Dungeons. Dungeons, dungeons, dungeons. I can read dozens of articles on dungeon design. I can take courses, and watch videos. I can look at what I think are good dungeons, and I can tell when something is a bad dungeon… but how do I know if my work, my dungeons, are actually. getting better? Why even make dungeons at all? Why dungeons?
The first part of the answer is “make more dungeons” (and compare the old ones to the new ones), but I only manage to make a couple per year, and they’re not always that thoughtful. I barely even have experience being inside dungeons as a player! I’m a baby! I’ve only played TTRPGs since late 2017, and I’ve only been running them for the last two years… I feel like I’m in a metaphysical crisis, a philosophical despair about the dungeon here.
But dungeons are just an example vehicle for general discussion here – all this is a result of my trying to put one together over the last week. The real point is, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels about game mastery and game design these days. I could run sessions 5 times a week, or write up a dozen scenario hooks, and it would probably lead to some improvement, but it’s not directed practice – my energy isn’t primarily being spent on being a better game master. Rather, I’m just going through the motions. Instead of practicing the metaphorical guitar, I’m just strumming the strings for twenty minutes – it all feels so aimless. What do I need to do, how do I focus on something specific to improve upon? How can I best bridge that gap between theory and praxis?
Even theory is tough – I used to feel quite smart during my university days. I was truly picking up knowledge and figuring out how to apply it… but lately, I can read through game design books and it’s like “what am I even picking up, here?” or “how do I actually study this?”! I’ve nearly forgotten decades of school and how to learn things! Applying it is worse – how do I know when I’ve succeeded? “Your players had fun” is an extremely low bar for me (a good one to strive for with the casual games master, but not really what I’m talking about here). I’m aiming for the intentional application of good gaming. Some sessions will just not work out – they won’t be fun. But that’s never necessarily the game master’s fault alone – it’s a myriad of factors. What I want is to figure out how to parse out those factors – and know that even if things weren’t fun, what did I do right anyway?
It isn’t exactly a self-confidence thing – I think my Cult in the Empire of Decadence was a good module. I even think the Fools’ Day dungeon I’m working on is going to be up to a decent standard. I’m still happy to run things and post my work online (when I manage the time to do the work anyway). But as a “professional” game designer (one that’s making a profit) I don’t want to put out work that’s not worth the price. I probably spent a few hundred dollars on making Cult and maybe 60-80 hours of work on it – how much is my time worth? A lot! I need to pay myself a living wage, after all. It’s not fair to pay myself less. But also – how can you expect consumers to buy something awful? I tried to price Cult fairly – it’s a good piece of work, and I’m proud of it. But I don’t want to be Wizards of the Coast charging $80 for a slim hot mess of a module that needs major re-working, that you then have to pay another $40 extra to get the digital edition of. There are fair wages, and then there’s… that.
That said, maybe the bar for good design is lower than I think it is…
I’m sure you’ve heard it before – in the context of writer’s block and not knowing what to do, the advice often given on writer’s blogs and somesuch is to “write what you know”; this idea that you should take things you’ve experienced and put them into your work and that makes the creative process easy… This also applies to tabletop roleplaying games! And no – not just writing modules (though I’ll get to that).
Last year, I ran a campaign in Stars Without Number, a sci-fi Old-School Rennaissance system by Kevin Crawford. I wrote a bit about it, I think – it’s a great system, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sci-fi (and OSR) to check it out.
But it wasn’t for me. And it’s not because I didn’t like it – I loved it. Kevin Crawford writes good stuff. Go buy the fancy deluxe version right now. The problem was that I don’t actually know shit about sci-fi or even fantasy-based space operas, as it turns out. Running a campaign in a theme I knew very little about (comparatively) was incredibly difficult. I don’t know the tropes (let alone how to possibly subvert them), and I basically just ended up having to peer into the depths of my fantasy knowledge to pull out a generic quest and strap LED lights and chrome on top. Which… kind of is what a space opera is, right? Either way, it was a pain in the ass to prep for, as a lot of my stuff is improvised at the table, and in between sessions I just had to read short sci-fi stories to steal ideas from and it felt like a lot of unnecessary work. I wasn’t a bad game master by any means, but it felt weak.
Fantasy is much easier – I read hundreds of fantasy novels when I was a kid, and even though I do not feel like I know the genre, it’s amazing the amount of stuff and tropes I can pull when creating adventure hooks and ideas for games – just because of what I’ve been exposed to and what I know. I personally probably won’t ever run sci-fi again unless it’s a premade module. I learned my lesson from that. As for writing…
…I did try and write a serious module. I posted about it last month – published under my company, Bovidae Studios. And it was a great project – I’m really pleased with how it came out! Yet, it was still a lot of work when I had to do the serious bits. I took a lot of jokes out of it in one of the final revisions, if you can believe that. I just struggle with writing truly serious content! So I’m taking a bit of a break from my second serious OSE module and writing a comedy one-shot, for April Fools’ day, which also happens to be my birthday (my whole life was a joke, really). It will be PWYW this time (consider it a birthday gift from me), and I’ll probably discount Cult that day too in celebration (in case anyone put it on any wishlists and is hard up for cash). I am not actually very funny, so we’ll see how that goes.
Circling back to the point: I’ve seen neophyte gamemasters ask for advice on how to run games in genres they aren’t familiar with – like if one of their friends wants to play in a Star Wars or a vampire-themed game so they pick up a copy of a system, but they have no interest in it so beg on public forums for someone to quickly explain the basic premise so they can bash something together… and I won’t tell people not to do that. Do what you want – play what’s fun. And do try new things – don’t be too afraid to get out of your comfort zone! Running SWN made me a better game master, and I’m glad I ran it. I try and run a new system at least once a month. But I will say that being familiar with the media that’s influenced what you’re running does absolute wonders. Run what you know.
Speaking of my missed session last week, and combined with some other things I have been thinking about, I would like to talk about time. Session pacing, session scheduling, spot-light sharing, in-game calendars: the works. This is sort of my typical ‘patchwork’ style of writing, so it’s a little about a lot of things without any depth. Maybe I’ll move on to writing more interesting, complex, specific articles someday? Probably not. Enjoy this for what it is, instead:
First up, session pacing. I’ve heard, on multiple occasions, that I am a “god of well-paced sessions, I wish I could run games like you”, as well as simultaneously someone who said I “could use a lot of work, it feels like the characters don’t accomplish anything”. These comments come from multiple different players from different backgrounds, all in the same month-ish timespan. So, am I good at pacing or not? The answer, unsurprisingly, comes down to it depends on the table. Both yes and no. Nobody wants to hear this, but I genuinely don’t think there’s a science to it. Maybe an ‘art’ – people have tried, bloggers have written dozens of articles about it, and while there are definitely plenty of tips that you can (and should) follow, like “bring a man with a gun through the door” when things get slow, or alternating high-intensity situations with lower-intensity downtime scenarios, and these things will help you improve your ability to control pacing… your mileage will inevitably vary, no matter what you do. I feel like even if I mastered and put all these skills to work as intended by the authors and game designers, someone, somewhere, is going to play with me and tell me it sucks anyway. Someone will also tell me I am incredible. Perhaps even two people at the same table. Maybe even the same player. My best advice, for learning how to pace sessions, then, is to set up a situation where your table has the level of trust in place that the GM is able to ask for and receive genuine feedback, where they can start tailoring to the specific group and find out what works. This is the actual trick to pacing – whatever’s fun, let the fun parts happen. Get rid of the stuff your group finds boring. Even if the fun stuff isn’t full of meaningful choices, it’s okay to still have all your shopping trips play out if the table finds it fun. Earlier this week, in session four of my Stars Without Number campaign, I spent probably far more time on the dance competition than was necessary, and I could have resolved it in a single roll…. but it was fun!
Certainly, if you were re-publishing the game as it happened into a book, perhaps you would cut out a lot of that content to make it more fun for the readers. Or perhaps if you ran a stream for a live audience, you want to keep things exciting for the majority (that’s a whole different can of worms). But in our case, the only ‘readers’ that need to enjoy the game are the people at your table. After that – you can always consult the advice blogs for your specific situation, but on their own, in a vacuum, it won’t work. That’s the trouble with GMing, there are almost no wrong ways to do it. I’ve had a lot of personal struggles with doing lot of GM theory-crafting and then when I put it to the table it turns into a mess. That’s a whole other subject, but yeah. Relax. My advice is to just run the game how you think feels best in play, if you find yourself spending too much time on one thing and not enough on another, check in with your players, and then try using different skills to speed it up or to slow it down. You’re always relearning everything with every new table you put together.
Putting those tables together is a whole different beast, though. You’ve heard it countless times: the greatest enemy in tabletop games is real-life scheduling. Players get married and need to take a month off for the wedding, suddenly have kids and need to work around their bed times, call in sick and can’t make it one week, or even end up leaving the table permanently for all kinds of reasons. I’ve had my heart broken several times over by a Numenera game last year that just didn’t work out – people weren’t communicating, we had different ideas on how often to play – things had changed over the past three years. I was left frustrated and upset and I don’t think there’s anything that I could have done to make it better.
Honestly, the best thing I can say here is to state your commitments, find people who are open and honest about their scheduling, communicate often, keep the overall game relatively short (i.e. only 10 weeks versus expected three years), and run regardless of attendance (one on one sessions can still be fun!). Or run an Open Table for as long as you feel like it. There’s not much to say, except it’s frustrating. The long-term things, the multi-year epics… those only complete with luck, a lot of player turnover, or a lot of money. With a lot of vetting practices (maybe I’ll do another post on how I acquire players) and good communication abilities, you absolutely can get a group that plays together and stays together, though, so don’t give up!
All these different players you do manage to get into the same timeslot, though, have other problems: Returning to the ‘fun’ talk, what happens when one player loves shopping trips and another finds it incredibly boring? The easy answer is ‘play with people who all find the same things fun’ and there’s no problem, and there are definitely some aspects of gaming that you cannot compromise on, but the likelihood of actually finding people who all love the exact same things and can bring enough fresh perspective to make the narrative interesting is probably somewhere in the 0.000000000001% range. As much as I love telling people to kick truly uncooperative players, and screaming bankuei’s everlasting great advice that you should be meeting at the game, there are always going to be situations where you have to acquiesce to the other person’s wants. So, the solution is ‘sharing the spotlight’. Make sure, at the end of the day, that most people are having fun, and get as much of a share of the ‘spotlight’ on their fun parts as they want.
Notice how I didn’t say ‘equal’ share. I could almost post an image of that ‘standing-on-boxes’ equity picture; I won’t but it’s the same idea – make sure everybody is having fun the way they want. Usually, it’s that you need to make sure everyone, including the GM, has roughly the same amount of speaking time – however, there are exceptions, such as one of my SWN players who deeply prefers to ‘spectate’ and only have small portions of personal roleplay per session. I have talked to him about this on multiple occasions; talked to that table about this, and everybody is on board with the situation of him mostly listening and putting forward his opinion when it matters. It’s all down to your table and what works for everyone, and listening to your players and adjusting as you go.
I left a game of Burning Wheel recently for this exact issue: it wasn’t the Game Master’s fault, per se (though I think I would have appreciated a more compromising response to my feedback), but it definitely wasn’t the right fit for me. We typically spent multiple hours of session time on a single player, with the expectation that ‘eventually everyone will get a solo session’ of sorts. This didn’t sit right for me, not because it’s terrible game mastery, but because it wasn’t what I found fun. I didn’t want to essentially spectate on a podcast for three hours, and I also didn’t want to ever end up in the situation where I had to narrate my own PC for two hours straight. Perish the thought. I don’t like being the main character, and though I absolutely want good sections of focus – I require a balance, and that table just didn’t have that. I spoke about it and the GM’s decision was final – this is how we’re running it. Back to bankuei – they decided to play a specific “game – for this specific rpg, this specific campaign you’ll be playing, and this particular group of people” and either the expectations earlier had some crossed wires, or I agreed to it and decided it wasn’t what I wanted. I’m not sure, but they’re having fun, and that’s what matters.
So, however you finangle your spotlight to your group, the point is keeping an eye on the clock and making sure you’re actually meeting the expectations of everyone. This shouldn’t be just the GM’s job, but the majority of the responsibility does fall on them to keep an eye on things, and it can be very easy to lose track of time if you get caught up in something the GM personally finds fun (see: my dance competition – I made sure to do a scene swap midway through to give the other players something to do that wasn’t just playing a dance minigame). However this works for you – whether that’s setting actual timers, or just making sure you have a very visible clock in your direct view, doesn’t matter, but you do need to be mindful. That’s far more important than overall pacing – making sure everyone is getting their fair share of what they want out of the game.
On a final note, despite me personally being fine with what happened in my Burning Wheel situation, I do want to point out that generally this really should be a ‘per session’ or ‘per two sessions’ basis. No one should be left out of a game’s fun for an entire session – if such a situation were to need to occur, just run a solo session or smaller group for the players it matters for and maybe give players a short summary to read. Offer them the choice to listen in or not. As mentioned when complaining about scheduling – we only have so much time in our lives. We want to spend it on things that matter, and every three to four hours of gameplay should be fun for the entire table. That is, if a particular player hates combat, it’s okay to have an hour of combat they slog through – but if the whole session is going to be four hours of combat, maybe telling that player to skip that week is better than having them there and suffering. Or, you know, don’t make sessions that are going to be four hours of combat if you know one person hates it.
Time in games is wiggly. For every real-life week, an hour could pass in the game world. Or It could be four months of content (see pacing, earlier). I actually had this article in my drafts when Adventure Forecasts by PCD was published (great article, go read it) and felt I should also add in a note about it, so here it is (if a bit awkwardly placed, it still fits the theme of the post). I’m not a very talented OSR blogger in particular, so I don’t think I have many important personal opinions to say, but here are my opinions on the above:
A living game world is a lot of work. A game where everything you do is realistic and makes sense is a lot of work. Even just writing a calendar of events is a lot of work. I can barely put my own life’s calendar together. The dream of pre-planning all these potential events is something I both want to strive towards, think this article is 100% right in recommending, and something I know is ridiculous for the average layman GM try to achieve. Maybe a professional who only goes GMing as a full-time gig could have the time and resources to spend on it. I think using the technique of having pre-scheduled, missable events in smaller doses throughout the campaign to add verisimilitude, while also keeping ‘static’ events that happen whenever the players interact with them, is a good mix that will keep your mind sane. A GM’s time in real life is just as important as time in the game itself. Don’t go burning yourself out writing potential hooks for every non-player character’s birthday in the game, or countless planet’s worth of holidays. Only do this if you genuinely have fun writing such things.
Time is the only thing we can’t get back in our lives. Spend it on things that create fun.
No session last week, so the last session was two weeks ago (as one player was going to be absent, one was unwell, and I had an event I wanted to attend anyway), but we did run this Monday (I’m just a smidge late getting the summary up). Since I’m a little late in doing the write-up, this may be missing a few finer details but I think I’ve got most of it down. Content warnings for today: None! Uh, there’s a lot of dancing?
The group arrives on planet Halfdis (still in the same system), which consists primarily of poor refugees; listening in on the radio advising them of a cultural archaeological festival happening. They also hear about some recovered footage of ’employees’ being the prime suspects of the casino heists, and some blurry photographs are on the net (the party doesn’t actually look these up). Blanche (whose player is absent for this session) is exhausted from the long rushed flight and remains on the ship. The rest of the group (Pillboi, Hermes, and Caitlin) are quickly pushed in from the starport next to the festival location, and as they chatter about their plans, head into the festival area. They somehow don’t think to check the guest list for the missing woman, Corinne, despite being asked for their IDs on entry (oof) and when they arrive, look around for anyone who works for the Ragni (space mafia faction, if you recall, who supposedly kidnapped Corinne). They follow a few patrols, which I hastily decide are on a loop from the food area (hosted by Cat’s Cradle Courier company and where they have a mini docking area for the courier ships – one of which belongs to the group that raided the casino and working the festival is their current cover) and poke around.
Not much happens here – they order some food (a recurring theme, I’ll have to make up some interesting local dishes for future planets), but they do spot a suspicious ‘familiar’ figure (Omen, the cat Blanche hit over the head at the casino, though the players don’t remember him) out wandering in the closed-off courier ship dock, but choose not to pursue; instead wandering over to the giant green spire in the centre of the city after being offered a few flyers by a passing Jade Spire Protector (who seek to leave the archaeological finds of the planet alone) insisting they take action against the Heritors (who want to remove the objects, study them, and display them to the public). The group does a cute little museum tour, but sees no sign of the Ragni. A tempting poster offer looking for ‘adventurers/excavators to brave the ruin’ almost lures them away from their target, but Caitlin’s resolve in finding Corinne is firm and they head back to the food stalls area.
At this point, I figure they need some action, so I immediately pull in the grand dance competition, of which preparations had begun while the party was away. The crowd had been given pointy green cone-hats showing off their planet spirit, and all of them were jumping up and down to reach the skies and swaying to the music. Corinne (the ‘missing’ woman), conveniently, is visible up by the stage, signing up for entry. The party, of course, decides that all three of them will enter the dance competition. I then proceed to do a fun minigame dance competition, which might have stretched on just a smidge too long – next time I’ll reduce it to two rounds each, where they score points based on the number of successes gained during their performance opposed to the other. Each dancer takes a turn and picks a level of difficulty – an easy move (roll a 6 or higher), a moderately difficult move (roll a 10 or higher), or an expert fanciful move (get a 12 or higher), and scores one, two, or three points respectively if they succeed. They score 0 points if they fail. Each 1 vs 1 has three rounds, so everyone got to pick three turns. I loved running this, honestly, I think I did a pretty good job with the announcer and the group got to narrate their successful and failed dance moves as they saw fit (they were only as foolish-looking as they wanted to be).
While Hermes and Pillboi were on stage, dancing up a storm, Catilin scuffled over to Corinne and made conversation. Caitlin heard of Corinne’s current career as a ‘World of Final Fantasy 342’ illicit gold-miner, but did not believe Corinne for a second that she was “just here on vacation”, and knew something was up. Pillboi, losing to Hermes in the second round, returned just as Corinne was called up on stage to face against Hermes, the undefeated winner so far. Midway through their dance battle, however, Corrine’s compad beeped, and she hastily left the stage mid-fight. Catilin was called up next, turned to Pillboi and said “you better not let that girl out of your sight”, and strutted on stage while Pillboi dashed after her.
Pillboi tried to get her attention, but Corinne blew him off, so he kept his distance and managed to follow her to the courier port, where the two hopped the fence and Corinne knocked on one of the starship’s doors. Sliding underneath the belly of the small ship, and listening in, Pillboi overheard Corinne being given a package (the stolen credit chips from the casino) and her instructions of not opening it, not telling anyone about it, or else it would result in her death. “And that’s not my threat, that’s my boss’s threat”, one of the crew (Omen) said. Pillboi stayed under the ship and listened in on their conversation a bit longer, learning that one of them was named Taz, before snapping a sneaky photo of the interior (the back of Omen’s head, and a straight-on photo of Taz, the ship’s engineer/programmer), before sneaking back to meet up with the group.
Meanwhile, the dance competition was culminating in one final match: Caitlin versus Hermes. Catilin got a huge lead as she’s a performer at heart, and was incredibly successful, so the only way for Hermes to tie with her was to complete an expert-level move…
…Except Hermes physically cannot roll more than an 11 based on his negative modifiers. Knowing this, Hermes’ player lets the table know that his character is going to attempt the splits, and, upon obviously failing, narrates how his character’s pants rip on stage, exposing his ass to the world. A glorious way to go out. Caitlin takes the (literal) crown – the reward being 500 credits and a giant eight-foot-tall golden cone-shaped hat, which she wears throughout the rest of the session.
Back to the actually-important-bit, the crew aren’t sure what to do next with this information. They decide to check Corinne’s dataslab which they brought with them, given by her sister) and check for any information on hotels or inns Corinne might have been staying. I accidentally fucked up the timing here, but the group didn’t notice, but anyway they did find out the location of her hotel. They hung around the festival for a bit, watched some jousting and wrestling competitions, and then made their plans to sneak into the hotel at night.
Since the group had the reservation listed on the dataslab, Caitlin posed as Corinne and got a spare key card from the front desk, and then headed up to Corinne’s room, where they confronted her regarding the situation. Corinne came clean (she’s not very smart socially, and easily coerced) to the group and they offered to help her. They told her to proceed as normal, and get on the outgoing flight as per her instructions, and they would meet her at the starport on Shan and, after dropping off the package, would help her and her sister find safety. They offered a touching video call with Sheila, and the two sisters reconciled their differences over the phone. The party then gave Corinne the new key to her hotel room (Corinne was very confused why they had a key to her hotel room) and bid her goodnight.
Then the three of them stood in the hallway, argued about how stupid that was, how they could lose her, and then knocked on the door again and told Corinne to actually just fly with them instead of going to the meeting place alone. Corinne, who had gone to bed, was sort of irritated and even more confused but agreed because it was pretty late, and the four of them decided to meet at their ship tomorrow morning.
The session was fun. It was the first time I had to do multiple “two NPCs are talking together because the PCs are listening in on their conversation” which I’ve maybe actually never done before. Talking to yourself is weird, in a way. That said, it worked surprisingly well, and my voices were distinct enough and the scene short enough (a few sentences) that it was good. I liked it. I kind of wish I had prepped less ‘interesting festival activities’ and one more ‘interesting plot hook’. I had a few, and they are going to return to deal with one next week, but I still felt like I was short (even though I prepped like ten different things). Maybe more little events? a food stall vendor needs help with something that just takes a few minutes? Who knows. My player said that he thought it was just the right amount of things to flesh out the world, however, so I’ll take his word on it for now.
More on that, though: in an effort to satisfy my players’ request of ‘we want more points of interest and faster pacing’ I felt like things were far more linear than I’d like? Any moment things got slow, I brought the action to them rather than letting them seek it (good, generally!). However, my party doesn’t currently like seeking their own adventure (RIP my sandbox), so it’s what they wanted. That said, the way I executed it was a bit out of regular form for me, felt a bit like ‘this is my story idea’ (even though it truly is not, they caused this) rather than the group’s and I don’t love it. Workshopping new strategies later, but I think I’m on the right track. I did appreciate the changes though – it can be a good exercise to go out of your regular GMing comfort zone. Still didn’t quite work but I’m slowly figuring out why. One of my players has always been a quieter ‘spectator’ type so I might see how he’s feeling about a more focused session on him later, but he did do a lot of things he wanted, so he was happy. The session overall was very fun, and a lot of information got given to the party which will coalesce into something cool probably. Next week I have to prep a dungeon, iron out those loose plot threads and pull ’em back into something interesting…
…So, next session they’ve decided they’re going to deal with Corinne’s package, head to Shan with her, and sort out a way for her and her sister to escape. They, for some reason, assumed the package contained a bomb? Anyway, it’s not a bomb. I’m not sure why they didn’t want to open the package but presumably, they will open it during the flight back? Afterwards, they actually want to head back to Halfdis to explore the Spire’s ruin. I’m looking forward to it, as I literally just ripped it from Numenera’s Jade Colossus, which I was going to run last year but the game didn’t end up coming to fruition, so a lot of the material I know! It’s going to be fun – I’ll have to do a bit of combat prep which I so far haven’t done for this game. Speaking of combat pep, Corinne was going to be killed by the Ragni as soon as she met to do the package drop-off (why would they risk any witnesses?), so I’m glad the party isn’t just skulking around after her, though they won’t have a lot of time since they’re waiting until morning to leave. I don’t think it makes sense for the Ragni to have guards stationed at Sheila’s home, so she will be fine so long as the group can beat them there if they escape with Corinne… But I am uncertain how it’s all going to go down. Time will tell.
I moved across provinces back in 2017. My spouse and I spent a little over a year apart, before deciding that we would both stay here in Saskatchewan long-term after my second degree. We made a few good friends when we moved here – Ben and Eric, but as they were my friends ‘first’, I wanted to give my spouse some time to get to know them without me around, so they wouldn’t just be “‘Beef’s friends’, but ‘our friends’. So, the Fast Food Aventures Trio was born! They don’t actually call themselves that, but basically the three of them would get together every few months and try weird fast-food menu items – the “Meat Mountain” secret menu addition at Arby’s, the limited edition “Double-Down” at KFC, etc. My spouse rarely eats that sort of stuff, so it was always kind of a fun event to do.
About a month ago, I discovered that Wendy’s (yes, the fast-food chain) put out a free tabletop roleplaying game a few years ago called Feast of Legends as part of a marketing scheme. I knew I had to run it, though I obviously doubted its quality -first – my name is Beef, so the fact that the world map of the game was called “Beef’s Keep” was a blatant irony I sought desperately to exploit. And second – this actually kind of lines up with my spouse’s activities and it would be a nice opportunity to bridge our interests: I figured that while my spouse wasn’t normally into tabletop, he would acquiesce in favour of combining it with ordering food from Wendy’s with Ben and Eric. So, a few weeks later we set a date, and a new legendary journey begins…
I’d like to split this review into two parts: first, the actual game mechanics, and second, the adventure campaign module that comes written along with the system. I should note that Wendy’s actually removed the game from their website a while back, but you can still find it from various internet archive sources. First, mechanics-wise, Feast of Legends is surprisingly functional. It’s a D20 system, probably a bit of a hack of D&D, and all the stats and etc. make sense. The writing is great – the ‘roll 4d4 for your stats, just like our 4 for $4 deal’ and ‘if you eat these Wendy’s items in real life, you get a bonus’ are quite clever little additions. On that note, though – the character sheets aren’t very well designed, or perhaps the food item bonuses aren’t clear, but it reads as if you add your temporary bonus to your base stat, not the modifiers, and there’s no spot to the character sheet to put these bonuses, which means you have to manually adjust your base stats and modifiers and then remember to put all the numbers back at the end of the session? Huh. A bit of an oversight that would have just been helped by an extra box. Chargen is fast at least (literally just pick your ‘class’ and roll stats), but it also weirdly doesn’t have good rules surrounding how to handle initial equipment (you may want to plan ahead what is OK and what isn’t OK for the game) – but I mean, you’re playing a TTRPG put out by a fast-food chain: Who cares if they get the ultimate fried chicken armour and wield the 1d10 damage whisk?
Spellcasting is also not really discussed – technically it’s just “you can use these skills and they function as spells”, but it feels weirdly phrased and almost like magic is ‘absent’ from the game – despite pretty much every “Order” being ability/magic-focused. A player asked me how he cast spells and I had to pause and say “I don’t know. You just… do them…?”. Welp. There’s also some terminology that got missed in editing – the actual stat is called ‘Grace’, and there are references in the Orders to not being able to use ‘graceful’ weapons, but then weapons are categorised as ‘finesse’ weapons on the actual tables – most likely they changed the name from finesse to grace and then forgot about it. But, hey – this is a free TTRPG, clearly made by like four people (there’s a bit of interjected genuine very author commentary throughout about their playtests, which I enjoy) and I forgive the company for making a few missteps here.
Whoever got this past the editors at Wendy’s, you are a star.
That said, the adventure module is objectively terrible. I was going to just run it with minimal prep (this is a ‘just for fun’ game, after all), but reading it I was immediately struck with wasted time, ‘let your players explore aimlessly until they see the fountain’, dead ends, and, worst of all, a lot of ‘they have to answer all four riddles correctly in a row or else the doors close for two hours and the party just kind of has to sit there until they reopen so they can try again even though the time punishment has no effect on the narrative’. That last one isn’t an exaggeration – it’s literally in the book:
Incredible.
I went ahead and went through every page and crossed out all unnecessary portions, and probably ended up with like a 2-3 session campaign that would have been significantly better than the multi-year-long adventure module in terms of actually having people play through it. The campaign itself, even, has a magical item at the end of the first area that instantly max-levels every character. So there’s no reason to keep playing for…. months after that. Just take them right to the boss for a final hoorah! Anyway. Maybe I’ll post my cut-up remix later if anybody actually wants to read it (I doubt it, but you never know). I would appreciate being able to showcase my edits in some fashion though, because, hilariously, the actual game barely happened: everyone ate their meals and then we played for 45 minutes, with one single combat, before the players had to leave. All my effort into learning and reading and running a Wendy’s TTRPG… wasted. The party literally ran into a mysterious guy, he told them to defeat the evils in the French Fry Forest, went over and fought two kobold-analogous enemies, and then went back, job done, saved the kingdom, hooray!
Overall I give it a solid 6/10 game system. Maybe 7/10 for the humour.
I’ve spent the last several weeks getting my Stars Without Number campaign going and yesterday was our first session after player vetting, interviews, a practice one-shot, and character creation/premise set up. This first part will be a bit long as there are character introductions and whatnot. I plan on mixing a bit of narrative play with my processes as a games master, and just writing the session summaries as I find the most fun to write, rather than to meet any kind of entertainment goal. The campaign is anticipated to last around 10-20 sessions at most, though we’ll see how well it lends itself to a natural end. Additionally, as a forewarning, I will be abandoning a fair bit of SWN’s default lore in favour of a more sci-fi kitchen sink space-opera tale, but some parts of it are kept to keep things coherent and to have a solid foundation to go off of. I also do not claim any of the following tales or designs are a reflection of how anything would actually function in the real world scientifically or physically, though I do try to keep it consistent and fair and how I would think things would work out logically. But I’m not here to do extensive science homework – I’m here to just tell people where to aim their sick laser pistols. My sincerest apologies in advance to the hardcore science fiction nerds, the physicists, and the chemists in the world.
With that out of the way, let’s get on with the show! Warnings for today: suffocation, drugs, alcohol, and human death & suffering ahead. The backstories are still pretty loose to start, but our cast consists of:
Blanche (23, she/her), the former “Cat’s Cradle” courier company driver. Pilot. Uplifted actual cat. Ran off with her company’s free merchant and cargo, and decided a life of smuggling drugs will get more money for her poor family back home. Also, kind of doesn’t want to go to jail after stealing the ship. Currently presumed dead by her former employer.
Hermes Hurtwell (18, he/him), our child prodigy software engineer (worked for Cat’s Cradle) turned space hacker. graduated young and entered the workforce too early – he quit his company in absolute rage and figures he can make better use of his skills on the black market. Not on good terms with his former employer.
Caitlin Wynter (23, she/her), a psychic goth theatre kid – took out a student loan through some sort of space mafia-type business and now they’re after her head. Not on good terms with said space mafia.
“Pillboi” (late 20s, he/him), resident ‘medical professional’. Sells drugs. Has a sick neon mohawk. Dips into his own supply, and would like to use the party’s free merchant courier ship to fund his new entrepreneurial operation of drug growing and smuggling. The rest of the crew seems to be on board. Has past connections with space mafia.
Let’s set the stage: it’s New Year’s Eve, December 31st 3199, and these four future entrepreneurs are having a party to ring in the new century. It’s Hermes’ 18th birthday, he quit his job that morning, and he’s getting shitfaced at the bar complaining up a storm about how piss poor the processes were. Caitlin, enthused by his goth depressing demeanour and having lost her theatre friends in the massive crowds of people, hits him up to share a few drinks, as a nearby courier, Blanche, attempts to find the owner of a package (unsuccessfully). Exhausted from her shift, she joins the two of them in complaining about their career situations. The three of them have a progressively more and more depressing conversation about the state of the economy, where an enterprising Pillboi steps in to offer them a little something to cheer them up. After a bit of back and forth, the four of them continue their bar crawl late into the night and eventually come to a brilliant heavily intoxicated decision: the three of them will take Blanche’s work ship and join Pillboi on his drug selling business and become the “highest” self-employed entrepreneurs in the galaxy. There are rumours of a plant on Blanche’s home planet, Terra Purr’ma, that has interesting properties when ingested by humans (as opposed to the native uplifted cat folk). Taking a few doses of a substance only brought out for ‘special occasions provided by Pillboi, the four of them black out.
…They wake up in a random part of space a few days later – clearly having gotten up to some sort of business, and only vaguely recalling their plans to become “self-employed”. but they’ve gone too far now – Blanche won’t be able to keep her job after running off with the ship, Hermes and Catilin have nowhere else to go, and Pillboi is excited at their future prospects. They spend almost two weeks getting the remaining cargo illegally sold off, and scrape the id from the courier ship, upgrading it to something a little more befitting of budding space adventurers with the money earned. They have a hefty 25 000 credits leftover to kickstart their pharmaceuticals business and decide to start getting a laboratory set up.
A lot of the above scenes were roleplayed out for fun, and to get folks’ feet wet in figuring out their characters, but had been decided ahead of time during character creation by the entire group as the premise-buy in (they said the concept of ‘The Hanover: In Space’ was hilarious) as to how their adventure started. I did not plan on running for a group of drug-smuggling bastards, but I appreciated the energy and I’m down for it. Please note that I, along with many of my players, haven’t done anything more than drink a few shots in my life, so a lot of the drug nonsense is truly nonsense. We plan on handling addiction fairly tastefully but a lot of it will be played for laughs as far as the party is concerned (not so much for my NPCs). It’s a group of ragtag idiots in a very harsh, very real and unforgiving world. So, from here, I set them down on a nearby planet, Kalmar, to acquire some materials to set up their lab, and gave them a bit of a primer for the locale:
Kalmar, is a planet in which breathable oxygen is at a premium. The dominant gas is sulfuric; if there was water on the surface, it’s evaporated due to the greenhouse effects reflective sulfur clouds would cause, and most of it is imported heavily from off-planet. Anyone venturing out into the sandy wastes needs a hefty oxygen supply. Settlements are either pod-like or underground where it’s cooler and water may still be available – however, they need to be fairly resistant to damage against the tunnelling, massive worms that occupy most of the surface of the planet. The largest settlement on the planet is also the oldest and has seen a long period of wear and repair, at this point looking as though it is barely held together with scraps.
The planet itself is rich in valuable minerals as well as a unique resource – calvinite, which is used to create speciality ship jump drives, among other things (such as purification for certain pharmaceuticals…), and day labourers are paid well for the dangerous conditions. Kalmar itself did not have a native sapient population but has been since colonised by a wide variety of intelligent life forms from across the galaxy. Most of the labourers on the planet are the ‘Futzes’, whose unique bodies can quickly adapt to extreme temperature changes and require very little water; and as such, do not require expensive habitation equipment to venture outside of settlements (though they still need a mobile oxygen source to breathe, and protection from the toxic gas). That said, as oxygen is rationed, a large number of the population has suffered severe health problems, which has put most of the settlers in extreme medical debt.
The mines, as the players arrive, are closed as of yesterday – the giant sandworms have unfortunately started their mating season much, much earlier than expected and the main major mine had to do an emergency shut down. Most of the valuable minerals have been pulled, and due to the perceived upcoming shortage, none of the calvinite that the players are after are for sale. However, a young Futz named Basil is ready to offer the players exclusive ‘back-alley’ access to the mines. It’ll be dangerous, with the worms about, and they’ll have to pay him for equipment and oxygen supplies (he’s trying to fund his brain surgery after an accident), but they can go in. A lot of the material is already mined, they just have to hope that they’re lucky enough to find cases of it left behind by the fleeing miners.
As a GM, I looked into a number of ways to handle this mission – I could put a fair amount of prep into it as thanks to our agreed-upon premise and time skip, I could start them in media res at Basil’s ‘shop’ preparing to go in, rather than risk them faffing about with other decisions, so we could kick things off with a bang before the sandbox opened up, and get them in a situation with clear goals. I decided to go with a miniature hexcrawl – it would allow them to learn the process of the hexcrawl, how I roll per hex at a smaller and faster pace, which will help them when we move to the larger hex-based space map when travelling to various planets (I’m going with the Planetville trope, here, for this campaign), and it gives a good look into the more nuanced approach to attrition and resource-management required in OSR systems. I think as new players (3/4 have only ever really played D&D5e) it’s a good way to showcase the style of play a fair bit. It’s also, technically, my first time using a crawl-styled structure and I wanted a space where I too could really grok the mechanics before moving to a larger space where things might have a different scale, and larger stakes.
a reference sketch of the miniature hexcrawl I sent them on. I like tracking things on paper.
I started with 60 hexes (later adjusted to I think 62 just to allow for some spacing issues on my VTT, Foundry) and then started decorating. Basil would send the players through one exit (bottom centre), and mention that while there are two other exits (on the left and right sides) that could be used in the case of emergencies, this was the only exit that he could guarantee would be unguarded, so no one would run the risk of being arrested for trespassing (and potentially theft). I wanted multiple exits because one of the main mechanics I decided on was for every hex moved, there would be a 10%+ increase of a sandworm tunnelling in and collapsing the tunnel behind them (so they wouldn’t be able to move back to the previous hex). Somewhat inspired by the ‘churn’ mechanics of The Expanse RPG, (and out of a back-and-forth discussion with other GMs), I basically tallied up the percentage change and rolled a d10, resetting the total chance to 0% after a worm was triggered. Each hex required 1 unit of oxygen per player to navigate (Basil sold each unit at 50 credits apiece), and they could expend an additional unit to dig through caved-in sections, do a more thorough exploration of the hex, etc. I scattered a number of hexes where 1d4 units of calvinite could be found, as well as three 1d4x2 caches of extra oxygen throughout. The players had two carts that each held 30 units of material (either oxygen or calvinite). I made it two carts as I wanted to give them the option to split up and cover more ground if they wanted (which they did opt to do). There were eight encounter hexes which I rolled on a table for, and minecarts that went one way, taking them through the caves faster, but the players wouldn’t know where they would end up and would need to ensure they had enough oxygen to get back from wherever the carts had taken them (somewhat inspired by Snakes & Ladders).
The players opted to purchase the full 3000 credits worth of 60 units of oxygen, confident they could make the money back with the acquisition of enough calvinite, and split into teams of two – giving them 15 hexes of movement each, barring any complications. The groups also had access to suits that, if the players ran out of oxygen, would inject a chemical into their bodies that would save their lives and allow them to subsist for a time without (but at the cost of severe lung and brain damage). I wanted to include these because, as helpfully pointed out by a fellow GM, “is it really fun if the players all suffocate to death alone in caves during the first session”? Probably not, so best to have some ’emergency contraceptive’ in the case of an accidental TPK. Back to the narrative:
Pillboi and Hermes trudged cautiously through the caverns – there wasn’t much to see in this area of the recently-abandoned mineshafts, but they had two nerve-wracking run-ins with tunnelling cave worms, and opted to adjust their route to proceed more carefully. Pillboi heard whispers in a room up ahead – and found two other rival ‘entrepreneurs’ scouring the caves in discount suits (presumably also sold by Basil) in search of calvinite. Knives out, and pistols drawn, the two pairs nervously faced off in a stalement, neither interested in risking their lives over some rocks. Hermes and Pillboi decided to imitate security guards, checking the caves for straggling miners, and convinced the two men to give up their stolen goods in exchange for additional oxygen to assist in their swift exit from the caves. With the agreement in place, and tensions lowering, the two groups split off in opposite directions – only for Hermes and Pillboi to find themselves stuck at a large crevasse, their only change of passage being to backtrack and dig through the previously collapsed tunnels in order to make their way back. Arriving at the entrance with just three units of calvinite, and barely two units of oxygen to spare, the two waited patiently for their other half of the party to arrive.
While this was happening, Blanche and Caitlin were heading in the opposite direction. Immediately upon splitting with Pillboi and Hermes, the two found themselves in a room filled with shallow puddles of water. Testing for acid, they safely trudged through the harmless brackish ponds, but not without causing a fair amount of noise to echo through the tunnels… Not wanting to risk the unwanted attention of the sandworms, or worse things, the two opted to ride the rail carts deeper into the mines. This proved fruitful, as they found several caches of supplies, including some mining equipment and spare oxygen tanks, and three units of calvinite. Making their way back towards the exit, the two heard the wheezing, rasping breath of a slowly suffocating unknown. The two looked at each other, and looked at their supply… they were too deep in the mines, and couldn’t afford to provide any oxygen or assistance to the dying one. Blanche and Caitlin hurriedly avoided the person in trouble, and snuck off into the dark, the desperate breathing ceasing quietly behind them. Not completely heartless, however, the two found another twitching, desperate soul that had used their emergency injection to stall their death, and loaded them onto the cart, sacrificing some of their cargo space. The two managed to meet up with Pillboi and Hermes at last, narrowly escaping one final collapsing cavern behind them, the worms tunnelling away, leaving the mine inaccessible from this entrance…
We called it there – a good 2.5-hour-long session. The person in need of medical aid was handed over to Basil to escort to a nearby medical facility, their goods brought to their ship and borrowed carts returned. XP was given out, and character advancements are to be processed over the upcoming week prior to the next session.
There are a few things I’d change: I would probably telegraph the ‘churn’ mechanics a bit more – no harm done, but I think it would have ramped up the suspense/stakes a fair bit. I think the number of encounters could have been increased on the board – there were a few too many empty hexes (but the length of the session overall was also quite well-paced, so I’m not sure about this one). I went back and forth between each group to give each of them equal screentime, though at one point a player had to grab a salad and it threw the balance a little off-kilter when continuing to play around it, I think it all worked out in the end. I would definitely do a 2 hexes-per group alternation in the future. One hex is a bit too short, especially if nothing is there, but more than two hexes mean things can drag on (especially if one side runs into a lot of encounters). I do want to keep timekeeping consistent between the groups as each one can affect the whole map with cave-ins. Overall, the numbers seemed fair, and other than potentially tweaking the value of everything depending on the campaign being run, I think it overall came out great! My players (one of whom is a GM himself) thought it was an excellent structure to run the session’s goals in. One other thing that was a bit unprecedented was the group wanted to keep the oxygen tanks and suits for ‘future missions’ – which I suppose I now ought to plan on including! I think I’ll probably run something similar underwater in a future session, and see if I can improve on the design a bit…
Somewhat related to the last post, Leaving D&D5e, I should probably specify why I don’t like the system. I hadn’t actually grokked the reality of my feelings until earlier this morning, where I managed to write something in a conversation that I think was incredibly thoughtful and truly struck a chord as to answering why I don’t like the system, beyond a simple “it doesn’t do what I want out of a game” or “the rules are broken”, and even reflects on why I don’t like FATE Core, my problems with my home system of Numenera, and why my review of Ryuutama was so lukewarm!
Someone asked, a bit tongue-in-cheek, while we were discussing alternative systems, well “which [system] is the objective best”? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing, and my friend replied as such – “there’s no objectively best system because they all answer different questions”. Therefore, then… The problems with systems come in when they fail to answer the questions they say they want to answer. This is where you get gripes with D&D5e, Shadowrun, etc. – most of my disliked systems are not disliked for their mechanics specifically, but because the mechanics and goals of the system seem to have failed to connect. Ryuutama had a weird amount of lethality to it for something that was thematically Ghilbi-esque, Numenera‘s combat and initiative system makes no sense for the logic-based rulings over rules guidelines, and FATE Core (review incoming)’s problem is that none of the mechanics actually work together to create something cohesive that answers goals. You hear time and time again from people who have played Shadowrun that they “love Shadowrun, hate the system” because the mechanics are just not conducive to the theme.
Recently I played Scum & Villainy, a “FitD” system that probably could merit its own review post, but I’ll just bust a quick one out here: I loved it. It did exactly what it was meant to do and the mechanics and the gameplay went perfectly hand in hand with the theme of the game we were playing (‘idiot assholes do shady jobs in space’). But I actually do not often care for PbtA-built systems, which is where FitD was born out of – but I liked this because it worked well. I love Numenera and nearly loathe Cypher because the system caters to Numenera‘s settings and goals and disconnecting the cyphers from that setting makes Cypher, well, not as impactful. It doesn’t feel good as a universal system.
What questions is D&D5e trying to answer? What are the goals of the system? One could say that it is in the name, ‘Dungeons’ and ‘Dragons’, but plenty of other bloggers have gone into the problems of the game no longer teaching people how to play or run dungeons, and how the mechanics of attrition seem to be fading away in favour of more narrative approaches. I think in order to become a better system in future iterations, the designers really need to lean into that more and change the rules to accomplish the goals that the designers actually want to achieve. But, they probably won’t, because D&D5e makes a lot of money as is… and that is why I think people should get away from 5e, not because it’s just, completely bad, or wrong, but because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing, and you have so many options that actually do a) what “D&D” is supposed to be and/or b) what you want to do in a game.
Woof, this title’s a bit of a misnomer, but it gets the idea across. This is a bit of a spicy one. As an early caveat, if you like D&D5e, keep playing it, and don’t tell me why it’s great. This blog post isn’t for you.
The first game system I ever played was Numenera, and I played it for about 2 years before moving on to trying other systems. I’d call myself fortunate, in a way, that my introduction to the hobby wasn’t Dungeons & Dragons, but for the most part, a lot of people’s first game system is going to be Dungeons and Dragons 5e (the current edition as of this writing). Dungeons & Dragons is arguably the very first TTRPG series to come out of wargames, and it makes sense why it has continued to be a mainstay in the tabletop community – it has clout. More recently, Podcasts and shows like Critical Role or Stranger Things have really brought a lot of new people to the hobby, and if you look on any ‘Looking for Group’ style community, such as on roll20, a huge majority of the people looking for games are going to be playing or running D&D 5e.
And it makes sense – D&D was always fairly easy to grok the premise of: everybody knows now what ‘medieval fantasy’ is. You have dragons, heroes, elves, wizards and all that stuff – you don’t need to explain to your grandma what a dragon is. She knows. While there is a lot of different worldbuilding in 5e with the Forgotten Realms setting, a lot of it is still on that Lord of the Rings-esque premise, and it’s easy to know what’s going on. Genres like sci-fi are also easy to grok, but it’s still a “nerdy” niche that a lot of people are going to be unfamiliar with past a certain point. Medieval fantasy is easy. Numenera combines the two into something truly strange – and getting people into understanding the setting takes effort, an effort a lot of people aren’t necessarily going to want to look into before starting a game – sure, (though I will say it wasn’t required of me in my introduction).
However, the mechanical rules of the game are a different beast. If people say that D&D5e is “easy to pick up and learn”, they may be referring to the above setting grok, but the game itself is hard to figure out. It’s not beginner-friendly. The game has baggage, rules that don’t make sense, misprints, overcomplicated sections that everyone has trouble with (grappling, action economy), and when someone comes to me and says “5e is great, it’s so easy to get new people to play it” I think those people are wrong. And normally, I’d say to each their own, but tabletop games are such a wonderful hobby, and if someone tries running D&D as a new Dungeon Master, and they find it hard, they’re going to think that any other game system is just as difficult to get into, and they’ll either quit the hobby altogether, or continue to try and desperately pull the things they want out of the hobby out of an unsuitable system for their needs and spend their days feeling frustrated.
D&D5e is popular for a reason. If you don’t know anyone else interested in TTRPGs, it’s a great way to find new players and friends to play with. I’ve run it for an Open Table before just because I wanted that cast of rotating weekly players (though now I might run Moldvay’s D&d instead). But it’s not my go-to for tabletop gaming, and I don’t think it’s helpful to encourage everyone to start with D&D 5e, or to tell them that it’s the ‘easiest to get into’, because it sets up that new GM for failure if they meet any sort of resistance (which in D&D 5e’s case, could be very often). There are so many different game systems out there that are so easy to get into – literally you can pick up and finish Honey Heistas if it were a board game in less than an hour or two, and get the idea of what a tabletop game is supposed to feel like. It sets the wrong kind of precedent for the TTRPG hobby as a whole, that tabletop games are a lot of work and heavy-duty commitment; so many games don’t have near as many rules as D&D 5e does or require that 4-hour-one-a-week-for-two-years commitment.
I hear time and time again from people who love D&D5e who say that trying a new system sounds hard. They say that it’s hard because they look back at all the work they’ve put into learning to play 5e (or 4e, or 3.5e, even) and think they have to put all that work in again. It’s not fair to say ‘most people don’t have the time to invest in a new system’ because often the systems being recommended actually have a very low cost of investment to start. To quote a friend, “there are some vicious cycles going on in this space too, where the thing is popular, so people play it, and because people play it, it becomes popular” and I think that discouraging anyone, especially yourself, from trying other systems under the premise that it’s ‘too much work’, or that D&D’s popularity and rapport are more important than anything mechanical, doesn’t help break that cycle, is setting a poor standard with D&D 5e, and it doesn’t help the hobby grow.
My ‘interview’ one shot to recruit some new players for my upcoming Stars Without Number (‘SWN’) campaign went live last night. I enjoy reviewing my sessions after as it allows me to keep track of notes as well as areas where I can improve, so this is more of a personal exercise than a public one, but hopefully, there’s something in it people could find value in.
After a year of running tabletops, I’ve really started refining my vetting process. Not everyone works well at every table (even I would be a terrible fit for plenty of games out there) and being picky and thorough with who you play with is important. Along with private text-based ‘interviews’ (read: me just asking them questions about tabletop I find important), I like to actually play with folks once or twice in single-session games to get a read on how they’d be long-term. Additionally – if you find that you don’t gel with someone at the table, the idea that not being able to play games with someone isn’t reflective of your relationship outside the game is a pretty darn healthy attitude to have. After a handful of horror stories and my desire to maximise fun and minimise the amount of work I have to do, I feel that while my vetting process is a little lengthy it’s always worth it in the end for formal campaigns.
This was my second time running this particular scenario, ‘Free Rain’ by Dominic Moore, (while I made several amendments and additions to make the transitions and plot a bit easier, I do recommend the module!) and so the prep was smooth as butter. Honestly, with the amount of work I put into it and having run it with my playtest group previously, I had all the info I needed and more to get into the game.
As for mistakes: I kind of regret being lax on the character sheets – I let folks come as they were and created them at the table, but it’s faster if I can punch them into Foundry ahead of time. All was fine because one person was going to be an hour late (talked in advance, all kosher) so I had that hour to do character creation with everyone else, but it still slowed a little when I got to make their one PC. In a campaign, doing character creation together is important (maybe I’ll touch on this later, though it’s been done before) but for one-shots, I find that getting characters done slightly ahead of time is just always better (unless you know the system front to back). You can still do connections as a group, but having the stats nicely done up makes things easier.
Since we started late I had to cut the session a smidge short, but I just had to narrate what would have been the last like 20 minutes in 30 seconds, so no fun lost or anything. The pacing was very good on my part in terms of how long the one-shot was supposed to be (~3 hours, we had about 2.5 hours of actual play-time), though I might have let the introduction roleplay drag on a bit too long (but folks were having fun and I don’t want to curb engagement this early).
Also pointed out by one player, I should have explained my house rule side initiative better – I sort of glossed over it and skipped its tactical benefits. I do wish I was more familiar with my system’s toolkit as a whole too – I’m still somewhat new to SWN’s ruleset and I’ll need to work on it. The narrative/improv one-shot prep was there but I definitely ought to brush up on the game rules so I never have to even think about glancing at the book or making stuff up on the fly. That said – things went… great! Probably in the top 10 sessions I’ve run. I slowed a little during the combat section (but it was also the very tail end of the night) though that ties back into knowing my toolkit and having more headspace to focus on the narrative.
As for players – I had THREE quiet background players and TWO brighter louder players. I mostly was interviewing the two spotlight players and one of the quiet players, so the focus was on them instead of the two players I had already. This meant my existing two quiet players that I already vetted sort of fell by the wayside. I’d definitely pay a little more care to them in a formal campaign but I can see where the dynamics would go in a full group, and it’ll take some talking out to make sure everyone has equal screentime (or, equitable screentime). I also didn’t love running for five people – it’s a fair amount of extra handling, and with my preferred higher rate of conversation-based roleplay, the more time every individual has to talk during the session the better. It definitely confirmed that when I pick my final players I ought to go with four, not five.
All in all, an 8/10 session, and I have a lot of good information for moving forward with the campaign proper! For future entries in my campaign diary series, I will probably do proper session summary notes with little jokes and storylines, as well as future scenario ideas. My players ought to probably not read those, though! ;]
(AKA why I don’t love freeform roleplay). This is just a short thought from some conversations I was having earlier, so it isn’t all that fleshed out:
I like OSR (‘Old School Renaissance’) games. One of the main tenants of OSR games is ‘rulings over rules’ and there’s a focus on the GM as an impartial arbiter of decisions: while there are some rules, what is more important is focusing on good, consistent adjudicating based on player-skill.
However, rulings over rules could be a bit of a problem when it comes to dealing with people who ‘powergame’ (eugh, terminology nonsense again), defined here as folks whose primary source of fun is making the most powerful character as possible. Sometimes, these powergamers push rules, however – twisting things with vague wording or missing notes on contraindications to fuel their power fantasy. People pushing systems really sets off warning bells for me because it tells me up-front the kind of game they wanna play (very gamey), which is not the kind of game I want to play. It’s okay if some people like that, but it is not for me, and as a GM who operates under very rulings and logic/fairness rather than actual rules those players really wouldn’t work well at my table. They’ll just thrash about at rules that aren’t there… with no true constraints they feel like they can do anything, and the only thing stopping them is me, as the GM, and things start to look adversarial.
To this end, I find rules can be good tools, because they contain certain types of friction to in-game only: if someone wants to do x, the rules are telling them how far they can go, rather than me telling them how. If they have a problem, they can dislike the rules, but if it’s rulings, that dislike turns to disliking me, and my adjudications instead. This is why I don’t like totally rules-less systems: I don’t like having everything on me. I want some sort of barrier between my feelings and the players’ feelings in the form of game mechanics to reduce friction. I like something that tempers my own biases I bring to the table. Game mechanics end up being a neutral space – while most friction can be ironed out with communication, having something unbiased and in some form of rigidity is good for creativity as well as avoiding needing to deal with a lot of confrontation and heavier communication.
Part of why I like Numenera so much is because it directly addresses that in the corebook: “if a player has a problem with the rules not saying they can’t do something and asks you to show them where they’re wrong, point them here: they’re wrong” (paraphrased from memory, a little). It allowed flexibility while also providing a written constraint and advocated for me as the GM and my decisions. I always had a +1 to my justification, so to speak (though this didn’t help in tempering my own biases – there were other rules for that).
Of course, having someone butting heads over rules, rulings, and just generally shitting (or in my cat’s case – sitting) all over the game table is a whole other issue in general (and I just don’t play with those people to begin with), but this is useful food for thought and examining why I like having some rules if I ever get into a situation where I misjudged someone, am invited to a game or running at a convention where I don’t get to pick the other players, or if one-off miscommunication issues on rulings ever cropped up.
Slice of Beef 