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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9891430" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Its not just that its the wrong term; its the wrong concept.Most of game rules are, effectively, engineering principals.  Engineering principals propagate.  They've done so since the beginning of human culture.  Even in the modern period and the existance of patents, all that typically happens is people do (sometimes pretty minor) alterations.  And that's if its a really ground-breaking, new idea, which honestly, most such things usually aren't.  The same is true of game system elements; even if you're doing it entirely from the ground up (and chances are you aren't; you've had the influence of game resolution from outside the RPG hobby over the years, and that's influenced game mechanics even if its not obvious), the realities of mathematics and interactions mean what you've done is likely not entirely new, even if you weren't influenced by it.Its just not something you should develop a strong sense of ownership about, because in the end, no one owns processes.Well, I'll be pretty blunt; I don't thnk most creative work isn't influenced by others either.  Almost nobody who draws, writes music (in particular) or does any other kind of creative work has had it leap ex nihilio into their mind, and in almost all cases you can see those influences if you know the field.  The line between influence and copying is fundamentally arbitrary, and in many cases has as much to do with application as style or technique.Well, as you see, my feeling is that if you're objecting to someone using your "ideas" to fuel their own rather than your "execution" you've made a mistake right off the bat, and I'd tell that to anyone else.When good friends with a man named Steve Perrin, who was probably one of the most well-known game designers in the field once you got outside the D&D sphere, being the primary designer for a little game called RuneQuest.  Besides his own involvement in some of them, there are literally dozens of games out there which use a BasicRoleplaying (the core system derived from the RuneQuest mechanics) basis, or variant systems based off that.  I only once saw him put out even the faintest criticism for one of these games, and that was because it was overly on the nose (not just the mechanics but a lot of the execution was based on RQ) and even then it was mostly a kind of wry recognition.Because people do not bother reinventing the wheel in the game industry unless it serves their purposes to do so.  Far as I can tell they never have; because even among RPGs, and even among setting-free ones, its implimentation and putting all the pieces together in a particular way everyone is selling (when the mechanics aren't just particular set used for a dedicated setting that they otherwise don't consider relatively unimportant).  Almost all mechanical movement is refinement, and no one expects it to be anything else.</blockquote>

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