Creativity

So today I'm going to talk a bit about creativity.

The reason I'm doing this is last night when I made my first post I had so many ideas with what I could post today as a blog and yet when I woke up this morning all the ideas I had were either gone or seemed uninteresting.

I know that the roleplay experience can be a creative one but at times I have felt that roleplay has actually stifled my creativity, either because despite trying other things there's only one way to solve issues in character (usually involving violence) or that when putting puzzles and social intrigues into a game the party wanted a game that could be solved one way (involving violence).

I have three of examples of this. The first is a Dark Heresy game I was running. The party had been tasked by their Inquisitor to go into an underhive and find a missing Inquisitor, the problem being that the Inquisitor was a master of disguise and no-one was actually sure what he looked like. The party initially tried to resolve everything using violence. After killing off most of their leads Jonah finally took control of the party and did what was required to get the adventure back on track, getting a local to set up a meeting with a gang boss, finding out about the problems in the underhive, deputizing an entire gang and generally getting things done.

 My second example is a D&D 3.5 game I was running. I was trying to be descriptive a possible and know as much about the settlements they were visiting as possible (I'll put at the end of this blog an example of details I put into working on this). When the party reached the first settlement they went to and were prevented by guards from entering until they'd bound their weapons and agreed to follow the local laws. The guards suggested that they should get an adventuring writ that would allow them more autonomy and to enter cities without peace binding their weapons. One of the party members asked where they could get one and the guards told them the magistrates office to which the response i got was "Are we there then"....... No interest in the roleplay that was currently going on. no questions about what this settlement was like once they were in or what the people were like "Are we there then". I died a little on the inside and eventually started running a dungeon crawl for that party as they only seemed interested in kick in the door roleplay.

Final example. I was playing in a D&D 3.5 campaign and created an assimar bard, I made him without any weapons and no combat skills to be told about the GM that I couldn't run him like that and that I'd have to re-assign some of his skills and take weapons. when I had finished this no longer resembled the character I wanted to play so went out of my way to get him killed.

So there we go, anyone else have these kinds of problems? It of course isn't always like this otherwise I wouldn't roleplay but with all my ideas been gone from last night this is what came to my head.

Hopefully see you soon for another (more upbeat than this) post.

Until then.

The Roleplay Dwarf.



The example (I had done one of these for every settlement I thought they'd visit):

Valls small town, (constable is the lvl 5 warrior) plus duke
population 1300, community wealth 52,000

1 lvl 2 adept, 6 lvl 1 adept

1 lvl 2 aristrocrat, 6 lvl 1 aristrocrats

1 lvl 3 barbarian, 2 lvl 1 barbarians

1 lvl 6 bard, 2 lvl 3 bards, 4 lvl 1 bards

1 lvl 5 cleric, 2 lvl 3 clerics, 4 lvl 1 clerics

1 lvl 13 commoner, 2 lvl 7 commoners, 4 lvl 4 commoners, 8 lvl 2 commoners, 1125 lvl 1 commoner

1 lvl 3 druid, 2 lvl 1 druid

1 lvl 6 expert, 2 lvl 3 experts, 37 lvl 1 experts

1 lvl 1 fighter

1 lvl 2 monk, 2 lvl 1 monks

1 lvl 2 paladin, 2 lvl 1 paladin

1 lvl 1 ranger

1 lvl 2 rogue, 2 lvl 1 rogues

1 lvl 3 sorcerers, 2 lvl 1 sorcerers

1 lvl 5 warrior, 2 lvl 3 warriors, 62 lvl 1 warriors

1 lvl 4 wizard, 2 lvl 2 wizards, 4 lvl 1 wizards

Of these there are 13 full time guards with 4 on each gate, 65 militia 20 on active service in any given month, 8 patrol during the day and 12 during the night)