thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-07, John Kim wrote:
Vincent wrote:
The punchline is: most RPGs' setting material (along with all primary source fiction, like Firefly or The Lord of the Rings) is the end product of a creative process. What do we roleplayers need? We need the starting point of the creative process instead.
Excuse me? If the creative process you want is original world-building, then yes, RPG setting material is the end product. But it's not like there is no room for creativity once the setting is created. There is still room for infinite creativity within an existing setting. As simple proof, the contemporary world is far more overly detailed than any roleplaying setting—yet I claim it is still easily possible to have creative stories within it. Let's take an example.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG was first published after Season Five of the BtVS television series. Obligingly, the book provides all sorts of background details on the state of the series. Now, by your logic, this is an end product. Gamers may pick up and use this setting and these characters to create their own episodes, but that is simply fetishizing with no creative input. But by this same logic, the actual television episodes in Season Six and Seven by Joss Whedon are similarly only fetishization with no creativity.
I don't buy it. In fact, I think this is moronic. I think the only way it sounds remotely plausible is throwing in a bunch of insults at geeks and fan-fiction is. But the principle is baseless.
There is great and insightful creative work possible by taking a pre-existing setting and coming up with new material for that. This applies whether you're creating a story in a contemporary or historical setting, creating new stories in a setting you previously created, creating stories in a fictional setting which someone else originated.
Sure, fan fiction is on average bad—but try reading the original fiction by the same writers. It's just as awful as the fan fiction. It's a simple consequence of the rule that 99% of everything is crap. The stigma of fan-fiction is purely a consequence of the reader—i.e. you're looking at fiction by authors you would never even glance at if they came up with original stories.
If you remove the stigma of copyright infringement, then you'll see lots of good fiction using previously-authored settings, characters, and plots. Nicholas Meyer's Seven Percent Solution and Mary Russell's The Beekeper's Apprentice; John Gardner's Grendel and Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead; and so forth.
