Something About Something
I have many thoughts swimming around in my head. What do these airy sprites whisper to me?
When you run or play a roleplaying game you can do anything you want.
"Ref... I want to play as a sheep man."
"Sorry, there are no sheep men in this world."
"Buddy. If you don't let me play as a sheep ma--"
gets shot
"Hehe... The ref's word is law, bucko."
By that I mean it's a process of negotiation. I'd certainly let her play as a sheep man, but bringing the sheep man into a Dark Fantasy Arthurian Campaign (Very Gritty and Epic) might not work with that particular table.
You have this deep well of power inside you. The power to bring yourself into the game as player or ref and really run wild with imagination. What will you do with this power?
The biggest issues I see at the table (and a mistake I've made myself) is failing to have fun. That's the issue I ran into in the Wolves Upon the Coast game I was running. I wanted the "Wolves Experience" but that doesn't really exist. It was my first time running extensive pre-written RPG material. Rather than try to get something out of the game I simply should've taken what I wanted from it (Or maybe it just didn't really work for me). I should have treated it like I used to treat Lego: mixing and matching every set and creating weird tactical skirmish games based loosely on my child brain's interpretation of how Final Fantasy Tactics worked, gleaned only from watching my older brother play the game with his friends. I'll revisit Wolves again, someday, and when I do it'll be very different.
When I see some of the old, extremely terse TSR modules I find my mind spinning. Wolves, with its reputation for terseness, was too overdetermined for me. The system became a limitation as well. That's the number one thing I should have thrown away. Not because its bad, but because I let it become an annoying little bugbear. Anyway. What was this post about again?
Play with your toys until they break, fix them up, and then do it all over again. I think the wonderful shared experience of roleplaying should be pushed to its very limit. In the time we carve out to get together and play we should be doing just that: we ought to be ludic, spontaneous, generative, and allow our hearts to be carried away. The OSR scene provides old school D&D as a useful shorthand which can be used as a starting point, but it shouldn't be the finish line.
This was basically about nothing. I appreciate your patience.