When I started looking for a plot idea that would lend itself to 150 pages and just 30 days for a rough draft, I wanted something simple, but every idea I looked at, I couldn't come up with an ending. Just recently I realized that I was looking for endings without knowing what the central conflict of the story was supposed to be. I was, quite literally, trying to solve the "problem" of the story before I'd determined what that problem was.

And I find myself wondering… has years of playing roleplaying games, both in the player's and gamemaster's seats, crippled my ability to tell a story on my own? As a player, I've learned to create "starters"… ideas for characters and starting situations, without any strong pre-conceived notion of how the story should progress, let alone end. As a gamemaster, I've learned to set up situations and antagonists, and often have some idea of how things might end, but I've learned to be vague and unattached to any particular story path or outcome.

In short, I've learned to quite deliberately not tell the story on my own. I've learned to create story elements, but then refrain from turning those elements into a story until I sit down to engage with four other people who will bring their own elements, and then together the flesh out the story through our roleplaying interaction.

That's a weird thought that, when I've read so many books on writing fiction and screenplays in an attempt to improve my roleplaying, my roleplaying experience would get in the way of trying to write fiction.