Creativity and You

I know that there are multiple ways to be creative, and that different things work for different people, but I'm also known to be insane and disregard what other people say to me.

For example. When I want to sit down and write, I refuse to read anything related at all to what I'm writing. I have this tendency to let my prose get Vancian when I read Jack Vance, to get archaic when I read Lovecraft and to get direct when I read Frank Herbert's Dune. And it doesn't feel right when I merely ape another person's style. There's no satisfaction in it.

The only way to avoid it, then, is to seclude yourself from the outside world's creativity and find what's inside your head. And then to write it. To create it from nothingness.

There are people out there who work best when they take another person's idea, a fairly recent idea, and try to do it better. They fix things a little to make the game they thought they were getting into, with their own little idiosyncracies and whatnot.

This is what's happening in the video-gaming community today. Any look at amateur game makers will show you three hundred thousand Super Mario clones, Sonic clones, Space Invaders, Breakout, and the like. There's nothing wrong with learning, or practising based on what you already know to try and get accustomed to the software, hardware, and programming language you're using, but what are you accomplishing?

Is there any point to publishing what are, in all reality, your scraps? Did you ever find Monet attempting to sell his daily sketches and pass them off as real art? If he did, wouldn't you find that crass and pretentious?

The point is this: Publishing things, and attempting to show them to the world, should be about increasing the value of the entirety with your contribution. In other words, if you haven't got something creative to give to the world, don't give them anything at all.

Game-Building 2: Classes

Secondly, one must have an idea of what sort of classes are to be expected in the game.

Initially, there should only be maybe two classes. I'm happier publishing mini splatbooks that deal with each seperate class than publishing one hundred damn thousand classes in the basic game. The way I see it, if you just want the basic game, then play the basic game. Simplicity has a beauty of its own.

If you like to have a thousand classes and advanced classes and subclasses and bloodlines and a hundred thousand other things going on in your games, then you're free to do that as well.

But the basic game is just that- the basic game. It sets the baseline levels of power for both warrior types and wizard types. All other classes need to both answer to this and to balance themselves in proportion to this.

The three classes that will make it into the basic game are:

The Fighter

The Spellsword

The Occultist

I know there are a couple of, perhaps, glaring omissions. Firstly, no theif or cleric? No, not even a little.

There's no theif because, well, I side with the grognards heavily on this one. There's no special rules for sneaking and climbing walls and stealing things and all of that oh-so-theifly specialties because it delimits what the other characters can and cannot do in a way that the fighter and occultist simply don't. The fighter is defined by his ability to be good at fighting and taking damage, the occultist by his spellcraft, and the spellsword by having a mix of both. The theif, however, has skills that every other character can have as well. He is simply better at it, at the expense of being nearly useless in combat or other situations. Basically, he is a weak fighter who, by default, tends to limit the sneaking options of other characters and tends to change the balance of power. He tends to take, basically, the entire trap-finding, lock-picking, chest opening dungeon aspect out and convert it from a roleplaying experience to an excersize in dice rolling.

It's for the same reason that I dislike the World of Darkness scheme of having stats for social encounters. A discussion should be roleplayed based on the characters and the real merits or disadvantages of the argument, not rolled and determined by character sheets.

In other words, for the same reasons that I would want for a character to actually roleplay an encounter as opposed to rolling Persuasion vs Stubbornness and then going on with the game.

And as for the cleric- why, he's right there, with a different name and a different flavor! A fighting man with magical skills? That's the Spellsword to a tee. Sure, he's not limited to blunt weapons and healing magic, but that's part of the fun. Since a Spellsword can only use one Weapon Group and Two schools of magic instead of Four, a Spellsword can certainly be played as a traditional cleric. Or he could be a Abysnian Blood-Channeler wielding the characteristic black-iron halberd. Or he could be a Harkannite Stormtrooper, casing fire magic ahead of himself while he charges forward behind his sword and shield.

Game-Building 1: Stats

My stat system is probably going to be simple. When it comes down to it, I'd rather have a few stats that do a lot than a lot of stats that simply don't do much. I'd also like for there to be stat bonuses based on classes. For example, a warrior type could get extra strength, whereas a wizardly type could get extra intelligence or some such. There's sort of a chicken-and-egg situation with classes, really.

Warriors are warriors because they were strong, healthy children who learned that the best way to get ahead in life was through physical means. They weren't necessarily aggressive, but they knew that if you weren't at least strong enough to put up a fight, then somebody could kill you or worse. Since they spend so much of their time fighting, training, or practicing, they've become stronger and tougher. Alternately, they could just have natural strength and practice being large and in charge the same way a moose practises having antlers.

Wizards, on the other hand, may have come from more educated families. They could have always been more intellectual, more cerebral than their more brutish counterparts. They had learned from an early age that outsmarting your foes is easier and more useful than bludgeoning them to death. Since they spend their days using, practicing and learning magic, they're a little more intelligent than their sword-swinging cohorts.

But I digress.

My ideal system would be, basically, similar to the GURPS system, in that there would be only a couple of stats and then a couple more "derived" stats related to them. For example, Strength would have Fatigue as a derived stat, and Intelligence would have mana.

And here, I would like to digress again. As much as I love Vancian magic, and as much as I enjoy the writings, settings, and ideas of the man, I dislike the way D&D has dealt with Vancian magic. The magic, as far as I recall, was basically that magic was advanced mathematics and that the spell itself was torn from your head after you cast it. You would have to sit down and re-study the magic formulae after each casting, so alien was magic.

I don't want to get into some sort of wierd debate, so I'll just let it be said that it doesn't fit the flavour of the setting I have in mind. In this world, magic isn't a bizarre mathematical formula, and it isn't available to everybody. I'm thinking more of a Moorcockian magic, where magic is bought from otherworldly beings, with pacts and bargains and bloodlines figuring in more than one's ability to wave carved sticks.

Anyways, I'm thinking maybe a couple of stats.

One for your character's toughness; this one isn't debatable. Although I like systems where your health is more or less the human average, I like the idea of there being Herculean demi-gods alongside pale, sickly, and wretched peons or what-have-you. I'm thinking of just calling it Toughness.

There should be one for your character's strength. Again, this isn't really an option. I'll probably just call it Strength, although I like the poetry of calling it Might. There's something poetic about the stat being an examplar instead of a mere description, if that makes any sense. This is obviously more useful for the brutish warriors.

For an example, Brilliance. It's not called IQ, for Pete's sake. It's not a measured calculation of whatever, exactly, IQ tests are supposed to measure. It's a measure of how Brilliant you are. How much of an incredible genius. This would be useful for wizardly types.

Not really an example, but Dexterity. You should know what this one is.

The last stat would be Cunning. It's a measure of your character's deviousness, his responsiveness, and such. It's also a measure of his perception. It's more useful for wizards than warriors, but like all stats, should have a little something for everybody.

That gives us, in all, five stats: Toughness, Might, Brilliance, Dexterity, and Cunning. One for everybody, two for warriors, and two for wizards.

Introduction

Allow me to introduce myself. My name, or alias, rather, is Nick. I am heavily into geeky things, and have been for years. I started playing D&D with my brother when we stumbled upon my dad's old AD&D guide, a blue book with a man riding a horse, slashing at a dragon on the cover.

I think it was just the right time for me to have found the book- I was bright enough to puzzle out the rules on my own, more or less, and we'd play as best we understood. We didn't have dice or character sheets or anything, but we would play diceless and, basically, rely on our understanding of both fairness and the capability of our characters. Oh, and drama. We would both work on creating the most interesting story we could.

Once bitten, I could never turn my back. I still look fondly back at AD&D, warts and all, as the foundation for my passion for gaming. These days, I play a little bit of MMOs, a little bit of regular old console gaming, some RTSes, some Warhammer Fantasy. A little bit of everything. I'm a hobby gamer by blood, and it's just who I am.