RPGsDay 2021 - Day Twenty-Six

DAY 26 - THEORY - PLAY - ORIGIN - RENEW

Welcome to your daily dose of Tim’s stream-of-conciousness blather loosely directed by a few RPG-related prompts… 

I don’t often PLAY role-playing games. I’m most often the Game Master. In THEORY I like the idea of being a player… but whenever I do, I always end up feeling… I don’t know… like I butt in too much describing things happening - like one might as a GM - and then feel like I may have overstepped my bounds as a player. It’s not like I feel like “I could do this better” at all - I’ve played in games with some just fantastic GMs - I just get wrapped up in the excitement of it all and some part of my brain kicks into GM mode… I also sometimes lack a brain filter and just open up my yap and "remind" the GM of a rule or a modifier - or if we’re playing in a setting or historical era that I know a lot about, I’ll post out something that’s… different… something that varies from "cannon" or history… - and I immediately feel bad and worry that it will be interpreted as “criticism” (which is what I know I’D probably do if someone said something similar in a game I run) though I NEVER meant it as such… When they though pops into my bring and out my mouth, it is with the intention of being “helpful”. I’m so sorry. I never mean to be THAT GUY… But I acknowledge, it’s a thing I do. 

One thing being able to PLAY as a player does for me is gets me excited about running a game again - especially if it’s been a while and/or I’ve been in a bit of a slump. Unfortunately, if I’m PLAYING in a game… and then get excited about RUNNING a game (filling up with ideas and stuff), but then can’t - because there isn’t time to run one while playing in another or because the people I might be able to run a game for are playing in the one I’m playing in or whatever the reason… well… I sometimes lack patience and playing in a game can end up chaffing..

In THEORY I LOVE to run games as a GM. I do have a lot of problems with doing so. I can be a VERY SLOW READER and am somewhat lacking in executive functioning skills - two key requirements for being a really good GM. Also, sometimes I can switch gears and recalibrate and improv when players do something unexpected… but other times (Like, a LOT of the time) players doing so will bring the game to a grinding halt when I can’t figure out how to deal with something I totally hadn’t planned for!? 

One thing that has worked well for me in the past is running games more like a series of tabletop skirmish games. This has worked really well with Savage Worlds - which is basically a skirmish game with some RPG elements added on - a character generation system and a good experience/advancement system. I’ve often used RPG adventures as the inspiration for the plot or background of these skirmish adventures - essentially summing up what would have been the role-playing/investigative/discover part of the adventure and skipping straight to one of the confrontations with the antagonists. This might seem SUPER railroady, as an RPG, but it works really well to flesh out a skirmish campaign. 

Running a skirmish campaign where all the players are on the same side playing against the antagonists run by me - where each player gets one hero and maybe a few small units of extras are shared between them has been a lot of fun. Ideally the scenario is never a straight up KILL ALL THE BAD GUYS - I try to make that impossible (there’s too many of them and/or more keep coming) to keep the players focused on the objective - which is usually something else - fight through the baddies to secure an object or rescue a person or disrupt a ritual - the ESCAPE off the board before being overwhelmed by them or the volcano erupts or the burning warehouse full of dynamite explodes.  

This is harder to do online… 

I’d really like to RENEW the Wrath & Glory campaign that I was running most of last spring-summer-fall. I really LOVED being able to reconnect with a few of my favourite humans and gaming buddies that have moved away. But I feel like I bit off more than I could chew running a investigative Inquisition campaign. Running a game like that requires a web of intrigue for the players to unravel… but building such a web requires… planning and the aforementioned executive functioning skills that I kind of lack. I fear that I’ll just run up against the same problems I experienced last year - idea burnout and being able to stay one step of the players in building that web for them to unravel… 

Sometimes I think I should revisit Savage Worlds.. but then I remember it had it’s problems too - especially when the characters DID advance to levels where they were pretty mighty indeed. It was fun for them to wade through units or hostile extras, but eventually they had to bump into a boss-level baddie and that’s where things ground to a halt - when two really powerful characters butted heads it was hard for them to actually deal damage to each other and when from a dynamic, exciting, flowing adventure and ended up becoming a very static dice-rolling match… which gets really boring, really fast… 

I’ve been thinking maybe I could do something similar to what I did with Savage Worlds but with the skirmish systems - Necromunda or the new Kill Team. Have multiple players as part of the same gang/kill team playing against enemies/hostiles played by ME - both games have some sort of experience point system. Necromunda has the added advantage of stats like Leadership, Cool, Willpower and intelligence - which could be used for scenario specific actions/tests to accomplish an objective in a scenario - get to the control panel to take out the power grid that run the… uh… tractor beam…? Or… whatever… 

That’s probably enough for today..