RPG Design: Ripping Off Worlds for Fun and Profit

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso

First and foremost, DO NOT STEAL. Stealing is bad, okay!? Cool! We’ve all
been there; watching a movie, reading a book, playing a game when
inspiration hits us. “This would be so cool to play with/at/as in my next
game”. Your inner self is absolutely right.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso

First and foremost, DO NOT STEAL. Stealing is bad, okay!? Cool! We’ve all been there; watching a movie, reading a book, playing a game when inspiration hits us. “This would be so cool to play with/at/as in my next game”. Your inner self is absolutely right. This would be cool, you should steal it. Not like that, we went over that. But you should take that really cool thing and integrate it into your next game. Part of making art, or a cool RPGs, is borrowing concepts from different sources and working them into your own world. What Pablo Picasso meant when he said “good artists borrow, great artist steal” is that when we borrow elements of the past that make us feel something and translate that feeling into our own works new art is created. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy lately and it struck me while running around Midgar as Cloud Strife. I wanted his Buster Sword in my next game. You can’t just add Chocobos and Buster Swords into your game as-is. Before you can integrate an idea, you need to do a little “re-working” before it’s game ready.

Cloud Strife by Square Enix

Let’s take the Buster Sword. How can we bring this weapon into your next game? There are three items to address first. Start with the mechanical effects of the item. It’s a natural instinct to make the sword really strong, but it needs to have a solid weakness for proper balance like sacrificing the character’s defense bonus to wield it. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you acquire the Giant Knife, an over-sized weapon that deals a ton of damage but prevents you from using your shield. Whatever you choose, it should ensure this weapon doesn’t break the game when it first appears. For my game, attacks are slower, giving a penalty to the attack roll, but boost the damage dealt when it does hit.

Ocarina of Time owned by Nintendo

You need is to consider how this new item fits into this world. The Buster Sword is big, really big. Fans have made them in real life, but they are too heavy to actually wield without help. Is there a metal in your world that is lighter, but just as strong as iron? Does this sword have a levitation spell cast on it so it’s 1/10th the weight? Do you need special bracers that allow you to lift the sword? To answer this, you may want to ask yourself “how rare is this item?” This can help narrow down your options. I feel like my item should be rare and have a levitation spell cast on it. That makes the item feel unique but not super rare. I like the idea of two giant blades clashing in the future of the game.

Once you’ve worked out how this item fits in your world, you need to customize the design. With my Buster Sword, I thought about sharpening both sides of the blade, adding an intricate design down the blade, or lengthening the handle. I decided to color the blade to make it really stand out. Now the levitation spell on it makes the metal appear purple. Just like that, my “Not-Buster Sword” is ready for game time. 

There’s nothing wrong with adapting an item from an existing universe.  According to Christopher Booker, there are only seven stories to be told. The trick to making a story feel original is to color it with your experiences. This injects a sense of something familiar but also new into your game. There are countless examples of this in other media.

Most people first saw the lightsaber in Star Wars, but that doesn’t mean that the lightsaber can’t make other appearances. The same weapon can be found in the anime Mobile Suit Gundam, and the video game No More Heroes, but of course they don’t call them “lightsabers.” In these other mediums, they are called the Beam Saber and the Beam Katana, and their design is a little different, but the concept is still the same. The dirty secret is that Lucas wasn’t the inventor of the lightsaber. It’s first appeared in an Isaac Asimov book, written under the pen name Paul French, called David Starr: Space Ranger. The weapon was called a ‘force knife’ and it had a blade made out of a force field that projected from the handle into a hard light construct.

Now go out there and steal to your heart’s content (but not really, we talked about this, don’t do anything illegal). Drink in as much content as you can to fuel your creative engines. Remember, it’s not enough to add just anything to your game. Try to reconnect with why this thing was cool in the first place. Let your flair wash over these items, worlds, and concepts and transform them into something completely new.