Long time since...
Well, I’m surprised how long it’s been since I posted on Livejournal… There’s certainly been a lot of water under the bridge.
However, I won’t be posting about my personal life - I’m just not comfortable thinking “out loud”, even on an invitational and vastly obscure forum like this. No press releases. Instead, at Elizabeth’s urging, I’ll be using this space to share my various game-related musings. I do a lot of fiddly, interesting-probably-only-to-me game prep - you know, History, back-stories, cultural folk-ways and the like, blah, blah, blah… most of which never sees the light of day. Part of that is because my gaming has dropped off enormously since my engagement - it’s not something we share, and is regarded as “frivolous” - and part is simply because this stuff rarely makes it past the GM’s screen. For example, in my late lamented “Maia the Vampire Slayer” campaign, I had detailed maps of the town of Hammer Falls, with estimates on travel times and the like, even though mostly that was dealt with at the game-table by simply saying “Cut to: Exterior, Night-time, The School. Go!”
That said, I like messing with things like this, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have a campaign where these nuggets of what-have-you are available and actually sometimes relevant. I picture a situation where I describe to the players the various totemic bits and pieces on the bodies of the goblins that just attacked them, and having one player exclaim “”Wait - these guys look like a Red Hawk tribe hunting party! But they never come west of the River Stamor - what could be forcing them out of their normal hunting grounds?” and the other players go “Hmmm - let’s investigate!”
It never happens - really. But a guy can dream, can’t he?
I’ve been reading about the OSR, or Old School Revival, in roleplaying games, and the thought of revisiting the heady days of my gaming youth (okay, thirty years ago. Good gravy!) seemed intriguing. There’s a lot of discussion about what ruleset to use, but for me, it would be more about getting together with friends and just having fun. Sure, characters would die - possibly often, depending on how badly you and your dice screw up - but the atmosphere around those long-ago gaming tables was something special. Maybe part of that was just doing something for the first time, but there may still be elements to recapture. Lightning in a bottle, maybe, but still worth trying.
One article detailed a campaign a fellow ran, and it caught my attention. Not so much the campaign itself, but the method of the campaign. Instead of a game with a tight group of players and a strong, engineered story arc, this was a “sandbox” game, where the characters were set loose on a prepared but basically unexplored wilderness. Sure, there were things going on in the wilderness, but the GM didn’t trail these across the players’ paths and then funnel them into a prepared drama.
The organization of the game was equally interesting. The GM invited a group of players far too large to all sit at a table together. Everybody got the Basic Campaign Info-dump, made a character and then joined an email list or forum. The players selected the goals for their adventures, hustled to put together a party also interested in exploring that valley or following that rumor, they informed the Gamemaster, and he ran the game on a mutually-agreed date. Some players played frequently - others less often. It didn’t matter if you could make a game every week, or only once every couple of months. All told, each player was only involved in about a third of the games that made up the campaign. Players began circulating chronicles of their successful adventures, and the group collectively pieced together a map of the wilderness, filling in the details and features from their own experiences. In virtual form, this modeled parties returning to town either victorious & laden with trophies and treasures, or sucking their last hit points and wincing from a desperate battle.
I really want to try this. Putting together a richly-embroidered wilderness full of “Easter eggs” for the players to stumble upon sounds right up my alley, and I’d love to set up a campaign that’s organized to let me play with a wide variety of people. There are folks who’ve gamed with me before who told me that they’d love to play with me again, I’d like to invite folks in whom I’ve never played with before, and it seems like everybody is so busy that a free-form ad-hoc scheduling system might be the ticket to semi-regular, interesting games.
So, who wants to play?
However, I won’t be posting about my personal life - I’m just not comfortable thinking “out loud”, even on an invitational and vastly obscure forum like this. No press releases. Instead, at Elizabeth’s urging, I’ll be using this space to share my various game-related musings. I do a lot of fiddly, interesting-probably-only-to-me game prep - you know, History, back-stories, cultural folk-ways and the like, blah, blah, blah… most of which never sees the light of day. Part of that is because my gaming has dropped off enormously since my engagement - it’s not something we share, and is regarded as “frivolous” - and part is simply because this stuff rarely makes it past the GM’s screen. For example, in my late lamented “Maia the Vampire Slayer” campaign, I had detailed maps of the town of Hammer Falls, with estimates on travel times and the like, even though mostly that was dealt with at the game-table by simply saying “Cut to: Exterior, Night-time, The School. Go!”
That said, I like messing with things like this, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have a campaign where these nuggets of what-have-you are available and actually sometimes relevant. I picture a situation where I describe to the players the various totemic bits and pieces on the bodies of the goblins that just attacked them, and having one player exclaim “”Wait - these guys look like a Red Hawk tribe hunting party! But they never come west of the River Stamor - what could be forcing them out of their normal hunting grounds?” and the other players go “Hmmm - let’s investigate!”
It never happens - really. But a guy can dream, can’t he?
I’ve been reading about the OSR, or Old School Revival, in roleplaying games, and the thought of revisiting the heady days of my gaming youth (okay, thirty years ago. Good gravy!) seemed intriguing. There’s a lot of discussion about what ruleset to use, but for me, it would be more about getting together with friends and just having fun. Sure, characters would die - possibly often, depending on how badly you and your dice screw up - but the atmosphere around those long-ago gaming tables was something special. Maybe part of that was just doing something for the first time, but there may still be elements to recapture. Lightning in a bottle, maybe, but still worth trying.
One article detailed a campaign a fellow ran, and it caught my attention. Not so much the campaign itself, but the method of the campaign. Instead of a game with a tight group of players and a strong, engineered story arc, this was a “sandbox” game, where the characters were set loose on a prepared but basically unexplored wilderness. Sure, there were things going on in the wilderness, but the GM didn’t trail these across the players’ paths and then funnel them into a prepared drama.
The organization of the game was equally interesting. The GM invited a group of players far too large to all sit at a table together. Everybody got the Basic Campaign Info-dump, made a character and then joined an email list or forum. The players selected the goals for their adventures, hustled to put together a party also interested in exploring that valley or following that rumor, they informed the Gamemaster, and he ran the game on a mutually-agreed date. Some players played frequently - others less often. It didn’t matter if you could make a game every week, or only once every couple of months. All told, each player was only involved in about a third of the games that made up the campaign. Players began circulating chronicles of their successful adventures, and the group collectively pieced together a map of the wilderness, filling in the details and features from their own experiences. In virtual form, this modeled parties returning to town either victorious & laden with trophies and treasures, or sucking their last hit points and wincing from a desperate battle.
I really want to try this. Putting together a richly-embroidered wilderness full of “Easter eggs” for the players to stumble upon sounds right up my alley, and I’d love to set up a campaign that’s organized to let me play with a wide variety of people. There are folks who’ve gamed with me before who told me that they’d love to play with me again, I’d like to invite folks in whom I’ve never played with before, and it seems like everybody is so busy that a free-form ad-hoc scheduling system might be the ticket to semi-regular, interesting games.
So, who wants to play?