Publishing

[MGuy]

With all this recent talk of copyright infringement, marketing, and corporate thievery, I am curious as to what steps someone would take to go their own route and get their own system published. I know people here, including myself, usually write rules out of passion and for entertaining themselves but as I hear about the corporate publishers failing I would like to know how aspiring writers might bust onto the scene.

[the_taken]

An interesting conundrum. I know that when I will create a system it will be heavily influenced by other all the previous systems I've played, or have yet to play. The resulting overlap will probably upset someone, and I've heard horror stories of big corps drowning smaller companies in lawyer feed.

I've come up with a possible solution: Make as much of the core mechanics of my game free, but produce my books extremely well. Kinda like D&D3.x's SRD, only with a finer comb.

But unlike WotC, my SRD will expand with every rule expansion. Not with everything, but enough that 3rd party companies can pick one of those expansions and say "These things here work, and we can make them better, but there's more stuff were we got it from. Go look."

I'd also have total transparency with all the math portions of play testing. None of this focus group bullshit, but actual mathematicians running equations and calculating probability and statistics and shit.