Denial is a Form of Freedom

Lamp, by didbygraham on Flickr

This week, I started a new role-playing game. I’m running it very differently than I run most games. It’s a D&D 4th edition game, created primarily to test out the classes and races in the new third Player’s Handbook.

Since I’m already running two other games, which takes up much of my time, I decided to run this game using almost entirely pre-published materials. I bought a dungeon crawl-style adventure (more accurately, a “temple crawl”).  Very little world design is required on my end.

This is weird. I love to create worlds; I typically spend a lot of time fleshing out my gaming worlds.

But this frees me up to do that in other games, and to just run the game.  I can focus on NPCs and larger world questions (I’m thinking of adding a Tékumel-style empire).

As with so many things, denial is a form of freedom.