I that was quite a feat given that we chose each and every class of the Star Wars rulebook.

There’s a lot that a group filled with goodwill and a common purpose will come up with creatively speaking. It bodes well for this week’s game.

But my disagreement was on this “Each and every idea that crosses their minds need to pass the judge test, thus being blocked from that very essential function of letting ideas, stupid/good/meh and ‘Just all right” co-mingle for some time”… When we created the back story for our character in Franky’s game PM(IT) and I(Engineering) where really tossing idea around. I agree that some people have filters up and will fall to that pit trap but I think it as more to do with what type of personality you are then whether you are technical savvy or not. There even a personality axe that is call judgmental in Jung’s Typology Test…

When you are doing the work alone on a creative problem like writing an adventure, (rather than a concrete technical one like fixing a computer), personal insecurities and barriers often combine to bring out a strong judge that tends to squelch the other creative modes.

I’ll attack this series next week. This week I want to finish the game reports and I have this Kobolds Quarterly article to write.

Well do this all day long and we are used to go quickly in between modes. The caveat of this is that in most engineering or technical field your judging parameter are concrete and real it will work or not. Where as in the entertaining field your parameter are as diverse as the number of people around the table. Judging an idea’s merit becomes a lot harder and might be discard for having no clear good sign where it could had been good with some further investigation. Instead only on clear bad sign should an idea get discard completely…

My last Game was exactly a case of little ideas forming into an awesome whole.

I may be wrong, but such barriers are things I’ve seen in my friends (and experienced within myself) .

Going back to the “it’s not good enough” worry, there’s one thing I learned from playing the guitar for 16 years (and getting quite good at it). You know you’re really “good” when you screw up and nobody can tell. Same thing for anything really. Even if your creative ideas suck (you took a risk that failed in other words), if you’re good enough in a general sense it doesn’t really bother your players and they still have a great time.

I’d also suggest tackling the issue of time management – personally that’s been a huge deal for me. This probably merges with the “being in solution mode” meme – having great ideas when you don’t really have time to work on them at that moment (and then losing the passion for them later). Sometimes you have to put up or shut up. Sometimes you have to work on your game when you CAN and not when you want to. It makes sense to schedule time for it.

Also your creative modes sound more like Bartles types to me!

Explorer = Explorer
Artist = Socializers
Judge = Achievers
Warrior = Killers
.-= Stormgaard´s last blog ..New Episode of The Guild! =-.

Your second point goes beyond creativity though. I know that spending a lot of effort on a blog without getting feedback is hard to take and demotivating. It took me some time to get comments from people other than my friend Yan… and I finally got commenters I didn’t know personally when I started writing blog posts that were responses to other blogger’s posts.

The hardest part to blogging is getting noticed. Fortunately, there are now lots of posts about becoming successful online. Look at my RPG blog primer series if you are interested:

http://chattydm.net/tag/rpg-blog-primer/

Of course, the other block is that I quickly get discouraged when I’ve written something interesting and no one looks at it. Negative feedback is helpful; being ignored just sucks.
.-= Saragon´s last blog ..Music at the table =-.

@chgowiz, Thanks for the idea. I’ve got a stash of little black note books that i found for 50c each. i enjoy peoples faces when they see me writing in my little black book. It has great a great pop culture attached to it… If only they knew what i was really writing, lol.

@Chatty, i’ll take that on board. Never really tried to stop myself from wandering and then hopefully save myself from burning out before i can actually work on the ideas that i have. Thanks
Whit

I’m happy that you validated my choice of book. As people share more titles, my heart started sinking and my own inner demons started mewling over the fuzz barrier of my meds. (j/k)

@lesInk: I would attribute those to the ‘Right Answer’ block. I look forward to discussing it.

@ND: Bonjour! Always nice to see new bilingual people! I like how you describing ‘solution Mode’ and confidence. I too have been in such situations before and my colleagues came to me for the same reasons (well, close to).

Your play example is a great demonstration of how players see things differently and expect widely different things in play. But as you say, when you want to open up the creativity channel, some will clam up or worse, complain. To them everything needs to be quantified for it to make sense.

Fortunately, the great majority of gamers lie somewhere in between.

I look forward to hear from you more during the series (and/or other posts).

I’ve been lurking for a while, but haven’t written yet (mainly because writing in English isn’t my favorite thing to do – I’m a professional translator, and every time I read anything in English, I tend to rephrase it in French… anyways…) And I admit I haven’t read all of the other comments. But this question speaks to me.

I have an active imagination. I’ve been a roleplayer for two decades now, and constantly have new ideas. Creativity is my main strenght, even at work. Collegues turn to me when they need to translate something catchy. But I noticed that creativity has something to do with self-confidence and being in “solution mode”. Empathy is also a great tool.

I often see my teammates stuck in a simple situation, just because they can’t see past their stats. “There is a hole in the ground, it is dark inside, but there are lots of traps all around…” “Ah, darn, I can’t see in the dark, and I can’t disarm traps, I’m useless in this situation!”… To mee, this always sounds like nails on a blackboard. “I light a torch and throw it in the hole to see how far it goes” or “I throw something to set off the traps from a safe distance” or “I hold the rope and make sure it is secure while my teammate with night vision goes down the hole…”

I once DMed a stats-free game. No stats. Just some guidelines. A good background, and some basic profiles (weapon specialist, knowledge specialist and infiltration specialists) Six players, two of each profile. Guess what : the creative ones had a blast. The stats-oriented ones petitionned for stats. When I gave them some stats, they cried that the others were all better than they were, and that therefore, they were useless. When, a week before, they were great performers, solving most of the problems easily. Sheeh. Drop the barriers, and some people will beg you for them…

@Chatty, a very good book for the GM side of creativity is Dennis Stauffer’s ‘Thinking Clockwise’.
Subtitled ‘A Field Guide for the Innovative Leader’, it is particularly relevant to those of us who see GMing, at least partially, as Leading.
I think this is a good topic and I think you have chosen the a great Guru to focus us with. I read Von Oech’s works quite a while ago in relation/rebuttal to some Process Management stuff I was fighting about, but it left a very strong impression. The field of ‘Creative Consulting’ might need you to be part of the next generation. You actually have the open mind necessary.

@Kevin R, I’m kind of like you, in that I leave my Game wiki up all day and any ideas go right in. I keep seperate pages for the different adventures and groups, as well as rule changes. I also have a game idea page hotlinked as an app on my phone, in the rare moment I am not not at home or in the office.

@Pingwin,
It is so funny that only about 1/2 the GM articles I read deal with the ‘back-of-the-house/Front-of-the-House’ dichotomy of the art. Chatty and I went around with this a few days ago, finding out we were much closer than we thought. I think that it interesting that Chatty and I were going over what makes the Great GM, and he seemed to give the edge to the ‘Front-of-the-House’ for game enjoyment, but here we are embroiled in the foundations of the Back-of-the House.
Mike Shea’s post about the Broadway director is in the same light as this. Damn, the progress we are all making together here…

(Yan–Encoding Specificity, right? YAY, not all the synapses are broken…)

.-= LordVreeg´s last blog ..edited Igbar, Capital of Trabler =-.

My challenge with ideas is somewhat more mystical and I know that several creative people have lived it. I will sometime get electrocuted by an idea so strong and powerful that I lose all motivation to do anythig else but work on the idea. However if I’m not in a situation to work on the idea within the next 1 or 2 hours, that idea will go away or I won’t feel like working on it anymore.

Hopwever, I feel that writing stuff down and creating association could “ground” an idea and anchor it in my brain to be worked on later.

I also used a recorder when I was in the car.

And as a certain wiseass near us would say: Anyway, there’s an App for that.

You might even find out that you remember what’s written before reading it when you come back to it.

It also helps to know that the brain works by association, retrieving a set piece of information is like finding a file on you HD, you need to know the path to find it.

In a similar way if you make associations in your brain to other things you make it easier for you to retrieve the information.

I.e. As you are driving, you get an idea on how you could make bookkeeping easier for your next encounters. What if on any hit the player made the target bloodied? Then, what if the next one killed it? Easy bookkeeping (association created). Oh, it’s like a minion only two hits. (Association created). It would be cool if on a crit it would kill them outright. (association again).

You see a van going by this is like a two hit car. (association!) The more associations you do, easier you can retrieve the info later on.

The problem comes when I’m at work and my brain can’t let go of a creative game idea. I can get sucked in, searching the web and typing notes. I know a guy who has a big reminder taped to his monitor: “Don’t get sucked in.”

There seems to be a dormant RPG system designer in me. I get bursts of inspiration from that, when I really need to be planning for the next D&D session.

Yup, this one has opened a flood gate. Hopefully these comments can fuel your future posts. No pressure, right?

On the subject of creative stories, I always feel the story itself doesnt have to be that creative or amazing. It has to work as an RPG scenario and the creativity could be aimed more at how to tell the tale then what tale exaclty is beeing told. So I am more looking for mood enhancing idea’s with lots of flavour, especially when it comes to NPC’s then I am interested in plotlines. Usually, in all fairness, my plotlines are not that amazing and have been seen, in some form or another, dozens of times before.

@Wax: I think I need to start building a writing collection. I should move all my molecular Biology textbooks from my shelves and start getting these books and a few others. But then again, there’s only so much you can learn about creativity… but no limits to what you can accomplish actually practicing it!

Thanks for sharing. I Still find it funny (in a strange way) that I get to inspire and engage “I do it for a living” writers. Although I’m actually just still too scared to take a step forward and plunge into professional writing too. I have one feet in the water while still holdong on to my day job.

@Katallos: Making RUles change is probably going to be the best example of the ‘to Err is Wrong”. Hacking the rules is one of the oldest practices of RPGs. By the time I stopped playing 3.5, my list of House rules filled several pages. Getting it wrong is part of the learning process, the trick is to move on… change things again, tweak, You’ll either get it right eventually or return to the original one.

As for engaging players, that’s as much a communication trick than a creativity one. While you may feel that you need to come up with a cool story (Creativity) making it come to life gets better when you lower your personal barriers ( I’ll look stupid, people won’t buy into my story…) and allow you to communicate your ideas/descriptions and make stupid voices directly with no interference.

You strategy of moving to a reactive for of play is also a good one.

@Chgowiz: I need to do this more. I really do… I lose so many ideas because I don’t take the time to note them down. And when I wrack my brain, the idea’s almost always gone. Good trick.