Progressing

Suppose that you have "settled down" ... your first hurdle will be to accept that your projection of how long it will take is completely skewed.  It will not take a few months.  Even the most juvenile world will ask a year of your life, at least -- and here I am defining a "juvenile" world as one for which you steal everything, with virtually no changes: combat system, equipment list, character creation, your choice of character classes, spells, feats, monsters, module dungeons and, finally, adventures.

Ask yourself: how much do you read every day?  How much of that reading do you retain?  Making a game world is asking you to read at least three or four 300-hundred page books, and retain it well enough that you can a) find what you're looking for and b) not be caught with your pants down when your player finds something you never saw.  Or don't remember.  And mind you, this is to make a world where you agree with all those rules you're stealing.  Every hour you spend rewriting some of these rules is time you're not studying and comprehending the mess of a game world the publishers have imposed on you.

Right off, if it's your intention to adopt a juvenile world (so-named because juveniles are the only ones for whom the choice is forgivable), here's something to think about:  DMs compete for players.  Oh, not against other DMs.  There aren't enough of those so if you're willing to run a game, you've already removed most of your competition.  No, DMs compete for players against everything else the players might do instead of participating in your world.  That includes relationships, their schooling, their jobs, the bar, a movie, watching sports, video games and doing chores.  If your world isn't better than any of those things which your player might rather be doing (or feels that it would be more useful to do that be in your game world), then if you get players at all, it'll be mostly because it is better than watching paint dry.

I don't have to explain this to you, because you've played in those worlds.  That experience preys upon you.  Are you any good at this?  Do you think you're a good DM, but in fact you're really not?  If your experience is anything like mine, you've played with DMs who thought they were "amazing," when in fact the players regularly trashed them to their back.  I've sat at a table where another player pumped his fiction cock whenever the DM dropped his eyes behind his screen.  Most would-be DMs -- those who aren't narcissists -- dread that something like might be happening.

We have two strategies to consider.  First, be charismatic.  A charismatic DM can skip and dance around the rule book, waving his or her left hand wildly to draw the player's attention while committing outright fraud with the right.  That's never worked well for me, personally.  I'm a smart cookie and I usually catch on with frightening rapidity.  Once I know a DM's tells, it's a question of whether or not I want to hang around and mess with the DM's game, or go do those important chores that need doing.  But this sort of DMing seems to work with the groundlings, and not briefly either.  If you're happy with groundlings, all power to you.

On the other hand, if you're going to rely on your actual game world to haul them in, it had better be a pretty good system with pretty good adventures.  If that's the case, however, using the rule book as written ain't gonna keep da kids down on the farm once they've seen New York.  Unless you are a kid, or playing them in your game, they've already seen the rules as written.  Or, to put it another way, they've already smelled the rules as written.

And so have you.

I've urged the reader to stop seeing greener grass on the other side of the fence; I've also used a metaphor that if you're panning for gold here and not getting any, you're bound to convince yourself to pan for gold somewhere else.  The metaphors differ slightly: one describes your urge towards green grass; the other, away from luckless dirt.

With the latter, you're sitting with your game world plan and its three or four months since you first started.  By this time, you're thinking, "Why did I ever think this was a good idea?"  Essentially, why did you think you should start digging here?  And the longer you dig here, the more you hate it.  Worse, the bigger the amount of work seems to get, and it is all unpleasant, boring work.  You thought it might be fun to rewrite a few monsters, but you've rewritten over forty and -- omg, how many are left?  Hundreds?  Shit.

Before you start making a game world -- one that is going to be better than the books offer -- you must reconcile yourself with this prospect:  creativity is not all beer and skittles.  Creativity sucks.  While using your imagination sounds like a walk in the party, with original ideas hanging from every tree, the actual production of creative work is taxing, wretched, unforgiving, soul-crushing monotony.  Uncreative people imagine a painter splashing colour in great sweeping arcs, whereas in reality it is tiny, tiny brushstrokes where a single bird's wing soaks up a whole weekend.  Acting is seen to be so glamourous, when really it is a tedium of repeating lines believably until the migraine is achieved, which appreciably the audience or the film camera cannot capture except to reinterpret it as passion.  People who want to be writers pour words on hundreds of pages like sanitation workers at a dump -- most never settle into the business of nitpicking a single paragraph all afternoon and into the evening.  This is why their stories are so unreadable.

You think you're going to be a DM and that you'll have this wonderful game world.  You think you're going to be clever and unorthodox.  You think you're going to wrap all this up in three months.  How nice.  How terrifically naive of you.

You will never make anything of value until you accept, first, that designing a setting is a disagreeable and unwelcome thing.  That you prepare yourself for it.  So that when you find yourself within the ennui of working on your game world, you'll have the wisdom to see how this is going to be, no matter what you work on.

Most people can't learn this lesson.

It's easier to express that as "won't."  They won't learn.  It gives them credit.  They won't learn, but they could.  I am not of that opinion.  I think, by and large, people won't learn because they can't.  They haven't the wherewithal, the background, the education, the patience or some other character trait they need to overcome this hurdle.  But I don't include the reader in this group.  I don't know the reader.  If I did, and talked this over face to face, and heard excuses that suggested that what I'm saying isn't fact, but opinion ... well, then yeah.  If you're talking like that in your head right now, you can safely put yourself in the "can't" column.

Not only have I written, spoken, performed and collaborated upon artistic projects for 40+ years, I've done so in rooms of people both successful and unsuccessful (and a lot more of the latter).  Gets to a point where you can identify who is going to be which pretty fast.  It's in the way they talk.  Their expectations.  Largely, it's in their excuses.

"This is boring" is the surest way to fail as an artist.  The right strategy is to change the word boring to "progressive."  How is my writing today?  I made progress.  That is, I dredged out some hours taking this project from this uncertain point to that uncertain point.  I went to the mountain, picked up rocks for three hours and dropped them at the place where the mountain is being moved.  I made progress.

Progress is all that matters.  Progress is god.  Because at some point, you begin to realize that the mountain you're picking the rocks up from is smaller than the mountain where you're dropping them. That gives you pause.  You look at the smaller mountain and, yes, jeebus, there's still a shit-ton there left to move, but then you look at the new mountain and you think, "Wow.  I did that."  It wasn't done cheerfully.  It wasn't done with a song.  Mostly, it's done with vapidity and hate.  Which doesn't matter.

What matters is that it's done.