The Value of Random Tables and Using Gaming Material Written By Other People

When I was a kid, I used to sit down with my Transformers. With my little plastic knights. With my GI Joes (both out-of-the-package, and reassembled custom characters). My friends and I would sit down and construct plots for the day's play (usually "here's the evil villain's plan," usually nothing more involved than the cartoons, although we did have a 'rebels in a dystopian future' thing going on with the Joe figures as well as a 'Die Hard with Space Aliens' thing). Sometimes, the friends weren't around, and I'd sit there with a situation set up, and then not play with the toys. Setting up situations is fun, but controlling and thus knowing what's going to happen isn't.

This is also why I can't write fiction. I can come up with characters. I can come up with situations. But when I think up an ending, I lose all will to actually write the story.

Today, I am a referee. People more commonly use the terms GM or DM, but it's not just an old school affectation that causes me to use the word referee. I really aspire to the ideal of objectively administering the rules and results based on the situation and what the players are having their characters do. I don't want to be the "Master" of anything, and being a "Storyteller" is so antithetical to what I wish to gain from my gaming that it's just offensive and I can't help thinking poorly (gaming-wise) of people who use the term.

To create the situations and the challenges creates a bias in play that makes being a 'referee' difficult. Since I don't create campaigns and worlds ahead of time and then recruit players to march through them, the players and their characters that will be participating influence my adventure design. Sometimes I cater to them, sometimes I'm intentionally trying to defeat their usual behavior, and sometimes I manage to get it right and an adventure location is just completely independent of outside influence.

But through it all, my creations all have one giant shortcoming: They are all mine. The advantage to this is I get to set the parameters, I get to define the atmosphere. "This is how the world is, and this is how the game should feel." I certainly don't mind the set pieces I come up with, the juicy bits of adventure and location. I certainly enjoy those being all mine. But I demand a certain level of naturalism, and it's the filling in of the necessary detail to satisfy that naturalism that I feel inadequate. I know what I put in more mundane areas aren't the things that would really be there, but what I feel would be there, and that's really a drag to me.

My point of view and my creative habits working for players and characters that I know... it just seems very limited sometimes, and sometimes I feel that for every trap, every menace, every situation, I can play out in my head what's going to happen and how. Sometimes I go overboard on detail in my own adventures based on that in an effort to make things more challenging.

It doesn't matter that in actual play things often don't go as anticipated (if it did, I'd have given up gaming long ago), but it is a sap on the creative process that it might.

Some might say I'm overpreparing, but I tend to fall into lazier and more predictable patterns when doing improv gaming. With preparation, I can see where I repeat certain things and then change them before they see play.

Random tables are a great boon in breaking up this sort of thing. They can, and will, give results that I would never have chosen on my own. They sometimes give results that I really don't like, but it's in those moments that seem most out of control that I am most interested in what happens, because the situation is no longer mine. I get to be a referee, and all my toys are out and it feels like they're playing with each other on their own.

But I'm still applying my interpretation to those results. Not that that's a weakness, but I still feel a certain homogeny to the affair. I'm still imposing my idea of how things should be onto details that I wish to be detached from.

I don't want to be the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of my world. What I want is to simply be an observer in a world that is consistent with my creative sensibilities (and there is where it becomes quite difficult to be a player).

This is where gaming materials, adventures, created other people can solve the problem for me. It removes my creativity from the situation and allows me to administer the situation and see what happens, the same as any player. It seems more "realistic" and natural because things written by other people certainly have no bias or connection to my players' styles and methods, nor does it recognize the specific capabilities of the characters to be used (beyond a level spread, of course). I don't have to worry that it might overall be too easy or difficult based on my misjudgment of their capabilities. It just is, and the players decide to interact with it and there it is: Gaming.

It's more than that though. The same referee running for the same players for a long period of time is going to develop its own rhythm. By introducing material written by nobody connected with that gaming table, all rhythms are disrupted. The little tricks that the referee and players use to challenge the other are thrown out the window, and everyone must learn new tricks in order to deal with the new challenges that outsider material present.

Traditional gaming is all about player ability, and this sort of variety enhances the ability of everyone at the table.

See, I was the first kid on my block to get into role-playing, and for many years I was the guy that was always setting up games and recruiting other kids. I wasn't even in contact with gamers outside my groups for many years. If I knew someone that role-played, it's because they were in my game. That really retarded my development as a referee (not to mention my opportunities to ever play have been quite limited through the years). This outside influence (that some mysteriously disavow) is practical experience for me.

Creative development, imagination, and refereeing is a constantly changing and growing thing. That process of growth happens a lot faster (and better) if it's fed by unfamiliar forces. Because gaming is entirely creative, every single gamer you ever meet is a potential teacher and inspiration.

And that's why, outside of the greater good of the 'Renaissance,' I want independent material. It's also why I want to publish, because my unique perspective could inform others the way others' unique perspectives can inform me, and everyone gains more colors on their creative palette.

This is also why I prefer detail in material. I'm looking to inspired by things that are completely unremoved from my creative process. The more detail provided by other creators, the more that creation is useful in providing something different and unlike anything I would do in my games. If I'm asked to fill in a lot of the details, then it loses its purpose in providing a contrast to what I could do myself, as the devil is in the details and I am confident enough in my abilities to provide a quality 'big picture' without looking to outside sources.

Note that I really don't do much with campaign settings or 'adventure paths'. Part of the joy of refereeing is the ability to create and define the 'big picture,' and settings and grand plotted adventures take that away from me.

But when it comes to dungeons and temples and shrines and out-of-the-way locations that adventures tend to take place in, well, defying the terms of the big picture there doesn't impinge upon or disrupt the big picture. Bring 'em on!

... funny thing is, this isn't the post I was originally writing in head as I was laying in bed staring at the ceiling. The past few days presented one question I had a problem answering:

"And yet you still have not explained why there is some special magic when *I* print 50 copies of WG13 at Staples and mail one to you, rather than you going there yourself with a pdf on a thumb-drive and having them print it."

My inability to explain that magic doesn't remove the fact that there is some special magic that I feel when receiving someone else's creation instead of assembling it myself. There is the lame answer that the standard US and European paper sizes are different so it wouldn't look right if I just took WG13 down to Multiprint and had it made into a book.

There is the fact that I've turned BFRPG, B/X, OD&D, Holmes, and more into A5 pages and put them in binders (in BFRPG's case I made completely new layouts from the OpenOffice documents, twice, before printing those books out for my players), and they all now sit on my shelf here and look... sickly the same. More like just more stuff I'd do instead of things that were created by other people.

I don't want to do that to anyone else's creation. It just seems disrespectful and limited.