RPGs as Creative Process

Is playing and running TTRPGs a creative process?

I think there's different ways to look at this.

GM As Author

For instance, if you want to be an author, you must create and populate the fictional world you're using, make the rules of magic, and design the society. If you use an RPG, the setting and system do this for you. In theory, this should free you up to be more creative.

This freeing of creativity by accepting the twin yoke of rules and setting sometimes can lead to great works. The fantasy anime Record of Lodoss War was based on a D&D campaign. Also in Japan, RPG 'replays', basically novelizations of actual game sessions, were huge during the 80's and 90's, and are still being produced now. In the west, the legendary (but truncated) scifi series Firefly was supposedly based on Traveller.

So RPG can foster the creativity to make great works.

But such is not always the case in reality. A novel based on most D&D games I played in would be boring as fights dragged on and the same spells were used over and over again. Ditto many BRP games, where the whiff factor and lethality of combat could end a story before it begins.

Player As Author

Similarly, an RPG can facilitate the personal narrative. In the old days, this 'zero to hero' or bildungsroman was the driving engine of OD&D. As RPGs developed in the 90's, they also allowed a larger narrative based on how the characters each affect the game world, as in Dragonlance or Exalted.

Now, D&D especially seems to facilitate the memification of charcters, witness countless social media posts about edgy character concepts (axe-guitar wielding Centaur bard, anyone?) and every character in Vox Machina. 

Game Creator As Author

To get back to the OSR, Jeff Rients once famously compared grognards making retrocones to Jedis making their own lightsabers. I agree that going through the process of re-viewing and re-making an old beloved game is akin to keeping alive the 'sad devotion to that ancient religion' whose 'fire had gone out from the universe'.

But re-creation is not creation. It teaches creation via reverse engineering, but needs to go somewhere new.

That is the riddle with which I am now wrestling...

Sources

Is Firefly Based On Traveller substack

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/13668/is-joss-whedons-firefly-based-on-the-traveller-rpg-he-played

Japanese TTRPG Replays

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/7r1jb1/a_fascinating_window_into_the_world_of_japanese/