@sett and everyone- great thread. Good thinking. Great reading. Funny thing, i'm brewing a star sector right now, as I'm reading this.

Wish I had something to contribute. I will say, though, that the drift towards using published settings has always bothered me. If it lights your fire great, but setting books are nothing more than entertainment for me. I've always known this, but it was really hammered home to me when I read the Midnight setting book last year, and then someone at this site (or maybe elsewhere?) told me that my ideas on how to play demonstrated my inability to "get it". I don't want to "get it". I want to do my own thing. For me, homebrew is gaming.

I am blown away by my own post.

Well no, but, seriously, I mean that letter by Tadashi of Chaosium--when he says that the magazine title was going to be changed from "DM" to "Different Worlds."

Think about it: a magazine in which homebrewers, each of whom at the time is in the very early stages of designing their own game-plus-setting, talk about these, well, different worlds. As a way of promoting them, sure, but also as a way of showing people how it's done so that they might do it themselves in turn... create their own worlds.

That is simply unimaginable today. (So is Chaosium's Thieves World, on which three years later a bunch of said homebrewers converged in order to produce a gameworld collectively.)

Elliot, it's definitely stunning how many of my generation gamed the hell out of the 80s (but stopped buying mid-decade or so), dropped out completely in the 90s, and got pulled back in in 2000 by 3E.

I'd been planning on get the Wilderlands boxed set once my current round of eBay auctions* came to a conclusion.  But this thread has me wondering again whether or not I'm doing myself a disservice by not tackling a new campaign world from scratch.

*List here, if anyone cares.

I´d say in the case of the wilderlands, it´s the same for the players. But something different for you.

Settembrini, the forms of creativity you catalog largely look at RPGs as works - the products are things that could be written down (codified rules, situational responses, setting elements, etc.).  But at the level of actual play, I suggest that they also create relationships among the players, and that this may be one of the most important creative processes involved.

This kind of creativity is necessarily collaborative.  It often arises in your situational creativity, but it's more than that.  It manifests in anecdotes (not usually narratives), in-jokes, favorite dice, and so on.  It depends on the construction and elaboration of shared meanings using common symbols.  Because of this, and because it gains its relevance and power from accumulation (repetition and adaptation), it is not in any strong sense original.  It must be bootstrapped from existing shared symbols and meanings, so it is derivative.  Which of your categories it falls into (primary, secondary, or tertiary) isn't necessarily important, because the chief reason it must be derivative is not to aid in the creative process of a particular author, but to make possible sharing with others.

Though most shared meanings remain within a group of players, some extend beyond them into the RPG culture at large.  They are tied to widely shared symbols (often the building blocks you mention) and accumulate around them.  Thus outside a given play group or cultural subgroup it becomes very difficult to compete with, say, Gary Gygax's set of building blocks - not necessarily because Gygax was the most original or skilled designer (though he may have been), but because in the relationships between many players over many years these symbols have accumulated more and more meaning.

The most successful alternatives (among diverse groups of gamers) will draw on other already existing and widely shared meanings by using symbols from the shared culture, whether that be history (e.g. Call of Cthulhu), subcultures (Vampire), urban legend (Delta Green), or other media (Serenity) (these examples may not be ideal - I'm using them for illustration purposes).  Roll-your-own settings etc. aren't necessarily "better" - because that kind of creativity may not be so important.

Geof,

EDIT: Great post!

what you say is mostly correct. But I think that´s not what I´m talking about. It´s more an elaboration on the play experience.

Anyway, wouldn´t that "situational creative play experience" be enriched/different if you would see the players and yourself building up those experiences on YOUR created elements?
And their input into the game world, rules, etc.?

These experiences aren´t communicable anyways, aren´t they?
So using idiosyncratic foundations isn´t harmful in regards to this.
I DO see some form of communication going on with players of the same modules. This is not creativity, but it´s a different fun that would be lost with everybody being idiosyncratic.