The Upside of Other People Imagining For You

The Afterward of Dungeons & Dragons, Book 3, reads:

"There are unquestionably areas which have been glossed over. While we deeply regret the necessity, space requires that we put in the essentials only, and the trimming will oftimes have to be added by the referee and his players. We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you? Write to us and tell about your additions, ideas, and what have you. We could always do with a bit of improvement in our refereeing."

There is an oft-quoted part of that - "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?"

I think about that one fairly often.

Part of it is kind of ironic - it's a failure to see that yes, that's exactly what people wanted from TSR. TSR published graph paper and geomorphs and such, but it's their adventure modules and monster books and rules expansions that sold so well. And people bought them and still buy them - and there are people today running companies that do nothing but make more supplements for D&D-based games.

Is there any RPG out there with as many supplements as D&D has adventure supplements alone, nevermind supplements in general? I doubt it.

One explanation for this is that people are consumers, are sheep, are intellectually lazy.

I think that explanation is a bit lazy. It might be partly true, but it's not complete.

Part of why people wanted so much more of Gygax's writing, and other official stuff, was because it's easier than doing it yourself. But it misses something.

Seeing what other people imagined is fun. It's valuable. It's interesting. It sparks your own imagination in ways it might not have gone. It's especially interesting when you've started with the same baseline, and you see where their imagination took them - what it shares with yours and how it differs.

Isn't that how D&D originated, basically? Gygax and Arneson taking each other's ideas, expanding them, interpreting them in new ways, and handing them back to the other for more modification? Maybe in relatively few iterations, but that's it right there. And it didn't stop. Supplement I: Greyhawk is basically the big book of what happened when Gygax & Arneson's rules met Gygax's players on a regular basis.

This is why, despite not running D&D anymore, I still read other people's D&D adventures. This is why I like reading other people's session reports on their games (often without regard to system).

This is why I've got a shelf full of gaming stuff. It's not because I'm unimaginative, or a sheep following a herd, or uncreative, or whatever. It's because what's there sparks me to make my own things in ways I wouldn't have if I didn't see what others did first.

Now, I need to get back to writing. See, another GURPS author showed me something he's working on that's overlapping with something I'm working on. And what I wrote after that was far superior to what I wrote on my own - because I could springboard off of what he thought of. The cycle continues.