For quite some time now I have been a writer on several different Play-By-Post RPGs. I have owned one, on which I was a co-administrator, and the experience was good while it lasted. However, it became quite bad when the partnerships dissolved and the board idea (which I originally came up with), as well as several of my characters, all of the descriptions (which I wrote myself), and even some of my posts were simply copied and pasted into my now ex-partners’ new RPG. Oh, but they wrote the new coding for it, which makes it all okay, apparently.
So as a result of this and a few other nasty experiences, my question has to be: Is it worth it to put your writing out on the internet in such a way? RPGs are places that writers often go to develop characters, storylines, and even whole worlds in an interactive and collaborative environment on which everyone has some (if not always equal) input. I have seen RPGs specifically for writers out there where you have input on everything and are hindered in no way as far as character creation, but these same RPGs depend on member input from everything from your own character to the whole world this character plays in and everything in between. I even have several unfleshed out world-building/story ideas that could be used in such a way, but is it worth putting that out there for other writers knowing what I know now about how horrible some people are capable of being?
I am a writer. I write my own novels and my own stories and it is my goal to one day get these novels and stories published. So keeping that in mind, sometimes beginning or joining another RPG knowing what I know now just seems like too big of a risk, and too much work for something that could just fall down by the wayside while ex-members steal everything in pieces and then pass these things off as their own, solo creations.
Are there other writers out there with similar experiences? What are your thoughts on this?
Tatiana
Writing Blocks 