Today’s theme is “Examine.”
It’s important to look back and examine your gaming life and
history. Sometimes changes sneak up on you. For example, both of the campaign
ideas that I discussed in my Dream post are sandbox style campaigns. That is
not common for me. I have historically been more likely to go into a campaign
with a story in mind, or at least plot threads for the party to follow.
The big turning point is probably my megadungeon game and my
subsequent exposure to the OSR community. Rather than devise a reason to get
them into the dungeon, or create villains and schemes, I just told the players
“Here’s the dungeon. Go to it.” There’s a degree to which I regret this, since
the campaign wound up being entirely focused on the dungeon and the process of
kicking down doors. But the players had a lot of fun and it went longer than
any other campaign I had ever run before. I’ve since desired the opportunity to
try to recapture that magic, either by rebooting that campaign and putting a
bit more work into it or doing something like my “ultimate sandbox” concept.
Applying a sandbox concept to a Star Trek campaign also
addresses one of the challenges of Star Trek gaming: The Planet of the Week. In
a typical Star Trek campaign, I might have to come up with a new planet for
every adventure, with a new society and a new challenge for the players. In a
sandbox game, I only need to develop a handful of worlds that I could regularly
reuse. It winds up being both more and less work. Less work in that I need to
come up with fewer new Big Ideas on a regular basis. More work in that I need
to think about those ideas with more depth because the players are going to be
interacting with them more.
It’s all a new way of thinking for me and I’m interested to
see where it goes.
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