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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3455374" data-attributes="member: 2067">Creative DMs and creative settings can co-opt almost anything for their own purposes. You brought in Renaissance artists working under the strictures of the attitudes and desires of the time, and told how they can creatively turn the familiar into something new. Just as the Renaissance artists co-opted biblical scenes to say something perhaps about society or human nature, a very creative DM can co-opt warforged ninjas to live a life of sea shanties, courtly repartee, and swashbuckling adventure. Look at Planescape. The setting was about philosophical meaning and political and mental power, and it co-opted everything from the Seelie Court to 1980's ecology to Ramones lyrics to Eastern mysticism to Vikings and made them all serve that purpose above all. You're right in that it's something a matter of taste. I'm sure Renaissance audiences didn't always appreciate modern commentary and I know not everyone likes the idea of fiends running store fronts from Planescape. Not everyone likes the idea of mostly divorcing something from its origins in order to use it in a new way, and people can get hung up on odd specifics of mental imagery.But saying "no" is never very creative. No matter how many times someone says "no," you can still *be* creative, but saying "No, that can't be," is exactly the counter-force to creativity. It says you cannot create, what you imagine cannot be, your ideas cannot be realized. So a setting that is narrowly focused on, say, a low fantasy feel, with a lot of specifics about what creates that feel will, by necessity, be of limited creativity. It will be saying "no" a lot.That's not to say that creativity is impossible or that it's a bad setting or that it's badwrongfun that no one would enjoy or anything. I've certainly run creatively limited campaigns like that before, because I had a very specific vision of what I was looking for. But it wasn't a campaign that enabled a lot of creativity. It was limited. It was fun and dramatic and passionate and even innovative (the one I was most limited on was a post-apocalyptic setting where I invented some d20 tech rules), but it wasn't very creative as  a setting, because it rejected a lot of possibilities.So if your tastes tend to be specifically defined and immutable, they're not necessarily very creative. They can be a lot of fun, I'm certainly not intending that as a negative judgment. Just a reality of the nature of the campaign. You can still invent new rules and have cool ideas and have compelling villains and rich, detailed histories and all sorts of goodness. But the setting, because it's limited, can't be very creative. It won't generate much as a setting. It's a lack of creativity to assume that a talking fox set in a romantic mold is inherently harmful to a low fantasy, swords and sorcery archetype. It would be using creativity to find the myriad ways in which that does work. That wouldn't necessarily make the game any better, but it would be more creative. Creativity certainly isn't the holy grail of playing D&D, however.</blockquote>

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