With the recent completion of my series revisiting Robin Laws’ Rules of Good Game Mastering, I’ve been thinking about starting a new one.
Then it hit me. What if I tackled creativity and it’s role in regards to RPG players and GMs .
You see, I’m well aware that I have a high level of creativity. I really have a knack for coming with new ideas and crazy concepts. I mean, I built a successful blog, I’ve even become the de-facto DMing consultant of several of my DM friends and I have a blast inventing crazy RPG adventures, settings and rules.
In fact, while doing a personality test for one of my former jobs, the final assessment said that I can generate more ideas in a given day that most people could in a month. That assessment was quite insightful because up to that point, it hadn’t really occur to me that other people might not have as many ideas. I just thought that they had as many as mine but were either too shy or had trouble communicating what was in their minds.
Then, a few months ago, my good friend Eric Maziade, gave me a paperback book written by creativity consultant Roger von Oech, called “A Whack on the Side of the Head”.
Creativity Consultant? For real? Where do I freaking sign up?
Anyway, the book is a self-help book about increasing one’s creativity. It does so by tackling the most common barriers to creativity and presents ways to break through them. It’s very good… if a bit weird to the overly critical eye of this here geek.
So what I propose with this series is to explore creativity as I see it applied to RPG gamers through some of the themes of von Oech’s book.
This first post will lay down the base definition of creativity I’ll use and will present what I feel are the common challenges that RPG gamers have in regards to creativity.
What is Creativity?
Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new.
That’s a pretty straightforward definition. You create something in your mind through a new idea or by combining together stuff that already exist (Spork!). However, the part that seem really relevant to all RPG geeks is the last sentence.
The act of creating something, of seeing the new idea through to a final product, is paramount to the creative exercise. And in that, seeing ideas through the end, is something that many geeks have trouble with.
Hence this series.
Typical creative activities of RPG geeks
There’s a ton, probably more than people expect but I’ll try to list a few.
Players
Naming a PC, creating a PC (min/maxing is hyper-focused creativity), creating a backstory, roleplaying, figuring out a puzzle, getting out of a jam, planning, pulling something out of your butt before the dragon roasts everyone into negative HPs…
GMs
Creating worlds, NPCs, stories, campaign plots, adventure plots, twists, encounters, challenges, draw maps, craft descriptions, role playing NPCs, playing monsters, opponents and improvise (instant applied creativity just there), etc
I’m sure I forgot a ton! I’m in creative mode here, not analytical 🙂
The Barriers to RPG Creativity
As I said before, it turns out that some people have a really hard time coming up with an idea. Several more have an even harder time making something tangible with an idea when it finally manifests itself. The creative process has several mental blocks that get in the way between idea and final product. I think this is effectively so in the geek mind…
- That’s never going to work because the rules don’t support it
- That can’t happen, it’s not canon
- I never know what to write in a back story, I’m not good with such things.
- I can’t be a DM, I have no imagination
- I can’t mess with the rule, it’s going to break something.
- Last game bombed, my story sucked, I don’t want to DM anymore.
- House rule? Who am I to change the way the game should be played?
- Ack, I’ve been at it for days, I need one more scene and it needs to be Right!
- That monster makes no sense.
- This project bores me… ohhh Shiny!
All these sample blocks to creativity can more or less be attributed to the following barriers (as taken from von Oech’s book):
- The Right Answer
- That’s Not Logical
- Follow the Rules
- Being Practical
- To Err is Wrong
- I’m not Creative
In the next posts on the series, I’ll tackle one or two of those barriers, summarize what von Oech said about the subject. I’ll then explore how this applies to RPGs and discuss it in some detail.
After that I’ll post about the 4 creative modes that bring makes an idea become a creation:
- The Explorer
- The Artist
- The Judge
- The Warrior
This last part is what I found the most critical of von Oech’s book and it has reshaped my approach to tackling RPG projects.
This is going to be a great series, I can feel it.
It won’t be posted back to back, this will be done over a long period of time, like my Robin Laws’ series. Unless I have so much fun writing it that I can’t stop myself.
But for now, what about your personal barriers to creativity? What prevents you from going from idea to final product? What are your mechanism for coping?
Intestesting post Chatty! Be cool to see what conecepts and ideas you bring up and whatnot… one of the creative areas for a DM that you forgot to mention though is the “I’m a sick sadistic bastard who likes torturing people for kicks so I create the most pain in the ass challenges possible.. Mwa ha ha..”
.-= wrathofzombie´s last blog ..Happy Birthday to Me! =-.
Typo in one of the titles. Also storu. I see this was truly automatic writing.
Other than that I’m interested in reading this. I laughed at the ‘not canon’ part, I’ve never written fanficiton or made a game on top of something published (,fluff-wise).
I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
@Wrath: Oh it’s in there all right 🙂 The emotional charge behind creating a challenge is usually all malice though 🙂
@Trabant: Yeah… it’s one of those “Write before you lose the idea” type of thing.
Happy to see it generates interest already! I’ll get to part 2 fast then!
“figuring out a puzzle, getting out of a jam, planning, pulling something out of your butt before the dragon roasts everyone into negative HPs…”
I call this “problem-solving”, which I think is a form or application of creativity.
Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior sound like character classes/roles in some RPG. 🙂
My common barriers:
Ack, I’ve been at it for days, I need one more scene and it needs to be Right!
This project bores me… ohhh Shiny!
I want to do this, and this, and this, and this, and…
I assume von Oech focused on our internal blocks. Otherwise, i would suggest external distractions as a common barrier:
Daddy, help! Daddy, play race cars! Daddy, I peed on the floor! Daddy, …
Looking forward to seeing this series. I am creative, though I too suffer from some of the blocks from time… Ooo … shiny!
I also would like to mine this for suggestions to pass on to players.
.-= jcdietrich´s last blog ..Free Local Computer Recycling =-.
@Kevin –
Well, but those ‘external’ distractions are just reminders of existing motivations. We want to be this or that, we want to serve this or that person. As Dave Sim would say, any day you don’t get the work done, look at what you did that day instead. You want that more than you want to work. It looks like an imposition, but it’s the manifestation of a choice we’ve already made.
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Barriers. =-.
@Kevin: Yeah problem-solving is the most sought after use for player creativity in a RPG. As @jcdietrich requests, I plan to provide examples where each mental block can affect players too… especially those players that act as creativity killers for others.
Yeah those 4 modes are very RPG like… and the one that RPG geek lack the most is the Warrior mode (getting things done) and what they have too much of is the Judge (Gauging an idea’s worth). The secret is to switch at the right time…. but I’ll get to that eventually.
@JC: Good one! 🙂 As I said above, I’ll try to write in player goodies. But as usual, I can’t guess where my writing will bring me… I don’t actually believe that I can fully control where a series will go. Hopefully I won’t end up comparing creativity to the life of a Vegas stripper.
@Wax: HA! The guy who writes a 2000 word post about my post by the time I eat dinner. What you refer to as existing motivation are addressed tangentially in the discussion about the 4 modes. But yeah… the time and focus you can afford to spend on a RPG idea is directly affected by external motivators to do other things.
A young child is one very strong motivator. That’s why I blog early in the morning and after kids are in bed.
I’m quite interested in reading this series. I struggle with creativity as well, but it tends to be the, “Oh, man, I’m such a schlemiel, I don’t have what it takes to do this,” and other varieties of self-doubt and paralysis by fear. I hope you touch on those sorts of blocks in your posts.
Looking forward to them!
@benpop on Twitter
I was going to write about this topic as well: DMing as an art form similar to being a broadway show director.
There are three really good books I recommend on this topic, books on creativity that, while not DM related, can help a lot.
The first is The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp – probably the most applicable DMing book since it talks about the entire process of building a show:
http://bit.ly/creativehabit
The second is On Writing by Stephen King, probably the best book on writing fiction I’ve read:
http://bit.ly/onwriting
The third is Bird by Bird by Anne Lemott. It’s a bit cerebral and she’s incredibly self defeating in the book but it has some really great rules like “The Shitty First Draft” that are worth the angst:
http://bit.ly/birdbybird
I highly recommend all three of these.
.-= Mike Shea´s last blog ..Dwarven Forge Tips =-.
I heartily invite you to write about the subject too… the perspective of those other books are likely very worth it. Then we can cross-link our series.
My main issue, in game and in blog, is balancing the kinds of things I enjoy creating with the kinds of things my audience is going to be interested in. I like world, I like characters, and I like nice Byzantine plots and blink-and-you-missed-it-but-that’s-what-logs-are-for foreshadowing–and I’ve had people gripe at me for all of it, including the new guy who, nine months or so in, asked if I could please stop using a character who was a group favorite because trying to both keep up with the missing information and make sense of its riddle-speak at the same time gave him headaches.
So it turns into “Is this something that both they and I can enjoy?”, and a lot of it gets scrapped because I’m not entirely sure it is.
.-= Ravyn´s last blog ..Twists in the Toolkit =-.
My biggest problem is that my head is always in the current RPG project i’m working on. At work or with mates i often just drift into my thoughts and miss someone talking to me.
That being said i suffer majorly from …ooooo….Shiny. So i spend all day at work conjuring new stories and powers and twist and monsters for my campaign. I get home and either burnt out from thinking about it all day or something else distracts me.
Really looking forward to this series.
Whit
@Mike mentions 3 books:
I’ve only heard good things about the first book, and can vouch for the second and third. Lamott’s book can be off-putting in tone, but her advice is straightforward: don’t psyche yourself out, live healthily, and churn out editable copy rather than trying to imagine the perfect thing. King says the same sort of things in much more nuts-n-bolts detail. I’ve given away a couple of copies of King’s book and can’t recommend it heartily enough. (He’s not much of a prose stylist but he knows his craft. And fuck ‘style’ anyway.)
I’ll add an extraordinary couple of short texts:
The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing by Dave Sim, and Impro by someone-or-other. The former is a hundred pages of advice on self-publishing comics, but really it’s about getting hardnosed about creativity. Grab it on eBay for like four dollars. The latter is a guide to mask play, improv theatre exercises, the psychology of group creativity, and dramatic creation. Both have had a huge impact on me.
When you want to come at creative problems a little bit sideways, try True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet. A collection of short essays on how to be an actor, and at times very subject-specific, but overall it’s ironclad advice on how to maintain integrity and creative spirit. And Mamet’s one of the clearest, punchiest writers in America, so the reading is pure pleasure.
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Barriers. =-.
I have become more reluctant to make major rules changes due to my past experiences changing rules always turning out poorly. I am still dealing with the fallout of attempting to use a 4e style skill system in a 3.5 game and when it didn’t work out switching back and realizing that several players based their characters around options that were allowed due to 4e type skills, but not mechanically feasible with the 3.5 skill system.
I occasionally feel that I have lost my players attention and have no idea why or how to get them back into my story. Since I switched to a more reactionary style of GM/DMing I don’t worry about getting scenes right, but that used to be a major hangup taking a lot of my preparation time.
.-= Katallos´s last blog ..Adventure Seeds =-.
@WhitDnd – I have that similar problem, I’ll have an idea either related to my current project or something in the woods. I learned a trick from my Dad – I carry around a little notebook. If I get an idea that I really like, I’m training myself to write it down the moment I think “I need to remember that.” It helps, even if two or three words. Searching a 50p little notebook is easier than wracking my memory banks for that idea.
The really sucky part is when I do that in the middle of the night. 😉
Wow. I’m impressed at the response this intro garnered. On the downside, I’m now well aware of expectations. Oh well, at least it will keep me focus.
@River: I know well the inner demons that sleeps inside us and whisper dark defeats and instill fear of success in us all. Increasing you creativity is mostly learning to circumvent the demons or shut them up. Not an easy task. We’ll see how it pans out in the series and the following discussions.
@Ravyn: While they say that constraints foster creativity, your case might be forcing it. You know me well enough to understand that I place catering to the players’s motivation really high on my list of GMing priorities. More recently however, I’ve come to realize that if you should strive to hit each player’s motivation at least once per session, you should also please yourself in one scene. So I suggest that you give yourself some slack in your game.
Now in your blog… I think that this constraint is entirely self defeating. You should write just what you like to write… Every case I’ve seen of bloggers trying to write for an audience ended up hitting a wall. It should be the other way around. The internet is alrge enough that whatever you write about, some people are interested in it. And you are quite the skilled writer so I’m sure you can pull it off. Then again, I seem to recall that you write for an outfit so maybe you have standards imposed from higher up.
I hope I’ll see you chime in once in a while during the series.
@WhitDnD: Yeah I think that you may have to work at getting in the right creative mode at the right time. I suffer from that too. To be discussed for sure!
@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.
There is also the matter of when the creativity hits. For a DM hosting an RPG there are two major ‘phases’, the prep and the play. During prep its much easier to roughly analyse the idea and how it should work, allowing to fine-tune or chance the initial idea, or abandon it even if it is rather cool because it would wreck other cool stuff. During play its not possible to do that at a similar level and my last campaign completely sidetracked itself due to elements I introduced on a whim.
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.
@Chgowiz & Chatty: I work at a computer all day, so I’ve made a habit of sending creative ideas to my personal e-mail address. Later, I copy the notes from my in-box to a folder of hyper-linked text files on my home computer.
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? 😉
@Chatty There are books on training your memory. The notebook technique is that helps, especially if you are mostly visual. The actof writing and then reading back the written words help many to remember.
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.
@Yan: That’s very good stuff. Stuff I recall seeing in my Cognitive psychology classes 15 years ago.
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.
A good Topic.
@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 =-.
One of the interesting barriers to creativity I have is: “It isn’t unique enough” or “That’s so cliche”. The problem is compounded because I try to find something categorically different.
Hi,
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…
@LV: Yes while I express a preference for soft skills and communications, I’m well aware that what goes one between the ears is as important.
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).
Wow the comments move fast here.
@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
My personal creative block is that I go too quickly from “Here’s a cool idea” to “Must get every detail of this thing exactly right before moving on to the next thing.” Perfectionism, in other words.
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 =-.
@Saragon: Perfectionism, especially in regards to prepping a game is quite a killer. Gauging the ‘It’s good enough’ point is quite a challenge as many of us are loath to leave an “unfinished’ idea behind. That’s one of the good things of Nerd Projectitis… helping you let go.
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/
The barriers from Oech’s book seem to all revolve around one basic premise – that creativity can’t come from being risk averse. That’s fair enough.
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! =-.
I have a lot of trouble if I find myself in a situation where I cannot come up with a satisfying solution to a problem. If I can’t come up with something that works as well as it ought to, but can still come up with something that does OK, I get frustrated and discouraged. For me, coming up with an ugly solution is often worse than not coming up with a solution at all, because I tend to get on a roll and consistently crank out half-baked ideas. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but I know I can do better. Usually.
.-= ambrose´s last blog ..Hogwarts RPG Species: Fire Crab =-.
@Ambrose: I feel that geeks, especially technical ones (IT, engineers, etc) have a huge challenge in regards to creativity because they ALWAYS are in Judge mode. 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… this often results in something being formed that transcends each individual idea.
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) .
I more or less agree. When we brainstorm in a design meeting we throw idea about, see what it sparks, argue for pros and cons then discard or embrace it.
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…
Group dynamics are different Yan. Not everyone can be a judge since a problem needs to be worked on right now.
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 that was not the part I disagree with… As this I know I’m culprit of in some aspect especially when the request seems to be a rule request and I spontaneously spurt out what the rules says instead of letting you deal with it in whatever you would like for the story and the hell with the rules their only guide lines.
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… 😉
The cool thing about that group character creation session was that we were all open to anything. The judges were sent to get a few beers while we went crazy thinking up ways to have all our PCs fuse together as a unified group.
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.