Seeking legal advice.

Straight to the point: I want to be paid for my efforts.

I have already put, and will continue putting, large amounts of time into developing a game system, and a game world. I want them to be compelling and enjoyable. This necessitates feedback. Therein lies the rub. How do I expose game mechanics for review, without effectively giving them away for free?

Large corporations do closed testing under non-disclosure agreements. Is this the only safe option? Wizards of the Coast released much of the d20 system as Open Gaming License material, but not until after they'd published a finished product. If I expose my design process here in the name of active critique, what's to stop someone else from taking it and beating me to hard-copy publication? Even worse, possibly doing so with a half-finished and less than streamlined version, so that even if everyone recognizes that I'm the victim of foul play, the first general public opinion is poor, and willingness to try the finished (real) product is decreased.

Short of clamping down and revealing nothing publicly, is there any defense against this possibility?

And what about game world material? That, I think, is slightly better protected by implied copyright; but is there anything simple (and preferably free) that can be done to assert and secure these property rights when publishing on a public forum like this?

I'm hesitant to share much of anything until I know more about these subjects. Pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Nice while it lasted...

Last week at GenCon, Wizards of the Coast announced that they will, next May, be releasing the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The D&D website has full coverage of the announcement, with links to video of the GenCon seminar on YouTube.

I'm not going to rant about everything I didn't like in their presentation, and let's not even get started on how quickly they decided to invalidate all the books I've purchased this time around, but a couple of things they said caught my attention more than the rest. One of them was "subscription-based," and the concerns this raises are obvious enough. But far more worrying to me was this:

"We're defining the roles of the character classes. Like a sports team, you're going to know what your character, depending on what class he is, is supposed to do in encounters and in the game as a whole."

This does not appeal to me, not one little bit. I started playing D&D about the time 2nd Edition came out, and it whetted my appetite for roleplaying, but the rigid class definitions got stale the instant I first encountered a game which didn't have them. Starting with Palladium games (perhaps the stiffest system still on the market), and then moving to the likes of Storyteller, Legend of the 5 Rings, Earthdawn, the old d6-based Star Wars game, Ironclaw/Jadeclaw, and even Deadlands: I've seen a fair number of gaming systems, and learned a lot about what I like and don't like. And toward the end of the '90s, I had started working on a gaming system (and world) of my own, trying to gather together the good bits and avoid the bad from all the games I'd played.

D&D 3rd Edition was released in 2000. The core rules were pruned, multiclassing was simple and viable, and the skill and feat systems allowed a fair degree of character customization. It wasn't perfection, but nothing about it distinctly turned me off... and with the WotC marketing powerhouse behind the D&D trademark, it rapidly became the game that everyone knew how to play, which was the most important thing. Much as I resigned myself to Windows at about the same time, I've played almost nothing but D&D since 3rd Edition was released.

But now, as best I can interpret, we have been told that D&D is bucking for a slice of the WoW pie, and as such will soon become more rigid again. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe stronger guidelines won't actually hinder you straying off the path... but I think I'd like to prepare myself for things being just as bad as I expect.

I'm pulling my old project off the shelf. Expect updates.