RPGaDay 2019 Day #12 Dream

Today’s theme is “Dream.”

It’s time to talk about our dream games. Most of my games are dreams right now, as I’m still getting to a point where I can run my own campaigns.

But I would love to run a Star Trek game. I had notes for a sandbox style campaign and the pitch was “Deep Space 9 on a starship.” The players would be the crew of a starship, but they were doing an extended sector patrol so they would be visiting the same planets on a regular basis. I had notes on how visiting the various planets and solving this problem or that problem would have effects on the other planets in the sector. Maybe I can dust them off and run with them once I make a few more friends.

Another idea I’ve had was the ultimate D&D sandbox game. Basically, the world map would be randomly generated, with no towns, cities or kingdoms. The only things that the party would have would be what they could make, find or build. There would be no kings or nobles to give them quests.

Part of this came from my desire to run a sandbox style D&D game involving domain-level play. Another part was a desire to run an experiment in player agency. To give the greatest amount of freedom to the players means stepping back as far as possible as the GM. See what kind of story they create when I have no vested interest in any outcome whatsoever.

There’s also the possibility of this turning into a 20-year campaign. I’ve known people who claim to have run the same campaign for 10 years or more. This doesn’t always mean that they’ve been keeping the same or similar butts in the same seats for the last 10 years, but that they’ve been running the same setting from the same set of notes for the last 10 years for whatever group they can wrangle.

With my 5-6-year long megadungeon campaign behind me, the thought of doing something big and long-term seems more possible. But one thing that I’ve had to confront is that I’m not creative in the usual sense, but I am analytical as all get out. I’m not sure I could create a setting detailed enough to hold up to 10 or even 20 years of consistent play. But the tools exist for the players to do that very thing themselves.

And there’s also a little bit of a confidence crisis in all of this, too. It’s been so long since I’ve run a campaign that getting back in the saddle is a bit intimidating. My coffee shop gaming was at the tail end of 2017. I tried running a game for Jordan and his group, but that wound up being a disaster. (Though to be honest, I wasn’t completely sold on what I was running, which might have had an impact.) There’s the fear that I can’t write a plot anymore. Running a pure sandbox with no set plot and doing as little work as possible might be a baby step towards running a more complex campaign of something else later. Or maybe my 20-year plan pays off and the sandbox starts simple, but the players work to build it up into a thing of majesty over time and I watch each group add some new piece to the setting.