How safe are your ideas, exactly, on this forum....??

Your ideas aren't safe on this forum, plain and simple. Once you put your ideas here, everyone can see them and do with them what they want.

On the other hand, this is a community. It works because we share things. I help you out with your idea, you help me out with mine. Most of us here have plenty of ideas of our own, and we don't come here to rip off other ideas, but to share ideas and to brainstorm. Someone might get inspired by an idea of yours, and develop it further. If he develops it into a game, and sells it, wins the Spiel de Jahres and becomes a multimillionaire, you won't see a penny for it. However, you may also get inspired by what someone else posts and use those ideas in your own designs. It works both ways. It's give and take.

Also, a good idea doesn't make a good game. I've now been designing board games for around three years, and I know that the hard part of game design is not coming up with ideas (I still have dozens and dozens of unused ideas for designs and mechanics waiting to be used some day), but actually prototyping the damn thing, playtesting it, refining it, writing a coherent ruleset, test some more, test some more, decide to ditch major parts of the design, redevelop some ideas, recreate a new prototype, test some more, revise the rules, etc, etc. I think you get the point. An idea is nothing yet, it's just an idea.

That said, if you are not comfortable with posting a specific idea for a mechanic, then don't. There's nothing that forces you to write about an idea that you don't want to share.

Good luck, and have fun.

(*This may, of course, be because the idea and the game are rubbish, but we'll skip over that one for now ;-))
The bulkl of my playtesting experience shows that All For One is definitely NOT rubbish :)

And unless you count my hijacking Scurra's original idea for the game, and beating a number of ideas and changes into him through a barrage of e-mails, then yeah - we're not worried about someone stealing the idea.

I'll also note that Scurra told me my efforts, even if originally uninvited, have helped take the game from "this was an amusing idea, maybe I'll get back to it someday" to "gee, should we submit to Days of Wonder, or Fantasy Flight?"

- Seth

Dr. Myles Munroe once said, "Do you know where the greatest source of ideas can be found?" He paused a bit as we mulled it over, then he boomed, "the cemetery!"
He went on to say that the cemetery was full of the hopes and dreams of men that never once dared to go for it.

Ideas mean nothing if they are not shared. You may not have an interest in designing a Collectible Card Game, but if you share your idea for a mechanic that solves a problem for someone who does like to design CCG's, well, there you go - the world's a better place.

Mitch

This post has some famous quotes that I can't track the author.

This quote was used to explains how modern scientist are :

"They are dwaves who sit on the top of a giants".

This mean that scientist use stuff that already exist made by other people and add their 2 cents that makes the "giant" bigger.

In computer programming, there is a quote that says "You do not reinvent the wheel".

So you take what already exist and do something else with it.

For some other example, on a thread(the one about girl games) one member suggested rapidly making some sort of boy seduction games for girls. I somewhat took the idea and started to make the game draft for fun. The game mechanics was mainly inspired from steve jackson games: Munchkin, Chez Geek and Illuminati.

Now I have 2 stolen item, the other guy idea and the steve jackson's mechanics.

- First you must consider, does the games is ever going to be published? I only did a draft, does not mean I or he is going to sell it. Game creation process takes time, the other guy might not be interested in develloping the concept.

- Are we going to sell it on the same market? If the other guy live in australia, well probably we won't have any commercial conflict.

-Would the game be exactly the same? Probably not. There can be some stuff similar, but since I only stole a raw idea, it might evolves differently.

Finally, consider another element. Once a while, darkhorse posted an article where 2 guy tought about the same game without contacting each other. So it is possible that somebody else uncounciously steal your game ideas. So you should not worry about.

Unless you are submitting printouts of your game with the exact rules on this forum, I really don't think somebody on this forum will be really be interested in publishing your game before you do ... unless he works for Microsoft (their speciality (^_^)).