My craziness and DMing....

I'm a guy that somehow likes to give himself trouble. Whenever I set out to create stuff, I impose myself with limits, restraints that sometimes end up conflicting. Since D&D is my main creative outlet (current blogging experiment excluded) that's where it all crashes. It seems that the concept behind the KISS acronym eludes me to no end. I always start a new campaign with a core idea and that idea explodes into a thousand others I wish to cram in the same game. House Rules collide with the latest cool book and the new plot idea I thought of last night to create an absolute mess that often ends up giving me the mother of all writer's block.

But I know why I do it. I'm a 'girouette', a change agent, always hunting for the latest cool thing. I did a personality profile once that said that I generate more idea in a day than an average person does in a month. And that's true. So much so that when I used to manage people, my team had a hard time keeping up with my ever changing ideas and objectives. :)

Anyway, in regards to D&D, I need constraints to drive my creativity because if I don't put limits I just don't know where to go with it. So for my campaign I go about creating a core idea: Evil Fiends are plotting to invade the Player character's homeworld. Simple, neat. Then, being the failed writer that I am, I try to fit this idea in a certain continuum that is my Home-brewed gaming world. Then I allow one of my players to keep a really cool character from the last game we dropped. A character that responds to a widely different set of rules that the 4 other characters. Then I want to use as much as the recent material we bought, so I'm staging the game in Ptolus (it cost 120 US dollars + 60 $ for the PDF we are sure as hell to use it!). But Ptolus is set in a Prison world that disallows plane-hopping, so we need to fudge a lot of the setting to fit it in my game-world, because I (and the players) also want to have a Plane Hopping campaign....

It goes on and on and on.... (Tons of house rules, conflicting storylines, etc)

Now it would not be such an issue if I wasn't such a stickler for rules. I love change and bringing down systems to rebuild them but I have a strong urge to abide by the rules (internal and external) of a system, so much that I often paint myself in a corner and become distressed. Up until one of my good analytically-minded friend gently reminds me that I made all the rules that got me there and I'm perfectly allowed to change them again at my whim to get out of that corner... doh!

Add to the fact that like all good DM (yeah I can acknowledge I'm a good DMs, after 20 years of doing it with the same players, I got some of it right) I'm somewhat insecure and neurotic about it all. I put emphasis on stuff the players never notice and I drive myself too hard.

So yeah, I often need to be reminded to KISS. :) I know I won't do it, but when I see that that corner coming, it helps to know I can simplify things.

So my personal take home message for this campaign is this:

Your friends show up for a few hours of Heroic Storytelling with a sprinkle of Buttkicking, exploration and Drama. Your job is to stick to that.