@Manbearcat : Outstanding! And in emphasizing the role of process, you’ve tapped into something much deeper than many players realize. Some of us have seen it before, in the role of outlining in the genre fiction fields that’ve always provided fodder for gaming. Make yourself comfortable, this may take a bit.
It used to be that fans in general saw very little of the creative processes leading to work they enjoyed. There’d be a few example pages of script in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and in The Great Marvel Tryout Book, but many of us were already just kind of assuming that Stan Lee would give us a version tuned for his purposes as he always did. Later we’d see a few pages of 1980s Alan Moore script and never realize how utterly unusual they were in multiple ways.
We learned (most of us) about outlining prose in school, and about doing multiple drafts with specific revision tasks associated with each. Then we might read about an f/sf pro denouncing multiple drafts except at editorial command and think something to the effect of “whilikers, I wish I could make my first drafts so great”. We’d see the occasional snippet like Gene Wolfe on the four-volume Book of the New Sun: “What I actually did was to wait until I had all four in second draft before doing the final drafts of the first and submitting it. I did not do that for reasons of admirable idealism; I did it because I wanted to be able to adjust the plot of the first volume in order to make the last end as I thought it should. When the first volume sold I began the third draft of the second.” And then later we learned about Joe Michael Straczynkski’s planning for Babylon 5.
So in our fannish enthusiasm to learn how the good stuff happens, we picked up partly unrelated fragments of info a led assembled an edifice of how we imagined good process was and how dependent good outcomes were on good process.
The problem is of course that a lot of good work came about through entirely different means, and rigorous to our kind of model has led (like every rigorous approach, and every messy casual one) to far more bad work than good.
In time, the world of fan magazines and amateur press associations spread online via ARPANET mailing lists, BBS networks like FidoNet, online services like America Online and GEnie, Usenet, and so on to our glorious present. A lot more of us got to see creators at work and to interact with them. And it turned out….
We were way off base about process.
Most work is made in a far more haphazard way. Some apparently great work happens without any master plan at all! And where master plans are made, they’re often heavily, repeatedly revised along the way. The number of series in any medium where creators conceive a plan and execute it substantially as is over months or years is somewhere close to zero.
Reactions to this varied. You can still find people who argue that they genuinely couldn’t enjoy a work knowing it had been created on the fly, and the level of disappointment many of them show strongly suggests a lot of them aren’t just trying to stir up trouble.
For others of it was the beginning (or a continuation) of a reappraisal. If we would otherwise appreciate the real thing in all this, the made, published, and distributed thing, without knowing how it had happened, how and why could we let more knowledge diminish our satisfaction? If our standard kept doing that to us, maybe the flaw was in our standard? Maybe we needed to change it to accommodate reality rather than keep hewing to a model that
never had been in tune with the creative process of really talented creators?
Okay, enough of the horribly rigged questions. I
did make that shift and have been happier ever since. What I need is satisfying results, and that’s
all that I need. Any process that helps GMs have mutually rewarding resources at hand is good for me. I don’t think it should matter to players what went on beforehand, to the degree that I’d say that’s not knowledge they’re entitled to and shouldn’t expect to know.
