Dilemma, see: Horns of
I’m facing a dilemma at the moment – to read or not to read. I have a lot of new and interesting games to look at, as well as some old ones that I haven’t seen or haven’t seen lately.
The dilemma is, am I doing myself (and my game) a disservice to go ahead and read these games while I’m still in development on my own? Will I find myself just glomming features from those games into mine? And if I do, is that bad? Isn’t the point of RPG development at this point to try to use the best mechanics available, whether new or co-opted? After all, I wouldn’t have a game at all without all the games I’ve read in my life, would I? And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be this game would it?
I’m just not sure. I also don’t want to run the risk of finding a game that does exactly what I’m trying to do and giving up because it’s already done. I was in the initial stages of doing an American Gods conversion into the Buffy Unisystem when Scion came out. I decided to run that instead of doing all the work for my own game, and both my players and I were really disappointed. Plus, I never did the conversion that I had in mind.
And then there’s the risk of co-opting stuff, consciously or not. There’s a word for believing something you’ve seen before is your own creation, with no memory of having seen it. It’s a great word and I don’t get to use enough, so I’m going to use it now. What about the risk of cryptomnesia?
What are the boundaries? Other games uses classes, levels, experience points, hit points, and dice without being D&D per se. Are there boundaries at all? I have some mechanics I consider novel, but if this game becomes known beyond my own table, I would expect to see them in some game that follows.
How much is too much? When writers are writing, do they read?
