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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas and a community of GMs helping each other run great games since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
The Haiku Approach: Constrain to Inspire
Fri. December 22, 2006
In the same vein as the 20% rule for new campaigns, there is value in deliberately limiting your options when you GM — even to the point of excluding things you’re used to.
I call this the “haiku approach” because it’s got a lot in common with haiku, the Japanese poetic form best-known for its restrictive structure (five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables — at least, that’s how I learned it).
As with haiku, giving yourself some GMing constraints can be a good spur for your creativity — you’re forced to do more with less, and that can have intriguing results.
This also ties in with thinking about your GMing history, especially the things that you do by default — not just your GMing style, but the elements that make up your approach to GMing, and your campaign in particular.
The haiku approach boils down to this: Think about what you do as a GM (it might help to make a list), and about how you approach your campaigns. Then make a conscious effort to restrict yourself from taking your default approach to a couple of those things.
What specific options you limit will be an entirely personal decision, based on how you think, how you GM and what your players enjoy. It’s not about improving your GMing directly (like writing your own naughty list), it’s about challenging your assumptions and stretching your creativity in new ways.
It’s almost impossible to give general examples of what I’m getting at, so I’ll give you one specific example from my GMing history.
A few years ago, I realized that my D&D campaigns tended not to feature many monsters — I tended to focus on plotlines that revolved around PC-race antagonists (humans, elves, etc.). There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but I wanted to try something different.
So for my next game, I made the conscious decision to include fewer PC-race villains and more fantastic elements — especially monsters — in my campaign. I tried to embrace an aspect of D&D that wasn’t always part of my default GMing style, and for me that was the genesis of the haiku approach.
This had a lasting impact on how I think about running D&D, and even though I didn’t do a perfect job of implementing my changes, overall they worked out well.
What do you think of the rationale behind the haiku approach? Have you ever voluntarily limited your GMing options — and if so, how did it turn out?
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Comments
6 Responses to “The Haiku Approach: Constrain to Inspire”
to limit options
benefit for the whole group
gaming will succeed
Sorry, but I’m all about the haiku. The idea is good, and I tend to find myself doing the same thing. Working on one aspect of my gaming style and forgetting about other stuff that doesn’t come into my world view. It’s like the old saying, close one door to open another.
In the course of playtesting I find myself doing this all the time. I have to test out a system, or see how this works in practice and so run a game or two that is based solely around a specific theme. Usually it works fairly well because I’m focusing on a single element, or the element in context with other things.
Haiku can be fun
Haiku can be difficult
Refrigerator
Well, I suck at this approach.
Seriously, yes; I try to do some things different from adventure to adventure, even though the overall theme remains the same.
One adventure was an investigation of an ancient site, currently occupied by Kobolds. It was a straight traps-and-ambush dungeon crawl.
Another was a multidimensional keep, full of oddities, constructs, and unusual geometry (four 50′x50′ rooms in a row along each side of a 30′ section of corridor tends to give the mapper a headache).
Next up is a really cool… Oh, wait. My players occasionally read this.
As for campaigns, I would like to try something really …different. Flex my DM muscles as such. Ideas?
You’re right– good constraints can foster creativity. Unfortunately, I haven’t done much of the first part: figuring out what my patterns are, so that I can limit them away. I know that I lean on reasonable/ plausibility pretty heavily, sometimes to fun’s detriment, so that might be a good place to break free. Say, in a pulpy SotC game…
Limit your options
Fire your imagination
Drive your players nuts
Telas: Your request for campaign suggestions would make a great forum thread (distinct from your haiku approach thread).
within set frameworks
restrictions are negated
no limits exist
Never ever stay in your comfort zone. Even if you don’t change your game or genre you should at least challenge yourself with new adventure concepts for that genre and game.
I’m considering taking my horror game into the ridiculous zone with a goofy tribute to the old Universal Studios horror films. Sometimes a complete break from what is expected revitalizes a game for both players and the GM.
Past winter comes spring:
From a DM with set ways,
New concepts flower.
What can I say: I agree. This is something I really could and should be using.
T