Creating in a Cage

First off, let me just put this out there: I love creating.
I love writing, painting, programming and designing. I love writing for tabletop games or building stuff for LARp games. But as of late I have realised that I feel more and more like these inspirations have turned more into cages than anything else. A restricting, closed in box that I can see out of but can never reach.

Until recently I was running weekly tabletop games for a handful of friends - we ranged from Dungeons and Dragons to Warhammer to Vampire the Masquerade. I had, to be fair, quite a lot of fun writing out all the background of the worlds they explored - the different NPCs they would interact with, the monsters they would fight and so on. The problem that I had would be that I would put so much effort and depth into these worlds only to have the players (quite literally at times) burn the entire thing down. Even settting the game in a Vampire genre where fire should be the absolute last thing they would play with, the teams we had ended up burning down three different clubs, several houses and, in the end, an entire city.
All those chaarcters, all those story arcs all floating away like ash on the hot wind.

Conversely, other issues began to arise - drop outs are a regular thing in most Table Top groups,  but it began to affect the actual game after a while - it's hard to take on a dragon if your archers haven't turned up that day, or to save a dying friend if your healer is running very late, or pretty impossible if you're supposed to break into a house if your thief wasn't feeling up to coming out to play.
I began to write entire story arcs for the characters to play out, entire storylines with character history, vengeful enemies and old friends coming out of the woodwork for them to explore their character with - all of which came to naught when the player would not turn up to explore the meticulously written story.
This reached a tipping point when I allowed the players to choose from a combination of three White Wolf games: Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. A number of players let me know what they were interested in playing "Mage" characters and so I set out to learn the rules and setting for that game; reading up on the Vampire rules and the Werewolf rules.
It was... a lot of reading. A lot of research, and a lot of inventive design to try to make sure that everything in the game could unfold organically, not be too forced to shoe-horned together, and to make sure that no one would be too overpowered.
But I got it done, printed out a frankly embarrassing number of combat tables and character sheets, and started that game. And not a single one of the mage players turned up to play. I shrugged it off, turning the game into - effectively - a vampires and werewolves game, but the same problem began to arise. Sometimes a couple of vampries wouldn't turn up, sometimes the werewolves - at one point not  a single one of the werewolves turned up for the game, making that entire story arc pointless for the week at least, and forcing us to focus solely on the vampires without any werewolf interaction.

After a while we moved on, and one of the charcters (as a human ghoul) died horrifically - the player, who had really invested in this character, asked if he could remain inthe party as a wraith. I thought that it would make for some interesting interaction and cross genre mingling. After doing (again) a LOT of reading about how wraiths work and play, I set up his character and we got started. He came to play one game and then never came back. Hours of reading and research, an entire set up all gone and wasted.

And yeah, I get it, people have lives and other things to do. But it didn't change the feeling that was quickly creeping over me - what I was doing didn't really matter. My writing was getting trapped in a cage, the world was just getting burned down time and again, the characters were simple cannon fodder for the players, and that was only if or when they turned up to play. My writing began to suffer. I decided to put as little effort in as possible and then gave up entirely - because I wasn't enjoying it any more - the entire thing appeared to be depressingly pointless.

The exact same thing happened but from a players perspective in the LARP games I had begun to attend - character growth and exploration could only be very minimal and, in an essence, private. This is great to explore the inner workings of your character but essentially denies any character growth without climbing up the various social ladders set throughout the game - become a military leader, become a high priest, a high mage, or a politician. And I quickly realised that if you wanted to climb these ladders, the method was always the same - the route of the politician. You had to deal with people, earn favours, make deals, debate, and so on. If you wanted to become a powerful mage, you first had to assemble a number of coven members around you, join the right magical order, then spend a good three to four hours in the hall of worlds debating with other mages and listening to them debate. Once that was over you would have to debate with your order and try to wrangle up some mana stones from somewhere to cast any spells of any worth. All boring magical politics - making appeals, filling out requests, and so on. Even creating a spell involved something that resembled and council tax form that had to be filled out in triplicate with addendum 37-B added on and stamped by three Eternals from the accounting department.
It was...frustrating.
Something that did draw my attention was the idea of a darker, seedy underground of Empire - the assassins guild, the thieves guild and so on - until that got shot down very quickly. The drama of it all fizzled out and then, as far as I could tell anyway, died. There was no more mystery - no more lurking.
Issues arose when someone said thye had been sexually assaulted in the game as well - which meant that no one was allowed to go skulking around at night - no more assassins, no more theives. No more conflict. It all appeared to become very....bland and washed out.

The point is that instead of it becoming a foundation upon which to build interesting characters, conflicts, and stories, it became a rather bland and restricting cage. I considered going back but found my enthusiasm for the entire thing dampened. Trying to arrange meets with other players met the same fate - many just wanted to hit things with sticks or hadn't really given their characters much thought - and more and more were dropping out every day. All the drama and excitement that seemed to be getting back to me about Empire were interpersonal conflicts - Out of Character ones. Bitchiness and backstabbing, conflict between players not characters, and all the absurd new rules that were being put out to ensure that new players wouldn't make too much of a mess of the game or end up hurting themselves or others. It became stale.

And lately I have turned all that impotent, useless creativity that I used on my tabletop games and LARP characters into writing for myself - actually creating characters and worlds, stories and horrors, all without the constraints of caged universes....and I have been loving it. I have also been having to fight back the instinct to look things up to see if they would "be allowed" by game rules. The rules are my own, the characters my own, and I have found that I can breathe some genuinely life into them withouth worrying about getting it wrong somehow.

But I have not given up entirely - I will be trying to play in other tabletop games, and may well be attending a few other LARPS throughout the year, but I know this - that focus on my family and my writing, my creativity and influence will come foremost now. Cages are fun to visit, but not to live in.