Ever stumble onto some forum or RPG when you are maybe hunting for one to join, and swear you've seen or read it all before?
Maybe you have.
It seems to be VERY common, in my experience, among people who belong to our warrior cats forum and then decide to go start their own {usually rival} forum. We've had at least 5 or 6 people plagiarise from us, or steal our graphics sometimes, or even both, from our site, onto their new site. I'm not sure why. Maybe they think some of the fairy dust will rub off onto their site from ours and make them magically successful. They don't understand that it's not our board descriptions or our graphics that made us what we are, it's originality, creativity, hard won experience and most of all, a lot of hard work over 5 and a half years' time.
I put in HOURS every day to our site. No lie. Not a day goes by that I don't at the very least, check in a couple times. And that's on vacation. I have managed to downsize my workload a bit--I had to or I was going to burn out {That's what my next article will be about!} but a busy forum is WORK.
People seem to think they can steal someone else's success by stealing their material or ideas or formula. All they are stealing is output--at the best, making their work a faded copy of something more vivid. They can't steal what created that output. And they can't back it up.
Your forum/RPG will never be successful until it can stand on its own.
And there are free resources that you can get graphics and layouts from, so there's no excuse there. As for the writing portions, if you can't come up with basic board and rule descriptions on your own then throw in the towel now before you go any farther because you aren't ready for this.
Nothing looks worse on a writing-based game than plagiarism on the setup of the forum itself. Better to have mediocre writing than stolen writing.
Plagiarism WILL catch up to you.
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