All Work and No Play Makes Wiz Liz a Dull Girl

AUDIO VERSION

I Need to Start Running Games Again...

...is something I've said far too many times. The more I wait, the more energy it takes to attempt to begin preparing new material or running games. There's the growing performance anxiety which I can get rid of easier when playing with people I know, or just running regularly which in turns makes it easier to take it easy, cause I actually get my gaming fix and don't need to second-guess as much. There's the pull of the Ideal Campaign, that makes me bite more than I can chew and try to start games with a focused group, lots of scheduling involved and the promise of a coherent whole, even though I should know better at this point: one-shots are how I run games efficiently. Campaigns as loosely connected one-shots, or, best case scenario, as the result of an emergent series of coincidences: managing to run games every weeks or so for a long while, core players creating engagement on their own, or simply finding a creative process for prep that I find fun to engage with outside of the table. I tried to start one recently, and gave up after two weeks passed after our first successful game.

A Review of Past Campaigns

There's been many a one-shot over the years, and a whole lot more micro-campaigns, usually interesting stuff we started but never finished, mostly my fault. I get distracted. I get excited about running Cyberpunk and a week later I suddenly crave Dark Fantasy. I burn out. Life gets in the way. Once in a blue moon, it's not even on me, players just drop out. I'm a decent Game Moderator at the table but I am not very good at getting people organized and playing. There's a lot of memorable micro-campaigns I'm skipping here, cause I want to reminisce about what worked in the games that truly did last for months. Spoiler Alert: none of them were planned as campaigns. Also, my memory is sort of shot because of mental health stuff, so I'm not sure about the actual order in which these went.


Digging Castle Redvald was super fun, AND I had some players who were always there, AND I had a fairly easy schedule and just didn't need much prep or mental energy to run it, so it lasted for about six months to a year, IIRC. Running the game was a breeze since I've internalized OD&D's mechanics and the players didn't need to be sold on the concept.

I still love digging dungeons, and would probably enjoy creating a sandbox with lots of broad strokes and a focus on interesting adventuring locales, most likely with a Dungeon people would repeatedly go to.

- Into the Odd x Barrowmaze was mostly about playing tRPGs with my then-girlfriend. We lived together, she loved dungeoneering and I found that having her handle a whole party using ItO+EB mechanics worked super well. The Gang Up rules from EB in particular felt way nicer with one player handling multiple characters, somehow. She was also really big on mapping, and since it was IRL, it was easier to do the whole carthography thing.

Barrowmaze is a very good "classic" dungeon. I'd say it's a bit vanilla but has the advantages of not requiring GMs to read it beforehand as most of the information is fairly tightly written. It's no Gavin Norman level just yet, but it's not verbose so I can just pick it up and run it as-is. Could easily re-skin it for other settings too. But if Redvald taught me one thing, it's that running your own material is just way more engaging. Could have both though.

- Before these, my last long campaign was a Legend of the Five Ring game using A Wanderer's Romance rather than L5R's system. Lots of cool samurai duels and courtly intrigue. It was amazing, but then again, I had a dedicated group of friends, all able to make time and most of them knowing one another, so playing tRPGs was both a part of what made us friends and an excuse to gather regularly. We also played videogames together and just chatted daily. That was a long time ago now. Fond memories in retrospect, but it was exhausting to run cause the more story-oriented structure created a lot of dissonance for me between wanting to let the dice dictate the action, while also fearing situations that would kill our momentum like actually losing a major character (ie: PC).

There is little I can take from that nowadays. I did spend more energy then on in-character banter, and creating NPCs that felt more real since we spent a lot more time simply taking in the setting. Sometimes I wonder if my games could be improved by a less focused approach, if I instead offered more atmosphere and scene-setting. Probably can have my cake and eat it too if I inject more of my writing, boxed texts style, into adventures that would still be tightly focused on problem-solving and so on?

- My very first campaign lasted three years. Two groups, some core players, some passing by. One world which I started running in around 9 yo, kept growing until I was 14 or 15. Sometimes I think about picking up Aedamphia again. Other times I feel like it might need too much reworking, considering how much I've changed as a person since then. Maybe I'll try again some day. I do remember these fictional places like I lived there. In some ways, I've lived there. I have memories of the people and places we shared back then that feel more real than some of my childhood. I've been coming to terms with why exactly that is over the last year or so. It had trolls and corwids and faeries and salt gnomes and all sorts of weird stuff.

The lesson I keep being reminded of was there from the start - we did not try to play "a campaign", we just played the game. Which at the time I called D&D. I like to call adventure games "D&D" just for the baggage, which to me is mostly WONDER, it brings. It works for my friends. It doesn't for people who know about D&D in a nerdy fashion, like non-casual gamers. Either because they think about its problematic aspects, or its design issues, or the multitude of meanings people attribute to it. So instead if I run a fantasy world again, I'll call it Underground Adventures. Maybe for a change I could steal from myself. Compile all of the fantasy stuff I came up with over more than a decade now, do my own kitchen sink hodgepodge, see what sticks. And just play, for a change.

So, what would make me think of just playing, no hassle, effort only in stuff that is actually fun and engaging to work on?

Digging a Dungeon and Filling a Sandbox with interesting and weird stuff I can daydream about. Drawing maps, knowing I don't have to worry about counting coins for XP or keep more interesting/dangerous monsters to level 3 or whatnot cause there's no levels or XP in my games.
It would be about Treasure-Hunting though. Cause I want Rogues and Knaves, "murderhobos" if you will. Adventurers described in three words at character generation, who are mostly defined retroactively by the actual play moments they go through. Cheap, disposable, with memorable, developped characters being something that regular players get to have by simply playing more and affecting the game world. That also means an Open Table - because I don't want to have to run after anyone for scheduling. I can offer a time and date on a weekly basis, see who can make it, who's interested, and just run for 2-3 hours.

The Big Question I'm asking myself is, do I want it to be a mixed space or not, if I'm going to be running for strangers (friends I haven't met yet!) again. What I'm thinking is, I'll offer games from places that I share both design values and political ideas, like the FKR Collective or the Intersectional Playpen and go from there. Maybe I can try both - have some non-mixed queer/poc/neuroA parties at time, see how it feels, and other games that are open to any kind people. It's not that I have anything against cis straight white dudes (some of my best friends are, krkrkrkr), but rather that there's already so many spaces where they're the majority, and sometimes I think that it might feel good to provide similar stuff for my niche game style. I'll look into non-mixed spaces in other domains and learn more about that for now.

Rules-wise, I'd have to go with the one near-diceless system that I always default back to after getting tempted by an addition of more clickety clacky dicing. In its current iteration, it looks like this:

CHARACTERS
a) Quick & Dirty - roll d66 for a background, infer skills, gear, contacts, etc. Name, pronouns, done.
b) Custom - write down a thirty words narrative, that's your character. Could get experimental too.

SAVING THROWS
Classic Traveller-inspired. Players only roll to avoid risks. 2d6 to beat 9+, 7+ with advantage, as default but not automatic target numbers. So 2d6 roll high, beat a TN set in advance, emphasis on making the risk and likelihood of success clear before a player commits. All-purpose, intentionally excluding violence.

VIOLENCE
Skorne frames it even better than Any Planet is Earth. Which has a conclusion that I reached too when studying Classic Traveller's combat rules. Diceless violence works really well with Hits. Four Hits for Players, one to four hits for weapons used in a "typical" combat situation, whatever that means. Armour and shield as additional hits (thanks, Skorne!) - or, could be interesting to graft the even more straightforward notion from 24XX of just "Fine / Injured / Dead" without ressorting to dicing. Or is that not granular enough when going diceless? Needs testing.

Battery dead, it's three AM, I'm done for now. Just needed to write this down.