Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hunter Simon" data-source="post: 1934135" data-attributes="member: 23677">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  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).  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 materialsPlayer’s HandbookDungeon Master’s GuideMonster Manual 1 and 2 Hero Builder’s Guidebook (great book for newbies)Manual of the PlanesCampaign settingsRavenloft 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 ModernCore materialsD20 Modern Core RulebookD20 Menace ManualD20 FutureCampaign settingsPulp 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)</blockquote>

Verification