By my nature I am a generalist. I know a bit about a lot of things. I'm the kind of person to read a single volume history of the Crimean War and then skip to one on the Cambodian Genocide, rather than to 'deep dive' into all of mankind's knowledge about one subject area. I've never found anything, either in my professional life or my leisure time, that could occupy my attention for long enough to become an obsession. My attention flits between many interests. And I have always been jealous of the kind of person who can plow one furrow so deeply that they can sow within it gold.
To steal from Isaiah Berlin, and to do damage to his concept, we are either foxes or hedgehogs. We know many things, or we know one big thing. This is also true of our creative lives. Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe were foxes, in that they wrote many different works that were ostensibly unrelated, or only loosely so, and in many genres (although, as with any writer, if you get to know their respective oeuvres well enough, you can begin to think of them as each having a single, hedgehoggish theme). JRR Tolkien and Lois McMaster Bujold were/are hedgehogs, writing about basically one thing - one great story - in vast depth throughout the course of their lives.
Being a fox, my natural tendency as a DM is therefore to want to run many different campaigns in many different settings, rather than run a single campaign in a single world over the course of decades. But I am very envious of those who can achieve the latter. I would very much love to create a megaproject of my own.
What is a megaproject? Some examples that spring to mind:
- Mapping and keying an entire world (Iron Man version: doing it at the scale of 1 mile per hex)
- Slowly and painstakingly drawing a megadungeon map on a 30m roll of drawing paper
- Creating many modules constructing a vast 'implied' campaign setting from the ground up
- Detailing the contents of one city, a la City State of the Invincible Overlord, down to the very last single inhabitant
- Tekumel
The people who can really pull off megaprojects are rare and special indeed. If you possess that gift - don't waste it.
This post does remind me of an article by the Chatty DM about nerd projectitis (https://critical-hits.com/blog/2009/06/11/friday-chat-nerd-projectitis/) about how we can be easily distracted from old projects and want to start new ones. I am unfortunately a fox, with the attention span of a squirrel and the eye of a magpie, always looking for the next shiny new thing. Sad thing is I often have genuine intentions that this time I'll see the project through to the end. I rarely do. My most successful project has been my blog, because it allows a certain amount of jumping from one thing to another, and each blog post can be seen as a 2-4 day project, which I can generally stick to. As long as I keep adding my eclectic ideas to the blog, I can claim (with some justification) that my blog is one big project that (for at least the last 6 months) I am sticking with.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought when reading the title of this post was that you were about to describe a game you're designing (a "megaproject"!) where I could play a Beatrix Potter-style talking hedgehog. Like, he's a baker who provides wholesome comestibles for the talking animal village but he's obsessed with fresh muffins & jam and usually doesn't want to share those. Sort of like "Mouse Guard" but without the guarding part because the animals are all pretty chill actually. They just kind of hang out and fumble around everyone's quotidian foibles.
ReplyDeleteInstead it was some brainy reflection on the human psyche and styles of creativity. Well, I don't blame you.
Although a bit of a hedgehog himself (a double hedgehog in fact, a man whose principle area of interest being the hedgehog), Iltud would like to intone from beyond the veil, "When he is blamed, the hedgehog excuses himself either by ignorance, or chance, or the suggestion of the Devil, or the frailty of his flesh, or the occasion given by his neighbor," an aphorism which seems to have made its way through the centuries to St. Anthony of Padua, who used it to describe the sinner. Iltud, of course, was in fact talking about hedgehogs.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this post my first response was to try to remember whether I had ever heard Iltud say "man is either a fox, or he is a hedgehog. My personal preference is for hedgehogs"
DeleteThe sad thing is being a fox who dreams of being a hedgehog and wonders if there is a way.
ReplyDelete