The DM's Percentage

[CRGreathouse]

I designed a custom world with maps, culture, and NPCs; I designed new rules and feats; I redid advancement; I design new monsters and drop many standard ones from the MM.

I borrow many gods from Greyhawk, though; over a third of my pantheon is GH-based. I voted "80% original".

 

[Wombat]

This question is impossible for me to answer "accurately".

Okay, I am 44 years old, have a MA in Medieval History, have read mythology, folklore, religion, grimoires, rpgs books, sci fi, fantasty, historical fiction and the like most of my days. I have seen hundreds of movies, listened to thousands of albums. I have seen plays, talked to others on a million different topics, and all the rest.

Is anything left that is truly original? Depends on how you look at it.

I don't run games "out of the box"; I have never had luck with pre-packaged adventures as they never fit the world I have come up with (except for a brief foray in RuneQuest run in Pavis/Big Rubble).

On the other hand, I have come up with characters not exactly like anything I have seen, heard, or read before, come up with new monsters and new treasures. I have scenarios that have elements from five disparate sources and something else beside.

So what percentage is me?

All of it, none of it, 50/50 and something else besides.

I'll leave you to decide and I'll just get back to my games

 

[Nifft]

I tend to make up about 70%. Many monsters, and some minor side quests, I rip directly out of suppliments. The rewards for the side quests are campaign-specific, or some of the challenges are, but I need to siphon off the imaginations of others for the less campaign-specific details.

The world, gods, some classes, all Prestige Classes, kingdoms, political systems, foes, plots, maps, overarching evilness, incidental evilness -- all these things I make up.

-- Nifft

 

[Eosin the Red]

I am not sure I understood how I should have voted. Probably 85% of my stuff comes from a hodge-podge mixmash of eclectic sources. The originality is how I spin these things ---- only so many stories you know.

I use Birthright to provide a common frame of reference as a starting point for the game. After that it is just kinda rolling with the flow. I have 30 players making plot....My job is to keep up with them and express the plot in some digestible manner.

 

[Deadguy]

The vast majority of everything that goes into a campaign that I run is of my own creation. Games that I run are generally fairly Role-Play intensive and relate closely to the game setting, so I find that other than pillaging a few ideas, modules don't offer me much other than maps.

That said I find after so many years of DMing (my first experience of DMing was a badly-written and premised expansion to B2: Keep on the Borderlands, some 20 years ago!), that everything is a source of inspiration for me as DM. Every film I watch is a source of NPCs and plot elements. Every documentary and news program a source of facts and historical elements. Every person I meet a source of faces, voices, mannerisms and thinking.

Yup, I guess that makes me a geek, but I've been playing long enough that there's always a part of me that analyses what I encounter through a role-player's eyes. After all, to make settings and NPCs believable we need to know how people and the world work. As such the whole world is and should be a source of inspiration!

 

[paulewaug]

I run half "product" and half home brewed.
I use purchased modules as a bassis for what is going on, try to link it all together in a convincing manner, and because I am horribly lazy and have way too many gaming interests I just make up a lot of stuff on the fly to keep my players busy!! hehe!

 

[GamerMan12]

Up until now I have run completely original campaigns, with a couple of small modules that fitted in, so 2 nights gaming out of 50. But the campaign world, the story arc, etc have all been original.

However, as an experiment, I am taking the plunge in my new 3.5 campaign and using as much existing material as I can. I am setting the campaign in Forgotten Realms, will be using the City of the Spider Queen when players get to that level. And I will use other modules along the way there.

The only original thing I will be doing is the starting adventure, as I want to give the players the freedom to go anywhere in the world and choose what they do, so will use the most appropriate modules that fit that. And just 'nudge' them towards the Spider Queen module.

GM12

 

[Dalamar]

60%

I usually create my own stuff, quite often just having a framework in my mind when the session starts and winging it on the way. Other times I bounce ideas off the players to know what they'd like to do. And sometimes I just use a random dungeon generator but populate it myself.

 

[Krail Stromquism]

This is a tough question.

HOw concious are we of ideas and imagery that slip into our games?

Are we choosing to show our party how a giant yells before entering combat and model it off how Harryhousen did his stop frame animations or is it just slipping in from when we watched his movies as kids?

We are constantly building visual libraries that help us not only interact with our gaming group but society in general.

Every idea get started by some inspiration, does that mean the idea ceases to be "original"?

Its kinda one of those things where if you never admit to where it came from people will have no idea where it came from.

But I guess I've had the opposite happen where a player said Oh you got that from such and such book, and I was like I never heard of it.

Take for instance the COMICBOOK and not the movie, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all the characters are preexisting and even the situations they incounter are based off other authors work, but the end product is fresh and engaging and thereby original. If your well read of early fantasy scifi , Wells, Burroughs, Carrol and a gillion others, and you havent read these Comics go out and get them.

and never see the movie...ever.

 

[Winternight]

I vote 70%:
Half the stuff i DM i take just out of my mind:

voices in my head

the other half i use bought or free module, change background (have to, i play in: Warhammer world), the names, the maps, the side story arcs.
Example: I ordered Where Madness Dwells from RPGNOW and DMing it right now. Before the player enter the asylum they have to find out, that the sage is imprisoned there. Also they have to find out, that something is wrong in the Asylum, because I have a paladin in the group and he won`t B&E in an Asylum.