GMs -- Don't we all want to roll our own?

[balzacq]

This comes from a thread in the GURPS forum, about the supposed lack of fantasy settings for GURPS:

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

I think the complaint is that there's no fantasy setting except Yrth, and if you don't like Yrth then you must write or adapt your own.

See, I still just don't get this sentiment. To me, it sounds like saying "I'm creative enough to make up characters, dialog, situations, and trivial world details, but I must slavishly follow someone else's creative vision when it comes to the big picture."

In the last 30 years that I've been gaming, I've come up with (conservatively) ten different non-Earth campaign universes (fantasy and space), most of which I created in the first ten years (jr. high through college). Only a couple of the worlds never got used. I've taken over a couple of friends' campaigns, but even then I altered them to fit my taste. If I'd continued gaming at the same pace, I'm sure I'd have created ten or more additional settings.

I've never found a published campaign that I liked enough to run more than an occasional adventure in*. Greyhawk is too wedded to the idiocies of AD&D. The very map for the Forgotten Realms annoys me. Hârn is too low-magic even for me. Yrth is another case of bad geography. Shadowrun's future history is completely implausible on so many levels. Middle Earth is bogged down by everyone's preconceived notions. Etc.

A setting has to be mine for it to fully hang together for me. Every aspect and decision needs to fulfill my tastes and creative vision for it to be satisfying. And even if it's not fully rounded out for the game's scale, at least I know where the loose ends are.

Yes, to "write or adapt [my] own" is an effort, but it's the fun kind of effort that doesn't feel like "work". And the process of world creation is a ticket to learning -- I can't tell you how many topics I've studied because I wanted to make my world better**. A lot of the impetus to get my B.A. in History I can attribute to wanting to make my fantasy worlds more believable (but then I'm the guy who thought the appendices were the best part of Lord of the Rings). I guess I hold to the auteur theory of GMing.

Is it really the case that most GMs prefer not to create their own settings? Are most GMs merely consumers of world product who then "resell" to their players?






* with the exception of Traveller's 3d Imperium, which I used before it accumulated so much canon as to be completely self-contradictory.

** Just off the top of my head: history (military & otherwise), geology, geomorphology, demography, physics, map projections, political science, economics, ship building. There are lots more.