stop writing like a robot!

 sometimes i catch myself writing like a damn robot and sometimes i catch YALL writing like this :// 

and the next time it happens ima do this to us
 

by "like a robot" i mean writing that has clearly been created by layering some specific set of prompts and constraints such that their interaction removes creativity from the process and replaces it with problem solving: "how do i write a [starting equipment] table entry for an [armor item] that provides [some snippet of lore] specific to the [family history] of [the ostrich king], if the [armor item] should provide a [defensive] effect at the cost of a [minor drawback] and the description should include the concepts [camel], [balance] and [beauty]*"

i have been thinking a lot lately about the dearth of what i would call Real Art in the writing produced by this scene (the scene reading this right now <3), particularly the with regard to the fact that despite the sense i have that my work is largely placed in the "game-as-art/writing exercise" category, my strong feeling that the writing I do on this blog is substantially less artful than the writing I do elsewhere. 

 i do think this mechanical generative tendency contributes significantly. Some of it is inevitable; we're making toys, after all, and toys have necessary components that need to be crafted regardless of our interest in that particular element; the game needs its pieces, its player characters and treasures and monsters and whatever else, and it's natural to develop workflows and procedures that help us create stuff when a lot of stuff needs to be created. 

 attitudes towards originality have something to do with this as well; on the one hand, you've got people like me who have a bit of an allergy towards making something even remotely derivative of existing Fantasy Stuff; on the other hand, you've got the noble Vanilla Enjoyer, and both tend to lean on this kind of procedural writing; the first in order to ensure originality (wow! this armor is about camels and balance and beauty!), the second because they have identified it as a false idol, and feel confident that they can have fun with a random distribution of bandits in a random distribution of rooms.

additionally, there's a powerful fetish for emergence present in the scene, for the designer to rely on random generation to fill hexcrawls, key dungeons, etc. and for people to create procedure-toys that help make this work more efficient, or interesting, or unexpected, or whatever. I have made a LOT of toy of this kind, and I like using them, but an over-reliance on this kind of thing removes the writer from the work, and creates a kind of detached, impersonal aesthetic i am beginning to get terribly tired of. 

it's this same kind of flat, clever randomness that characterizes roguelike videogames, a genre that Adventure Games sometimes align themselves with ( death is quick! getting a new guy is quick! random loadouts! random encounters! mitigate randomness with strategic resource management!) despite the fact that video games and ttrpgs have very, very few strengths in common as mediums. If I'm playing a game once a week, I'd much, much rather the world I'm exploring be a deliberate conversation between myself and the person who made it, rather than a conversation between me and a set of random tables with the writer as a kind of interpreter between us.  

is all this worth bitching about? idk girl! the thing, of course, is that a Powerful Game Master can make the most horribly original idea into something playable at the table, and 1d6 bandits IS a good encounter if you're good at running the game. 

that said, there is no law that demands the writer be an interpreter of statistics rather than dreams. I wish dearly to see more adventures written with an eye towards the material present in the writers unconscious rather than their treatment of material they have been provided with by procedures outside of themselves. it's a bit of a false dichotomy (how you would write up that Ostrich King armor and how I have written it up are surely different), but it's enough I think to ask that you, gentle reader, free up some of those limitations we all love so dearly and allow your creative process to flow a little more freely. 

exercises to this end: 

- let your writing dictate the kind of game you are making rather than the other way around. this is the big one; it all flows from here.
- embrace anachronism; if you're hyped on racecars but you thought you were writing a fantasy setting, let yourself write Ye Racecare Fantasy 
- accept that your game is going to be tailored to your preferences in a way that is not balanced. your settings may have more monsters than mine! my game might have more cool treasure cause I like writing that stuff! its chill! don't use a formula!
- write lists without an eye towards distribution; just write 20 starting items without worrying about if there's too many kinds of rope and not enough kinds of polearm. don't worry about making sure you have enough weak monsters and enough strong monsters; if you have more ideas for strong monsters, the world is just scary as fuck and that's sickie
- write a hexcrawl without a hexfill procedure; in each hex just put the most interesting thing you can think of at the moment.
- don't sit down to write an encounter or write an item or a class; sit down to write and see what happens.  
- if it comes time to play and you don't have any classes cause u hate writing them, have everyone play a monster because you wrote so many of them. or give everyone one part from one of the monsters you wrote because they're the children of that monster and a mortal sire, or tell each player about three places you wrote and they come from one of them, or give each player three treasures you wrote and that's their guy
- write without an eye towards use, towards balance, even towards play.  if you have an awesome idea for a useful thing, thats awesome so awesome for you, but otherwise take the pressure off yourself. make something beautiful :) trust that the GM will find a way to make it gameable :) if it's beautiful enough, they will have no choice >:)

relax a little bit! stop stealing jobs from poor hardworking generative AI! i'd just like to know you a little better. 

in short... 
Nbateman: "people both play and write blogposts by rote as if to fulfill invisible expectations of what an RPG ought to have"
Archon's Court: "you do not need to write things you do not care about in order to fit a game together"
Louis:  "I also think that a really good practice to be in creatively is to follow your intuitions about what you want to write, but to reject the first version of why you think you want to write them, and to sit with the why question for a while and see what else coalesces. because I think very often it's goes deep or strange inside you somewhere, but it's too easy to accept the basically formal thing of 'no this is a just genre piece' or 'this is just a table', 'I know in advance what sort of thing this is'"
Me: "hooray i love you all"

* by the way this is an Ostrich Rider's Egg Harness, in the style of the Ostrich's King's Egg Saddle, which was commissioned in celebration of his son's marriage into House Bactrian. An embroidered, beaded, and feathered leather cuirass with two gorgeous jeweled eggs balanced, one on each shoulder. Anyone who sees them will take care not to damage them while striking the wearer for the sake of either awe or greed, but the wielder must move slowly and deliberately as to not unbalance the eggs

do NOT become a little robot BABY