertaining than Skyrim (there I said it).

Now i am at the point of a basic document and some play testing, and I come here lads to ask you how you secure your own IP? Not that I imagine wizards sitting there and reading my posts (though the NSA does they are not that much into RPGS). Its more of a lets seal my ideas down and defend them a little.

Any responses would be fab as I have got no posts on RPG.net and feel like I must be a leper there on some subjects.

If you mean IP as in Internet Protocol, I'm the wrong one to ask. Bbut if you mean intellectual property... OK, I'm not a lawyer and still not quite the right one to ask, but we have discussed this before.

In most places, you have an assumed copyright - if you put your name on it, it belongs to you. Unless something says otherwise, no one should be quoting it without proper attribution.

You can't actually copyright most aspects of game mechanics. Hasbro can not own the idea of rolling two six sided dice and adding them together, for instance. It is the story and setting elements that belong to only you, and usually there is only minimal incentive to directly copy that.

Now if you are a major company you might trademark certain things to make sure an image or term is only associated with your product or patent some method or device so no one can use it. Producing a book and getting an ISSBN so that it can be cataloged in the library of congress is another process, but by that point you have a publisher.

When large companies test products, they can have people sign NDAs - Non Disclosure Agreements to not talk about what they have participated in. From our small scale point of view however, having people spread the word of mouth discussion is to our advantage, and hiring lawyers stupidly expensive/counterproductive.

Anyway, most of the time, you really don't need to worry.

You could of course, label the game as creative commons or some other other open license and not worry about theft since you already gave them permission to borrow it.

The best thing to do with the idea of intellectual property is to put it in a drawer and come back to it once you've overtaken sales of Pathfinder. Even then, you'll probably find that having a free and open attitude to IP will have only helped and you'll leave it in the drawer.

If someone wants to rip off your game, it's probably a good thing. It means you've made something that people will like. If you run across someone doing it, you just ask them "Hey, I see you liked my game and thats really awesome! Can you point people to the fact that you used it in the credits page?"

A lot of the time, when people like a game, they'll investigate the source material for the game. But more than that, If someone is using your system and they have players, those players already know your game and are now far more likely to play it.

It's like if you had a game on a game console that was really cool. But some other company comes out and makes a game for that game console and people are buying more consoles because of it. Now, those people are more likely to play your game because they have the game console they need, their barrier to entry is lower. Think about your game engine like that console and the setting as the game disk. You want people to pick up your engine and run with it. Either that or if you're really serious about getting people to play your setting, use an existing engine like Risus, Fudge or Fate. Now anyone that knows those engines, can pick up your game and play it at a low barrier to entry.

It's hard to get past the idea "This is my baby! Someone might steal it!" but in the RPG ecosystem, some of the biggest games out there exist because someone said "This is my baby! Come and steal it!"