Wow, I think I could be a real short story novelist if I could run down this whole list of general. I took a break from writing my story for a few months since I have been working out some personal issues that I would rather not discuss on a public blog about roleplaying; let's just agree that life sucks and all of us have our own problems. I haven't been actively writing out a general plot for a campaign idea for when I become a regular DM again, but I have hosted a few improv sessions as a DM recently. So where does that leave me at the moment for roleplaying? I am just experiencing life and I am sucking up experience, inspiration, and trying to be as original as possible, acting as a player while someone else is taking on the role of DM.
However, I think that originality is dead. After reviewing several forms of campaign settings from several editions over the years, all of the broad ideas are covered for tabletop roleplaying settings whether you want the setting to take place in the past, present, future, on space ships of realistic or magical based, varying planes of existance based on various ancient religions written in old literature, et cetera. I really could go on but then the sentence would become a lengthy run-on sentence filled with at least fifeteen more commas filled with other cited examples. "Originality" seems to be not in the campaign setting that the DM runs the roleplaying game session but how the DM/GM (whatever term you prefer) steers the direction of the plot.
When I was growing up, my brother and I used to buy madlib books where there was a general short story written on the notepad but there were blanks lines in the story where you would fill in some random word or phrase that would fit on each line. After filling in all the blanks with random suggestions, someone would read the whole story and we would laugh at the final result of the story since the suggestions were ridiculous. So why did I bring up that strange little factoid about my childhood? The answer is the last sentence of the previous paragraph. The general suggestions of campaign settings are in place, the types of characters are already established, and the suggested rules of how to run the game already exist. The only real control DMs have is the madlib plot, unless you are reading out of an adventure module. For the record, I have never ran a campaign using an adventure module as a DM, but I have enjoyed adventure modules as a player. I have read through a few of them and I seem to get lost reading them for some reason. I do not have dyslexia but I seem to get lost in what is written in the passage. I prefer my madlib method of inserting stat blocks, and having a general plot idea established from plot hook to climax to conclusion. Even though players can at times throw DMs for a loop with strange incentives, interests, or strange actions ( I have heard of all sorts of strange stuff, like the almost naked dwarf that would turn their thong into an improvised sling for example, yeah, ....... you know who you are .......... ), I find that having several madlib plots strung together in the same setting creates an ADVENTURE WEB. I capitalized the last two words since that is an important concept. Set up several adventure modules / adventure ideas for long term campaigns that way players can advance their characters several levels.
In a future post though, I will discuss leveling pace when I get the article finished from the point of view of the player and the DM, but I will just move on for now and check my facebook page. Feel free to contribute any comments or questions that you may have ........ :-)
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