How RPGs nearly killed my creativity (and how I got it back)

[Hunter Simon]

I just have to share this. If anyone has similar stories, I’d love to hear them.

I started gaming back in 1980 and since that time I have repeated the following mantra hundreds, if not thousands of times: “I love RPGs because they inspire my creativity.”

They used to. But something strange happened around the time that D&D 3rd edition was released; at some point in the year 2000 I stopped being a creative world-builder, adventure-maker and began to morph into a mindless fanboy dedicated to memorizing every word of published settings and determined to do nothing that wasn’t “canonical”. I stifled my own creativity in favor of studying what game designers had created.

Hundreds and hundreds of wasted dollars and thousands of hours of mindless memorization later I’ve realized a simple truth: I don’t want to be a fanboy. I want to be creative instead. Rather than rushing out every month and obediently buying the latest Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, or Eberron material and then feverishly trying to memorize it to be “canonical”, I’ve decided that less is more. Here’s what I did this past weekend: I got rid of all my non-d20 games, games that were sitting around collecting dust anyway, games like GURPS (both 3rd and 4th edition), Alternity, Adventure!, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Mutants and Masterminds, and many others. Great games, all of them, but never played. Taking up space. (Note: I'm not saying "d20 rulz and dem udder games suxxors." I'm just saying that I decided to get rid of games I'll never use.)

I ended up with only two games that I want to play: D&D 3.0 and D20 Modern. But for each of these I had far too much published material, material that was simply draining away my creative energies and replacing it with someone else’s orthodoxy. I got rid of all my Forgotten Realms material, and my Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. Begone, hundreds and hundreds of pages of other peoples' visions! From now on, I will actually be *creative* and build my own worlds.

Or at least, build my own worlds on the foundation of another. I kept my sweet little 32-page D&D Gazetteer, which outlines, in beautiful simplicity, the basics of the Flanaess (Greyhawk, if anyone doesn't know ). This became my new starting point. Then I sat down and wrote the only really creative thing I’ve written in years: “The icy cold waters of Lake Quag are unnaturally black and horrifically deep--so deep, in fact, that the bottom has never been reached.” I sat back and admired this simple attempt at shaping Greyhawk to my own vision. Then I added: “Hemlock, an ancient, depraved linnorm, lives deep within Lake Quag, yet rarely makes his presence known.” It sounds bizarre to say this, but this was the first time in years I had *created* something to add to a published setting.

I was on my way.

This is my new philosophy: D&D with Greyhawk-as-crafted-by-Hunter Simon. I kept the Planescape boxed set (love it) but got rid of all the additional Planescape books (do I really need a 200-page guide to the Astral Plane? I thinketh not). Ditto Ravenloft. For D20 Modern I kept the core books (except for Urban Arcana, which I loathed anyway) and various campaign settings, most of them non-d20. Kept my Gamma World Player's Handbook, but turfed the GM's Guide, Out of the Vaults, Beyond the Horizon, etc. Kept my Hunter: the Reckoning core book, but did I really need a Storyteller's Guide and a Player's Guide? Bah. Gone.

At one point, at the lowest point of my invasion-of-the-body-snatchers, obedient-little-consumer phase, I had literally *hundreds* of gaming books, a bloated, decadent, creativity-sucking mess. Here’s what I have left:

Dungeons & Dragons (3.0)
Core materials
Player’s Handbook
Dungeon Master’s Guide
Monster Manual 1 and 2
Hero Builder’s Guidebook (great book for newbies)
Manual of the Planes

Campaign settings
Ravenloft Campaign Setting (3.0)
D&D Gazetteer (yep, 32 pages is all I need—I invent the rest. You know, creativity!)
Planescape Boxed Set

D20 Modern
Core materials
D20 Modern Core Rulebook
D20 Menace Manual
D20 Future

Campaign settings
Pulp Heroes (Dungeon)
Transhuman Space (GURPS)
Call of Cthulhu (d20)
Hunter: the Reckoning (core book)
Dark*Matter: Shades of Grey (Dungeon)
Genetech (Dungeon)
Atomic Horror (GURPS)
Gamma World Player’s Handbook (d20)

 

[Sebastian Francis]

I agree completely. IT seems to me that you can be a fanboy settings-lawyer, or a wildly creative DM, but not both.

Good post.

 

[der_kluge]

Beautiful.

I would like to add that I believe this is the very reason really awesome campaign settings like Al-Qadim eventually floundered. I loved the setting when it was just a book. As more and more crap, er boxed sets came out for it, I started to like it less and less. And I think you just summed up perfectly why.

 

[shilsen]

Less is more. For my current Eberron campaign, I'm using the ECS, the Sharn book, PHB, MM, and DMG. Stuff from CW, CD and CA is allowed on a case-by-case basis. And whatever craziness my brain can come up with. And even with just those I have at least ten times the amount of stuff that I could/would use if I ran the campaign from 1st to 20th lvl.

 

[Thanee]

Hmm... no, I can't really say this mirrors my experiences.

I have lots of gaming books, too, and I like it when they put out new books for the Forgotten Realms (where I play and DM the most). Still, I don't see creativity hampered in any way, most of those books spawn more ideas instead of suppressing existing ones. I just do not want to invent the whole world from the ground up (why would I play in a published campaign setting then, anyways, instead of inventing my own), I like to focus on different things and the books help filling out the rest, building a foundation on which to base one's thoughts on, and there's more than enough room for creativity left over even in the most detailed campaign settings and rulebooks.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Nifft]

Unearthed Rules -- in the spirit of Options Not Constraints, wouldn't it be nice if additional material were presented in a format that showed several different choices one could make regarding a setting, and then showed the implications of those choices?

Like, a bunch of variants, and how each might look in play.

-- N

 

[Blue_Kryptonite]

I have a ton of books, but they seldom see use in my game. I use them as recreational reading, since as I've gotten older, my attention span for pure fiction has waned. Its a lot more entertaining to curl up with a good game manual than to wonder what the hell the last five pages of the fiction I'm reading said.

 

[Thanee]

Less is more is often true as well, however, especially when it comes to rules expansions. I also prefer to use mostly the core rules plus some stuff from the various expansions, but the core rules provide the backbone and rule pieces from there usually form the majority of what is used.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Cyronax]

I kept my sweet little 32-page D&D Gazetteer, which outlines, in beautiful simplicity, the basics of the Flanaess (Greyhawk, if anyone doesn't know ). This became my new starting point. Then I sat down and wrote the only really creative thing I’ve written in years: “The icy cold waters of Lake Quag are unnaturally black and horrifically deep--so deep, in fact, that the bottom has never been reached.” I sat back and admired this simple attempt at shaping Greyhawk to my own vision. Then I added: “Hemlock, an ancient, depraved linnorm, lives deep within Lake Quag, yet rarely makes his presence known.” It sounds bizarre to say this, but this was the first time in years I had *created* something to add to a published setting.

I was on my way.

Too many people have knocked the D&D Gazetteer since it was published almost 5 years ago. I applaud your sentiment....if you do go with a published setting ...GO BARE BONES! Add the rest and throw your setting-junkie players off base (have to do that myself). The Gazetteer provides all you need for a generic (but rich) D&D setting with all the classic feel.

Linnorms at the bottom of Lake Quag...... poetic and a great campaign starting statement if I'd ever heard one.

C.I.D.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I was pondering running a Greyhawk game a while back and I was keen to find out if there were any Greyhawk specific PrCs, monsters, etc for 3.5, but I couldn't source any. Couldn't find the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer (I just have the 32-page Gazetteer, too). Now I know about a few, such as the Shining Blade of Heironeus, in the Complete series but that's it.