Comment on “Cooking an Egg”

It really does feel like there's a parallel universe where other people are doing something that they call RPGs, but which bears no resemblance to what you are doing here at the Tao (nor to what your readers are doing with you as inspiration.)

It occurs to me that most creative endeavors must suffer from it. I'm familiar with it in the poetry world, where the "parallel universe" people who think splashing 20 random words onto the page is a poem, and the Smolenskian OGs are sweating over every syllable, every implication of a word's etymology. I don't doubt that you've seen the same for the art of writing, more generally.

It's a separation between people who will do the work and those who will not. Or, between people who will stop at nothing to improve their craft (even if it means throwing away everything they thought they knew), and people who never grow out of the "expert beginner" phase, and think that whatever they learned in the first six months of a skill is all there is to know.

Mulling over whether there is anything unique about the D&D instance of this phenomenon, the difference must be that there are expert writers and expert poets who more or less make up a canon, but there's no such thing as a D&D canon. Yet.