Have you noticed this? This seems to be commonplace across nearly all pursuits these days, but the one I want to talk about today especially is role playing. I’ve noticed this nearly every day on places like Reddit and I really don’t get it. For a hobby that relies on being creative, why can’t anyone actually be creative?Let’s set the way back machine to when I was heavily involved in RPGs, back in the 80s and early 90s. Back then, there weren’t that many games out there and if you wanted to play something off the beaten path, you had to either home-brew your own game from the ground up, or you had to take an existing system and make modifications to get what you wanted. Making up your own game was very common and everyone had their own set of house rules for whatever variations you wanted to make to your game. That’s just how it was done.
Today though, I can’t tell you how many people only want to run pre-built campaigns and play pre-done games. People are constantly posting, looking for very specific games, like someone owes it to them to have generated an entire RPG just for them, designed for their specific tastes. You want to run a game written for steppe nomads? Someone must have made a game for exactly that, right? Or you want a game made specifically for 1930s era pulp detectives? Or how about a game specifically about role-playing dragons? Those are all things that were requested in just a couple of hours over on Reddit and when people don’t get exactly what they’re looking for, they get upset.
Why? Because for some reason, laziness has become acceptable in RPG circles. You can’t just take a system that you’re familiar with and make changes to it to accommodate your game play. It has to be done for you! You can’t just make up a game to GM your friends through, it has to be done for you! Role-playing is no longer a creative endeavor, it’s an almost passive past time that you don’t have to put any effort into whatsoever. Sit back and let someone else do all of the work. You’re owed exactly what you want.
Except that’s not how any of this works. The whole point of playing an RPG is to be creative. It’s to take on a role and play a game. It’s to lead an adventure and deal with the unexpected. Far too many people post that their players aren’t doing exactly what the pre-written campaign say, therefore they have no clue what they should do. If it requires any thought of any kind, they’re lost.
That’s like of pathetic, isn’t it? But that seems to be a very modern problem. Creativity and intelligence are a thing of the past, replaced by slavish adherence to rules and forcing players through rigidly constructed dungeons that someone else, someone much smarter than the GM, came up with. It’s not much of a hobby when you think about it. It’s just reading someone else’s book to your players and expecting them to play along and read the script back.
Now yes, people can do whatever they want to do, it just strikes me as a terribly boring way to spend your time. These aren’t immersive fantasy environments where you can be something unique, they’re barely “choose-your-own-adventure” style books. Give your players three options and go to the right page once they decide. It just seems so pointless and sad to anyone who has been through a long, creative campaign and made it out the other end in one piece. Laziness seems to be the way of the world today and it’s a real shame to see it becoming so commonplace in the RPG world. Games aren’t supposed to be passive. It’s not like sitting down and watching a movie. You have to take an active part and be creative. You have to care. This isn’t just a social get together where nobody really cares what they do, so long as they do something. Gaming isn’t meant to be a time waster. I really don’t get people who are only playing because it’s something to do. Then again, I don’t get people who behave like that at all. Maybe it’s a generational thing, which I might pursue further in a future article, but I just don’t get it. What is wrong with these people? Have they lost the point of the activity? I doubt these are questions that I’ll ever get a satisfactory answer to. That’s kind of sad.
