Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — other designer's mechanisms

Sometimes folks will email me with questions about game design. This is not only very flattering, but it's also helpful, particularly when I need to write a blog-thing but haven't yet settled on a topic. The stars happened to align in just this way recently, and so here we are. The question was, When designing games and using mechanisms created by others, how do you avoid feeling like you're stealing from them? Specifically the designer in question was inspired by a game he loved to make something using similar mechanisms, and was worried that his own work would be too...