Until the week of December 20th, I’ll be posting reruns of older blog posts.
One of my earliest Blog posts (August 21st 2007). I wrote this while I was planning last year’s D&D campaign. Its still very actual and defines me as a person in all my life spheres. Its a bit rough around the edges so I couldn’t help editing it a bit. Enjoy!
I’m a guy that somehow likes to give himself trouble. Whenever I set out to create stuff, I impose myself with limits, restraints that sometimes end up conflicting.
Since D&D is my main creative outlet (current blogging experiment excluded) that’s where it all crashes. It seems that the concept behind the KISS acronym (Keep it Simple, Stupid) eludes me to no end.
I always start a new campaign with a core idea and that idea explodes into a thousand others I wish to cram in the same game. House Rules collide with the latest cool book and the new plot idea I thought of last night to create an absolute mess that often ends up giving me the mother of all writer’s block.
I know why I do it. I’m a weather vane, a change agent, always hunting for the latest cool thing to augment my player’s experiences.
I did a personality profile once that said that I generated more idea in a day than an average person does in a month. That’s so true !
Anyway, in regards to D&D, I need constraints to drive my creativity because if I don’t put limits I just don’t know where to go with it.
For my campaign I went about creating a core idea: Evil Fiends are plotting to invade the Player character’s homeworld. Simple and neat.
Then, being the failed writer that I am, I try to fit this idea in a certain continuum that is my Home-brewed gaming world. I then allowed one of my players to keep a really cool character from the last game we dropped. A character that responds to a widely different set of rules that the 4 other characters.
Then I wanted to use as much as the recent material we bought, so I’m staging the game in Ptolus (it cost 120 $).
However, Ptolus is set in a Prison-world that disallows plane-hopping, so we needed to fudge a lot of the setting to fit it in my game-world, because I (and the players) also want to have a Plane Hopping campaign….
It goes on and on and on…. (Tons of house rules, conflicting storylines, etc)
Now it would not be such an issue if I wasn’t such a stickler for rules. While, I love change and bringing down systems to rebuild them, I still have a strong urge to abide by the rules (internal and external) of a system. So much that I often paint myself in a corner and become distressed. (Dec 2008 Edit: How familiar)
Up until one of my good friend gently reminds me that I made all the rules that got me there in the first place and that I was perfectly allowed to change them again at my whim to get out of that corner… doh!
Add to the fact that like all skilled DMs, I’m somewhat insecure and neurotic about it all. I put emphasis on stuff the players never notice and I drive myself too hard.
So yeah, I often need to be reminded to KISS. I know I won’t do it, but when I see that that corner coming, it helps to know I can simplify things.
So my personal take home message for this campaign is this:
Your friends show up for a few hours of Heroic Storytelling with a sprinkle of Buttkicking, exploration and Drama. Your job is to stick to that.
Yeah, first of all: nice article, and very recognizable. A few questions to compare neurotics 😉
So did this result in you picking up older campaigns and starting new ones, or you being “done and ready to move on”, while players were barely getting in character for this campaign? Because I kind of recognize some of this (actually a lot of it), and I CANNOT stick to one campaign, I have to actually force myself to do so, and be reminded by others that the campaign we’re playing is fun, cool, and has it all.
Besides that, do you also have the piles of “background info” you wrote for campaigns, that you just discarded; deciding not to bother your players too much with details?
I usually follow a pattern where, when I tire of a campaign, I try to cram it full of the stuff I’d like to play with… hence I made matters worse for me as I had too many ideas and too many details to worry about while planning my game.
As for campaign info, contrary to my good friend Yan, I don’t actually write all that much in advance. I detail a small part of the world and let events in game shape the things to come. So I hardly discard any of it… I usually find a way to integrate it into later campaigns.
If there’s one thing I don’t do, its give players enough details… Since I often find details superfluous, I assume players are the same (which is, usually, totally wrong).
I’m happy to see that I’m not alone in this.
I agree; once you concern yourself with rules transfers and adjusting environments, it takes a certain edge of the preparatory work, since you shift focus to other issues than presenting a fun adventure.
I try to solve it by making detailed documentations of the adventures we play, so I can read back the story and get reinspired in the same setting, without suddenly implementing something which is difficult and will shift focus from fun to rule-advocating and details. Really, just a story of our own campaign can do a lot for my inspiration.
All other ideas and concepts are jotted down and hurled into the fridge for later use. Some of these things out of “the fridge” (which contains ideas and concepts from years ago) are super-idiotic, and I’m very happy I didn’t use them at the time.
Anyway, take it easy and enjoy your half-season break. Looking forward to your adventure, ship one this way for me, would you 😉
Wow, I love this article!
It describes the conundrums that I face exactly. And it also has the solution that I also have thought of. Yet it still is sooooo hard to adhere to the KISS method (so much coolness, so few sessions …..)
It seems that I need to go back to the beginning, and read every single post of yours 🙂
@Cyclone: Welcome to the blog. Happy to see this article struck a chord. The thing with coolness is that you don’t need to add a lot for it to work in a game. Its just that we tend to think we need to overload all scenes with coolness so that we’re sure that players will hit some of them.
The trick is to leave hooks of cool stuff for players to grab onto… not leave so much stuff lying around that players and the DM get lost in the mess 🙂
@ChattyDM : I think we don’t always realize that most of the ‘coolness’ actually comes from the players.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Playing a zombie character
@Eric: Good observation. By loading scene after scene of cool stuff you’ll stifle the creativity of the players… This will depend a lot on the type of player you have at your table.
This actually happened in one our recent campaigns where at some point I said to Phil that I would love to have more “free time” so we could explore the depth of our character and build interaction within the party.
Like everything else, a balance must be meet and this will varies from group to group just be sure that everybody as the occasion to contribute if they want to…