Quiet Times

By my count, this is the fifth time in my gaming career when I've gone a significant length of time without gaming.

The first time was way back with my original group when, for reasons too stupid and embarrasing to recount, I had a falling out with the rest of the group. Fortunately, we gradually patched things up and got back to gaming, but it was a dull time in the meantime!

The second, and probably longest, of the fallow times was during my first year at university. This was caused by a combination of two things: my first group had finally split up and gone their separate ways, while I was too involved in my studies to seek out the Gaming Society on campus. This year was marked by quite a lot of reading of AD&D 2nd Edition books, as that edition was coming to the end of its life but I was yet to discover the joys of "Vampire: The Masquerade". In that year I also first became active in online communities, though only to a very minimal extent.

The third quiet time was during my last few months in Yeovil, when I was avoiding the local gaming scene. This was not a good time!

And then came the fourth time, was was a couple of years after I returned from Yeovil. The issue here was that I actually was involved in a game, in theory at least. Unfortunately, though, the group was small enough that our quorum amounted to 100% attendance, and was almost never available. Over time, it became apparent that the group was basically lost. And this, eventually, led to me starting up the Falkirk RPG Meetup, which has gradually expanded over time. So, that was good.

Of course, this latest quiet time is largely a result of a house move gone wrong - my most recent campaign ended in a TPK, and the expectation was that we would be moving imminently thereafter. Obiously, that is yet to happen, and it just hasn't quite made sense to start anything up in the meantime.

I now find myself contemplating the end of this fallow time - surely it can't go on much longer? And, that being the case, I wonder what shape the end of it will take. Will there be a new campaign? Indeed, does it make sense to start up a new campaign given the disappointment of the last couple? Alternately, should I focus on playing for a while, or run some one-shots to get back into the swing of things?

And one other thought: maybe I need to seek out a new game, or perhaps even a whole new style of game, for when I get back to things? Probably the most satisfying return to gaming I've enjoyed in the past was on returning to it was when joining the GUGS society at Glasgow - and my introduction to the aforementioned V:tM game. So, maybe it's time for something new?

Unlimited Agency?

I was pondering the upcoming "Star Trek" RPG yesterday, and in particularly I was considering just how many episodes in the various series feature a B-plot wherein one of the main cast falls in love with one of the guest stars. This is common enough, in fact, that it's something that probably should feature reasonably prominently in a ST RPG in order to better capture the entirety of the show.

And yet, the romantic B-plot is also something that almost invariably complicates the A-plot in some manner. This presents a difficulty for an RPG, since players are notoriously averse to causing problems for their characters - they want to win, understandably, and that's obviously much easier if they're able to tackle the A-plot undistracted.

In addition, of course, there's the thorny issue of imposing any sort of inner-life on the PCs - one of the underlying premises of RPGs is that you can basically have your character at least try whatever you have. This means, as a strong rule of thumb, that the GM really shouldn't restrict or impose on the player's agency when running their character.

(This even extends as far as domination effects and spells - these are amongst the most-hated things that can befall a character, and the advise is almost invariably to use these very sparingly. Indeed, I go so far as to leave the player in control of their character's actions while dominated, merely informing them of this fact and trusting them to play accordingly. Which, thus far, has worked reasonably well.)

Perhaps, though, it's worth considering whether that cow really is sacred - maybe it's permissible in some cases for the game to assign plot points to the characters, with a view to better fitting the genre? Indeed, games like "Firefly" seem to include the mechanisms needed for this sort of play, where the assigned subplot would become an ideal source of Complications (and therefore Plot Points) for the relevant PC.

And so, suddenly, I find myself quite interesting in seeing how, if at all, the "Star Trek" RPG handles that aspect of the game. And, if it does cover it well, that's one more reason for interesting the game as a whole.

More broadly, though, I now find myself considering whether, and to what extent, it is worth dropping that sort of subplot into a one-shot and/or campaign and leaving the players to drive the game forward from there. Or, indeed, is it perhaps better to just leave the whole thing to the players and let such things develop organically... or not at all?

Astral Miners in the Dead Gods' Graveyard

There's a classic AD&D adventure called "Dead Gods" that centres around the efforts of a dead god to return to life (hence the name). I've never played it, nor indeed read it, but the concept is pretty cool, and ripe for adaptation in other forms.

One of the underlying features of the adventure is that when a god dies, its remains somehow become petrified and become a hulk floating somewhere in the Astral Plane. Of course, such a hulk would have power associated with it.

In a previous post, I mentioned a campaign that I never quite got off the ground, centred around something called Cavcari's Last Invocation, which I did consider to be one of my better ideas - and which, in brief, states that anything that has a beginning must eventually have an end... including the gods themselves. Naturally, this ties in extremely well with the Dead Gods themes and ideas.

So, if we have these petrified remains of Dead Gods floating around in the Astral Sea, and if those hulks have inherent power, where might that lead? Who would have an interest in such a thing, who would be their agents, and how do the PCs get involved?

There's a campaign in there somewhere...

5e and "The Force Awakens"

Each time I re-watch it, I find myself less and less enamoured with "The Force Awakens" - the first time was a joy, the second time I started seeing some flaws, by the third I'd pinned down the arrival of Han Solo as the point where it starts to run out of steam, and now it's... well, it's still good, but it's basically "Star Wars Greatest Hits", and the originals are clearly better. (That said, there's no reason Episode VIII shouldn't be better.)

The reason I mention this here is that as time passes my impressions of 5e start to fall into the same mold - I was initially very impressed (with the finished product), but as time has gone on I've become less and less enamoured of it, and more and more convinced of the flaws.

But another similarity is that I'm inclined to think that a very large part of the positive reaction to both 5e and TFA is due to what they are not - TFA was a massive relief after the relative failure of the prequels, while 5e was likewise a massive relief after the negativity surrounding 4e. And, as such, many of the weaknesses and failings get a pass simply because they represent a step away from what has gone before.

Either that, or I'm just getting old and curmudgeonly.

But here's a question to finish on: I wonder when we'll see D&D's equivalent of "Rogue One"? Preferably complete with CGI recreations of Gygax and Arneson...

Back to that Star Wars game

Having considered the matter some more, I have decided that the Star Wars mini-campaign should probably be stripped down quite considerably - better to structure it as a one-shot, use pregen characters, and see how it goes. Then, if the game is a roaring success I can consider investing the resources in a full campaign, and if it fails to take off then I've not invested too much time and effort.

Additionally, I have concluded that the ruleset I will use is the Star Wars d6 Second Edition rulebook with no supplements, largely because that's the book that I actually own. If I do go for a full campaign, I'll probably want to 'upgrade' to something more recent and/or investigate sourcebooks, but for now it's better to stick with a manageable amount of reading and stick to physical books.

Finally, I've refined my concept for the game quite a bit - I'm now looking at a mash-up of "Unforgiven" with "Casablanca"... or, rather, a mash-up of my half-remembered versions of these.

The Things You Care About

One of the great unfulfilled promises of 5th Edition was the hope for a "modular game". Originally, this was sold as part of the "unify the editions" strategy, allowing players of all the different editions to come together around a common core, with 1st Ed players picking up a "classic module", 4e players picking up a "tactical combat module", and so on. It was never clear if the intention was for people to be able to play different 'editions' while at the same table, but it proved to be a moot point anyway since none of that meaningfully came to pass.

That said, I'm never sure that was a realistic aim anyway. I would have thought that a group that wanted to play 1st Ed would be better off just playing 1st Edition, and I suspect the "different games at the same table" would have been a nightmare.

However, one area where the modular design could have been really helpful would have been in allowing people to emphasise different bits of the game depending on what they individually care about. Of course, some of this has always existed, in that players who cared about having, say, a code of conduct could pick the Paladin class, while those who enjoyed magic could pick the Wizard, and so on. (And, of course, the use of supplements could allow the group to expand the game in some directions rather than others.)

And that worked to an extent... but only to an extent, because unfortunately there were almost invariably power imbalances between the options (Wizards beat Paladins in just about every edition of the game), and also because those expansions were generally done symmetrically - if the Fighter wanted a lovingly detailed weapon list and set of combat maneuvers, everyone was thereafter forced to use that same set.

But a modular design probably gives some scope to skipping that - if the Fighter wants the detailed weapons, maybe he could have access to those while everyone else just uses "hand weapon", "great weapon", etc. Meanwhile, the Wizard gets to use the detailed spell lists and components, while nobody else has to bother. And as long as everybody interfaces with the core system (used by the DM) in the same way, everything should remain fine.

Or not. Maybe it's a pipe dream.

But it does seem like something that would be worth investigating - rather than a 300-page core rulebook that's shared by everyone, where fully a third is spells that are of no use to lots of players while the weapon list is too detailed for some and not detailed enough for others, maybe it is indeed best to have a very thin core game, coupled with a set of modules (potentially associated with the classes), where the player picks up only those modules they care about, and ignore the rest.