Maybe Steps

 Another Maybe step this week. Checking in on the Bards & Cards Discord server, I saw someone looking for someone to run a Pathfinder 1e campaign. While I'm not particularly a fan of the system, I have invested in it, mostly at my wife's urging, and have run a session or two.So I answered that I could run something. Now we're actively looking for more players. Maybe it'll be something, maybe it won't.

Even though Pathfinder is not the game I would have chosen to run for my first campaign in ages, I'm realizing that I really needed a good swift kick to get myself moving. Even though I've got other things on my mind, I'm not developing them to the point where anything is actually going to happen. Which keeps me away from gaming. It's like the saying goes "The perfect is the enemy of the good." I've been waiting for things to be perfect, and therefore missing out on things that would have been, at very least, good.

Even if this doesn't become anything, it's at least a reminder that I should get back in the mix sooner rather than later.

Even though I don't think I have the ability to pull out a novel for NaNoWriMo in November, I'm thinking of trying to flex my creative muscles. There's a solo journaling RPG called Apothecary that I picked up from the Bundle of Holding recently that looks interesting. So at least for November, I'll try to play a little bit and post my results here.

I think my last post came out really muddy because I kinda solved the dilemma I was looking at sort of in the middle of working it out on the screen. What happened to my playstyle and the way I think about games? I shifted to player-driven gaming over GM-driven gaming. I don't have to worry about gearing my scenarios towards different taste groups because I let the players themselves decide what they do. If someone wants to fight, they can pick fights if they want. If someone wants to talk, they can do that too.

The gaming Meetup group met on Saturday and I was one of the 2 GMs offering to run games for attendees. And the other guy was just "I didn't plan to run something, but I have a game later tonight, so I've got my stuff." I ran a quick game of InSpectres, since it's October and therefore time for spoopy things.

I'm planning to run a session at Bards & Cards (the game store that's nearest to me) closer to Halloween and it was a good chance to get some practice in.

I had mentioned intending to run The Great Ork Gods, but I realized that the edgy humor that was the inspiration of the game isn't quite as funny these days. I do remember having fun, and am interested in trying it out again, but I want to come up with a scenario that would actually be funny.

My current thought is to have a scenario where the orks are running from a dragon that devoured the rest of their tribe. They're on their way to warn/join the neighboring tribe, but have to pass through a human village along the way. So even though they are not there to raid and pillage, the humans assume that they're there to raid and pillage, and so the scenario is actually them trying to make it through this village without raiding and pillaging it because they know a dragon is coming this way.

Or maybe a straight up raiding and pillaging scenario, but they're doing it because the humans raided and pillaged them and they're just trying to get their stuff back.

Always Be Playing

 Believe it or not, this post is inspired by my experiences at Wasteland Weekend. In order to cover the cost of my ticket, I volunteered to help the event happen. This mostly consisted of patrolling the grounds overnight one night and again on the last day as the attendees were filing out. As it turns out, Wastelanders are a well-behaved lot, so the patrolling was very uneventful. Which gave me lots of time to get to know my patrol partners, and it turns out that a couple of them were D&D players. (It would be great if they were into other RPGs as well, but I'll take what I can get.)

At one point in one conversation, there was the classic discussion of the balance between combat and roleplay/social interaction. Everyone has their own opinion, so it's a conversation I've had dozens of times over the many years I've been gaming. The idea that an RPG plot is fight scenes separated by talking, or social scenes in between fights..When I was running games much more regularly than I am now, this was part of my adventure writing rubric.

But this time, my brain rebelled. Since that time, how I game, how I GM and how I think about gaming had changed so much that it felt like we were having the wrong conversation. 

The big shift, when you get down to it is from GM-driven campaigns to player-driven campaigns.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with GM-driven gaming. When I wrote my D20 Modern tabloid-world nostalgia adventure, I dove right back in to my old adventure writing methods, which were still in that GM-driven model. And "social interaction vs. combat" is still something that I need to think about, because even if I'm not railroading, I'm still providing a structure to the scenario.

In a player driven game, the players have much more impact on the play experience. In my OSR megadungeon campaign, the players decided which hallway to go down and which door to open.Fiasco and InSpectres both lean heavily on player input to create the plot, with Fiasco not even having a designated GM role. The debate between social interaction and combat is lessened for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the GM has less of a role in setting the pace of the game, Secondly, being player driven means that the players can call for the types of scenes that they prefer. In the megaidungeon, players can choose which section of the dungeon they want to explore. In InSpectres and Fiasco, the players have a degree of control over the narrative itself and can directly call for the things they want to see in the game.

I don't know if this is a deep thought or just me rambling, but I felt like I needed to get it out.

Feeling Wasted

 Don't worry. That's actually kind of a good thing.

While gaming conventions have been thin on the ground the last few years, my wife has been dragging me to Wasteland Weekend for the last 3 events (I'd say 3 years, but there was a 2020 in the middle there, so the 3 events happened over 4 years).

It's pretty cool. You basically spend 5 days hanging out pretending to be extras in the background of a Mad Max movie. If you want to get deep into the LARP angle, there are tribes and factions and missions that you can do. I keep meaning to get into that stuff, but I never quite manage. The tribes and factions also manage a lot of the entertainment. There is a main stage with live bands most nights, but there are also smaller events in other spaces. One night, I did karaoke in the Wreck Room. Another day, I visited the Slammer for a cabaret/burlesque show themed around villains.

The thing that sucks is that my wife and I don't drive, so we have to do a lot of wrangling in order to attend because 1) The event is held in the middle of the desert, and therefore 2) The only lodging available is what you bring in. Think about the amount of stuff you would need to go camping for 5 days, then modify that for desert conditions and further modify for having to carry all of this yourself for some portion of the journey.

 We finally managed to make it home last night after train service interruptions made everything take much longer than it should have and cost a bit more, too.

So as fun as it is, I'm also thinking about how the annoyance and effort and expense create a counter-balance to that fun. If things tip too far to the annoyance side, it might be something we don't do again (much to the chagrin of my wife).

Here are a couple of pictures of me in my Wasteland gear. The first photo is pretty much my original costume. You have to have a costume to contribute to the illusion for everyone else. unlike a Renaissance faire where there's a clear divide between the participants and the tourists, Wasteland Weekend wants everyone invested in selling the post-apocalyptic vibe. I think a lot of people do a basic "military surplus" look early on to meet the basic requirement and upgrade as time passes. The second look is built around that chest piece. There's a funny story about how I got it that I may tell some time, but I count myself very lucky to have it and built a sort of second costume around it.

I do have other photos, but that would take some sorting and more brainpower than I really have right now.