Manufacturing Insperado
One of the biggest problems I have as a both a GM and a player is trying to shift through all of the ideas that pop in my head. At any given time, I’ve got several ideas for both characters I’d like to play and story/campaign ideas.
This normally isn’t a bad thing; I mean, who wouldn’t like to have so many ideas to run with? The trouble comes when I get excited about new concepts and do not give enough credit or thought to older ones. Worse yet, sometimes I will flat out abandon older ideas if the new idea is striking my fancy. This happens a lot during character creation, and I’ve lost perfectly viable and interesting characters to this madness.
If you happen to have the same problem, or maybe do a similar thing, the best thing you can do is keep a notepad file on your computer (or just a notebook if you find yourself without a computer often) and jot down every idea you come up with in these regards. If you get excited about a new character idea, jot both the new idea and the old idea down, as you’ll maybe want to revisit the idea later on and use it wholesale who even incorperate it into a new idea. This goes double for GMs.
Also note that you don’t need to use new ideas, even if they’re seemingly more exciting. If you’re a GM, it’s not just your game, it’s everyone else’s game too, and you have to consider that suddenly dropping in your new ideas might very well throw the entire game off for everyone else at the table. If you’re a PC, there is such a thing as bogging down a character with too many plot points.
That’s all for today’s advice. Join me next week when I report back that I didn’t listen to my own advice and made a Half-Orc cleric/oracle that fights with two scythes and doesn’t cast spells because he’s afraid of divine magic.
