As I can snatch a couple minutes here or there, I’ve been spending my spare time and brain power on gearing up for another Dungeons and dragons campaign. Apparently, that’s all anyone–aside from one of my players, anyway–wants to play these days and as much as I want to play different games, I’d rather play D&D than nothing. It’s not like I can’t enjoy this, after all. I’m here for the stories. I just wish I had the opportunity to tell different stories and to play with a group of people more interested in the broad range of stories I want to tell. I already need to keep this one a little more limited than I’d like, focused on story elements that aren’t analogous to problems we face in the real world since one of my players has specifically requested that, along with no more fighting the personification of abstract and awful concepts, like capitalism. Not because it didn’t work out the last time I did it, but because this friend doesn’t want to encounter a real-world problem we can’t actually fight in the real world. Which is a huge limitation since there’s tons of interesting story ideas that allow people in a D&D game to fight something we, in the real world, can’t fight. I get this player’s meaning, though, so I’ll do what I can to comply, but there will be some amount of real-world issues involved because I can’t imagine running a game for very long that DOESN’T have some kind of real-world analog.

I just have to bury it deeply enough that no one spots it right away. I mean, the messed up world we’re using, the D&D equivalent of the world we made for our Heart: The City Beneath game, has always been a metaphor about global warming, fossil fuels, and the way those with means and power can simply flee the impact of climate disasters in a way that most can’t. There’s a heavily destroyed, slowly decaying world that has passed beyond a tipping point and started to slowly become entirely uninhabitable for the creatures, plants, and people who used to live there, all while new life arises that can survive the new environment emerging from the ruins of the old one. It’s all there. I think the only reason it hasn’t really come up as something my players want to avoid is because I’ve described the campaign setting using some memes and leaning heavily on the visuals of decay. Outside of the surface layer, though, there really isn’t much hiding the global warming and environmental collapse themes. They feel so plain as to be entirely obvious to me, which means that someone without my insight into the world should still be able to figure them out.

I’ve used this world for a different game already, though, so I know that the stuff I’ve been building into it isn’t so obvious that its the only possible reading of the stories we’re telling. It’ll be fun to try running a game in this world in a different place, hopefully far enough away that there’s never any question of the two parties intersecting at all, but we’ll see how the games go. I won’t write anything off, yet, even if I don’t expect it to come up. Especially because of that. I’ve been caught by surprise many times by things that were incredibly unlikely but still somehow happened. In another group of only three players, even. The possibility of statistical unlikelihoods striking again is too strong to ignore. In the mean time, though, I’ll be trying to foster the same sense of trust and intimacy in this group that has grown in the other groups where I’ve had three player and one GM. It might take a while since most of us haven’t known each other for very long or haven’t been emotionally close with each other, but I think we can get there if everyone settles in, chooses to trust each other, and focuses on having fun. After all, it works a lot better when everyone pulls together. Even if some of the members of this group have historically struggled with active roleplaying and collaborative storytelling…

I’ve got no idea how this is going to play out, yet. I know Session 0 will have happened by the time you’re reading this, so I will probably have a follow-up post soon about how it all went, but I think I can make it work. After all, everyone is fairly engaged with the general premise of the world and the stories we’re telling (I refuse to run a game until I’ve found a story everyone will buy into, so there won’t be a game at all if we don’t get the latter of those things). That counts for a lot, if everyone is willing to try to make things work. I feel a little anxious, I’ll admit, since at least one of the players wants to be told a story and the other seems suspicious of collaborative storytelling in general. I think it’s possible that one of them might pump the brakes or pull the eject lever if they start to feel like I’m asking too much of them, but there’s nothing I can do about that ahead of time. I’m not about to tell a story in a way I don’t want to. I have to enjoy myself as well as my players, or else I’m just burning myself out for no reason. I’ve done that before and I know better than to try it again… Hopefully it’ll all work out just fine.