Hello,
My team is designing the rule system for our upcoming fantasy role-playing game (RPG). I know the answers here won't be legal advice, but please, some feedback would be great.
My rule system contains concepts such as Races, Classes, Skills, XP. During character generation, you choose a Race, Class and then choose Skills.
An experienced poster writes this here (to someone else, e.g. I won't have "feats" in my game):
I notice that you're talking about "feats", "classes", "spells", and "skills". These four things taken together tell me that you're thinking about using the rules from one of the Wizards of the Coast–produced editions of Dungeons & Dragons. In that case, you have to be extra careful. The 3rd edition of the game is licensed under the OGL.
If my game mechanics are different from D&D/Wizards of the Coast, am I right that the chance of legal trouble is very small? Game mechanics cannot be patented, and words themselves (especially which existed long ago in the English language such as Race, Class, Spell) cannot be protected either. Only the way they are used can be copyrighted.
Well, this is where I'm hesitating. We use Race as... well, race of the character. Class as the "occupation". Skills as... skills. So game mechanics might be similar to other games (using D&D), but with different values and structures. I read that many games copy XP table concepts, but they make sure to use different numbers, which is a good protection against legal issues. For races, we will have human, dwarf, but other custom (unique) races as well.
After crowdfunding, we might be able to pay a lawyer, but not now (I guess review our rule system would cost a LOT $$$ now).