The lost art of not giving a damn
Hello fellow adventurers. It is I, here again to assault your eyeballs with a progress report.
You see, upon thinking about how much joy my son's version of D&D brings him I got to realizing the main difference between us (beyond age). My imagination is stifled because over the years I let the world tell me what can and can't be done. I put guardrails around my imagination to shelter myself from ridicule.
Meanwhile, my son just threw something together without a care in the world. I am finding myself envying that. And also inspired.
My TTRPG is going to be set in and around Arthurian Camelot. Adult me had the thought of "Well, there's literally centuries worth of lore around this area, so I need to make this meet those expectations".
I completely ignored my own literal mission statement: "The idea of this game first and foremost is to be silly and have fun."
Other than people who go deep on historical lore, I think most people's understanding of the King Arthur legend at this point would probably come from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail and some vague cultural sense of there being a round table.
So, realism be damned. I've turned around and thrown my slavishness to the lore and setting away and just jotted down story beats and started working on monsters for the players to have encounters with (including a version of the lady of the lake that has a very vulgar name).
I've also taken a note from my son's game and just thrown together a rudimentary map to start off with.
I'm sure as I go on with writing and planning I'll go back to the lore and tweak things, but I'm not going to worry about that right now.
Right now I'm focusing on making it silly and having fun. Like I said I would do back in July when I first had this idea.
I've stopped giving a damn about the history and lore and am just going to have fun with this. That is allowing much more creative freedom.