Do you ever "steal" ideas from your DMs?

[Li Shenron]

For DMs who are also players:

When thinking up ideas and adventures, do you ever draw upon your player experience and rehash/reuse adventures/ideas/NPCs that your old/current DM has used when you run your games?

What's wrong with that? If you think about it, there is very true "original" material even in a published book...

 

[DaveStebbins]

Heck yeah!

With over 20 years of gaming, I've even played PCs in subsequent campaigns that were originally run by someone else in a different group.

My current group uses a shared campaign where all three DMs rotate duties, so we share NPCs and add to each other's plots all the time. It's actually lots of fun trying to figure out ways to mess with an NPC or plot started by one of the other DMs without actually damaging the NPC or idea, in case he wants to come back to it later.

-Dave

 

[Aristotle]

There was this one time that a bunch of players wanted me to run something and I had nothing prepared. I didn't even have any nifty ideas in the oven, so I ran something a former DM had run in a previous game I had played in. I told everyone, quite clearly, that I didn't have anything prepared so I was running something that this other DM ran once.

My players were fine with that, but about a week after the session one of my gamers was visiting friends and started telling them about this really cool game he was in. It tuned out that someone else from the original game that I had played in was there and instantly recognized the borrowed plot. I got an amazing amount of grief about that for a good year after it happened, and a small group of gamers in the area all but stopped speaking to me because I was some sort of "campaign thief".


As a DM I borrow ideas from books, movies, songs, etc.. But I really try not to borrow things that other people have run. I'm not upset when someone takes something I've run and runs it for another group, but I don't completely approve either. I would never be anywhere near as harsh as those folks were to me.

If someone asks for my consent to run one of my campaigns I normally give it to them, but I encourage them to change things up. Take one or two of the core plots and maybe a few of the scenes you really liked, and then put your own spin on it all with your own sub-plots and encounters of your own creation thrown in on top of it all.

 

[gunter uxbridge]

Aristotle...that reminds me of something similar that happened a while back.

MANY years ago, I and a group of my friends played a really enjoyable game of the Star Trek:RPG (back in the old FASA days). It was a one shot deal set on a Galaxy-class ship with me as the XO and my best friend as the Captain. The premise of the game was for us to go out somewhere, saucer separate the ship and duke it out in a wargame (ala Peak Performance...I know, I know...but this was DIFFERENT I tell ya!). I took command of the warp powerless saucer while the CO got all of the weapons and maneuverability in the star drive. We both immediately began to cheat by throwing up sensor ghosts, using personal codes to board each other’s ships, crash each other’s computer cores, you name it. At one point the wargame computer thought I was able to simultaneously launch dozens of volleys of torpedoes at a time. It was a great time, but as so often is the case, horseplay turned to tears and we accidentally beamed a bunch of our crew into space. Back to spacedock we went and the real adventure began.

10 YEARS LATER

I am living in a completely different part of the state and talking gaming with someone I had just met. We got on the subject of Star Trek, and he began to relate this very story back to me. Imagine how surprised he was when I finished the story for him and even filled in some parts he got wrong. It turns out he knew a guy who knew the GM from that day. Eerie.

 

[frankthedm]

Yep, i steal things from other DMs in my group and they steal from me. of course, when they steal from me, they are usually trying to get Revenge on my character for what i did to thiers. A good run speed often helps in those situations.

 

[d10]

For DMs who are also players:

When thinking up ideas and adventures, do you ever draw upon your player experience and rehash/reuse adventures/ideas/NPCs that your old/current DM has used when you run your games?

Doh, I thought I was the only brianiac smart enough to do that!!! JK

But seriously, I think all DM's begin doing that. What better to draw upon as a fledgling DM than your favorite expierience from playing the game?

 

[StalkingBlue]

A couple of times we've both used similar ideas within a few weeks of each other, but in each case I think we each had planned it independently.

That's so part of the creative process - mutually influencing each other and coming up with parallel ideas, each on their own.

It is one of the reasons why whether something is in fact a plagiarism of someone else's work can be a tricky question to answer when there are similarities present rather than mindless imitation.

 

[StalkingBlue]

I generally do not borrow ideas from my DM's. If there is something I think is really cool though, I will ask them about it. Usually, somebody else's idea won't fit perfectly anyway. But, I might be able to fieldstrip the idea and make it work for my game.

The stuff that I draw on is characterization, description, visualization, etc. Basically, technique. When a DM uses something very effectively, I tend to ask myself, "How can I do that?" Not the exact situation, but the way it was conveyed effectively.

Same here.