Back in the Suck post I called for improved creative leadership in the RPG industry and hobby. But as many of you pointed out, I never defined that well. The post was getting a little long, you see, and I didn’t want to offend you all at once. A little at a time, maybe.
Let me hit you with the bold text:
Creative leadership is intensely self-critical. Creative leaders perform obsessive postpartums/mortems on their projects. They aim to be the most severe but honest judges of their own work. Aside from generating lessons for future projects, severe self-criticism inoculates them against bullshit. If you already know what’s awful about your work it’s easy to dodge unwarranted praise and damnation from the outside. This doesn’t mean you should cloister yourself, but pick and choose your critics from people you trust (not necessarily like), with the yardstick of your own dissatisfaction ready to measure their contributions. Then again, if someone from out of the blue says something really insightful, props to them, and bring them into your trusted circle.
In my own work, I can think of a few things I worked on that received unwarranted praise, and projects where fan criticism missed the real problems. The Prince of 100,000 Leaves idea in Mage: The Awakening’s Boston Unveiled uses monotonous motifs disguised by cheesy Sword and Sorcery metal album language. I made mistakes there that I’ll never make again — but if I had let other people decide, I’d have just left it at the praise.
Creative leadership builds on its own innovations instead of pandering to trends. It’s very easy to get caught up in a climate of ideas and think in terms of trends. Before you know it all of your work concentrates on whatever was popular at the planning stage of the project. These kind of “Me too!” projects that dress up a trendy mechanic to hook it to one’s own work are kind of sad. But even worse, they tend to blind you from your own progress. If you’ve got the potential to lead, you’re going to harsh on yourself a lot, and you might throw away really valuable work. You need to go back to the things you throw out, ask why they’re there, and how parts of them could be rehabilitated.
For instance, in the midst of a heated discussion of metaplot I realized that White Wolf had developed all the tools to implement it properly. They created event books like The Red Sign, metaplot-central adventure paths like The Giovanni Chronicles, and talked openly about functional, structural concerns. But the company abandoned the concept and lost some tasty content — and adventure paths and event books became signature D20 products.
Creative leadership asserts authority over its works. Leaders. Don’t. Pander. I’ve seen many discussions where creators basically say yes or something close to every fan request, and end up with a mess, or nothing at all, as the project gets to complex to finish. In fact I can think of one particular game whose creator I have a lot of respect for, and who I want to see succeed regardless (thus, no names!), who designed a much worse game than s/he was capable of just by skimming popular ideas from the community and jamming those fuckers in.
You must find and defend a creative mission — one that isn’t too closed for others to appreciate, but doesn’t easily yield to social pressures. That’s why I believe the trend toward merging marketing and core creative work in one common engagement with the audience is bad. You risk meandering away from the strengths you want to develop and story you want to build — things your audience don’t necessarily even know are core to its experience.
As I’ve said before, if you do what the audience tells you, you’re doing exactly what it doesn’t need you for. Anything it can conceive of, it can do for itself. This is not about contempt for the fans — it’s about staying out of things they already have well in hand.
Creative leadership is inherently heterodox. Once you critically examine your work and build on it from a personal creative mission, is that you’ll stray from consensus thinking. Fans will punish you for not doing what they want or thinking what they think, and occasionally management will punish you for straying from standard narratives of what the game is, what it does, and where the audience fits in (or where they’d like the audience to think it fits in). Your peers will frequently wonder what the hell you’re talking about, because you’re wandering away from a common school of thought. It looks like a breach of some unspoken trust.
Snap. Crackle. Pop.
For me, losing faith in “toolkit” approaches is an example of my journey away from a consensus. Lots of people, including people I’ve worked for, love them, but I decided I didn’t like them right before I worked on World of Darkness: Mirrors and the Mage Chroniclers Guide — two toolkit books. I think this actually made my work better because I decided I wasn’t going to provide much in the way of standalone “hacks,” or chat much about how you can spin things to X, Y or Z, even though the wisdom floating around was very much that hacky XYZ was the way to go, all the kids love it, and it was worth a fat cheque. So instead of going on and on about how fantasy could be this or this (I warmed up with that, though) I just wrote a goddamned fantasy setting. I designed integrated systems instead of portable hacks. I did it because I believe that ideas best express themselves in defined examples and positions.
Creative leadership respects the project’s medium. One side effect of the hobby’s inferiority complex is that creators throw out hard-won technique for something from another, more popular medium. I’m a great advocate of treating RPGs as a cousin to other arts, with lots of cross-pollination, but not without adapting what we get from other sources and implementing it in the context of what we’ve learned in the hobby.
You don’t import WoW dynamics to D&D. You see what WoW has to offer that enhances (and does not constrict) the experiences D&D creates. Similarly, damning RPGs for not delivering a clichéd story structure is stupid; adapting those patterns to what RPGs do is smart. When you decide to transform a game beyond those strengths, you ought to do it consciously, and not because, in your heart of hearts, you’re afraid you’re some kind of fraud for talking about elves and NPCs and such.
Naturally, you’ll feel tension between the traditions of the form and your increasingly eccentric ideas. In that case, they fight it out in your head; the winner stands, or is transformed enough to live with.
Creative leadership fights for the time, talent and compensation needed to do it properly. Lightboxed art. Shitty editing. Plagiarism. General exploitation. Some of these are moral failures, but more of them are the result of failed discipline. Alone or with a team, a designer, developer, writer and/or manager needs to stay on top of this shit, and if they can’t, they need to change the project until it fits the effort they’re willing to marshal for it.
Time, talent and payment forms the exercises/food/rest relationship of creative work. They need to be wrestled into balance, and it’s too easy to transfer blame from one to the other. Skimp on time, and it’s the talent’s fault for being too slow. Skimp on talent, and you can drone on about budget limitations that prevent you from hiring real editors. In gigs that don’t pay, leadership needs to ensure they’re providing some sort of worthwhile compensation beyond that standards set by an exploitation-friendly community.
(Quick aside: People often think I object to folks working for free. This is untrue; I object to enriching a third party instead of the worker. Got it?)
Anyway, that’s what I think creative leadership is.
