Tfw you read a book/watch a movie/play a game and they use an idea you used for your setting/game you kept telling...

>tfw you read a book/watch a movie/play a game and they use an idea you used for your setting/game you kept telling yourself against all odds was kinda unique
>And you weren't even the first

Why are you people so obsessed with always being original?

Weapons-grade autism, user.

Because otherwise whatever idea you post will just be responded to "lol I read/watched/played _____ too" rather than anything constructive.

I wrote a setting and rough plot point arc for a d20 system Mecha game at one point.

I gave it to someone else for a sanity check; turns out I had independently just written Babylon 5 with Mecha. Up to and including the Nightwatch, and basically the entire series 3-4 plotline. Was utterly gutted.

To be fair I then watched Babylon 5 and it was fucking awesome, but yeah my group refuses to play it because of 's reasoning.

This character design here?
This WAS my first D&D character that I'd played about five years before this book came out.

The difference between originality and plagiarism is that pagiarists borrow elements from a single source, and original writers borrow from many sources and combine the material in a unique way.
Take a look at papa Tolkien; he took a fuckton of elements from folklores of Finland, Germany and Britain, gathered some material from real history and gave it flavor by creating languages of his own, which in turn were influenced a lot by real world languages and so on.

A friend of mine once accidentally created the Dragon Age setting. Dude was heartbroken when he finally played Origins after a Steam sale.

Yog it isnt so difficult.
Just steal from EVERYTHING steal so much and so often that no part of the final combination is identifiable.
Making a race?
Steal Egyptian Architecture
Steal Mayan Currency
Steal Nordic Gender Roles
Steal Greek Political Structures
Steal Chinese syntax and combine it with a Celtic alphabet.
Steal Native American myth cycles and replace them with African deities
Steal Mesopotamian technology
Steal the skill color and physiology from pacific islanders.

Nothing is original. It's all inspired by something else or a failed interpretation. Pastiche is you friend. The more you steal the more unique things get.

Why should anyone give a shit about the opinions of a bunch of strangers on an anime website? Just play what you want, I say.

>That face

I've done this several times with my campaigns and my players have never caught on. Particularly I've done a Black Company ripoff, an Age of Conan Khitai ripoff, and a thinly veiled Dune ripoff campaign.

They loved them.

Stop worrying about it.

Bro, I would play that game so hard, just want you to know.

>tfw you're the best read person at the table
>tfw you can make great settings/campaigns with zero difficulty
>tfw you will never ever have anyone to talk with about those books
>tfw the books are all the most entry-level of reading
>no one will even take offers to borrow them

Some day I will find impressionable children and make them read decent books.

...

I swear the Space Marine game opening stole my idea.

Instead of jumping onto an Ork ship, it would've been Tau.

Still fucking cool though, I ain't even mad.

>mfw I made a campaign that mixed Beowulf with Berserk and Dune and my players are still begging me to bring that setting back

I've written this whole story for my special snowflake OCC Donut Steel Chaos Space Marines, where they use a device made of Eldar skulls to hide their presence from an Eldar craftworld, get in point-blank, then launch a massive attack on it, plunder its armory, unleash daemons within the center of it, and corrupt the Infinity Circuit, and the warlord becomes a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh.

Then I read the new Fabius Bile novel.

You're doing it wrong
The trick is to steal so much from so many sources that your setting is unrecognizable as a copy of any one thing

wow so creative

I accidentally wrote waterworld

This is why I did my current campaign without any worrying about being original, I consciously borrowed my most liked features from different popular fantasy settings and just rolled with it. The players are actually enjoying finding references to settings they know.

>"When your players are too busy arguing WHICH setting you are copying, they'll end up convincing themselves you aren't copying anything at all."

It looks better on Veeky Forums.

Doesn't happen to me very often because I handpick only the most ridiculous ideas for my settings.

Figures Jarmusch would say something like that, he stitches his films together from scenes lifted from old French art movies 3.5 people saw, reshot with Hollywood actors and on a decent budget. If it works it doesn't mean it's a decent thing to do.