The multi-game campaign I’m calling “Sifting Through The Ashes (Working Title)” has officially begun. We had our first meeting, the first conversations about what we’re doing have been started, we’ve observed our first lengthening silence in response to a question I asked, and I’ve even made a discord for the group. Heck, the day this posts, we’ll be getting together to start playing our very first game: The Quiet Year. I’m excited to introduce more people to that, and to get this whole campaign thing a-rolling. Of course, it would help if I wasn’t still struggling to get enough sleep and feel rested, but that’s just kind of life these days. Never enough sleep. But that’s okay. It’s only a three hour session playing a game I’m familiar with and need to just lead, not adjudicate. After all, it’s a GMless game and while I’ll still be wearing my GM hat, it will be just to facilitate the game and help get everyone’s creativity flowing rather than because rules need interpretation or a difficult situation needs arbitration. As long as work doesn’t kick my ass the whole week leading up to the session or give me extra hard on the day of the session itself, I should have enough juice in the tank to handle whatever that might bring [work has kicked my ass the whole week up to the session]. I still need to make sure my players are reading up on all the stuff I posted in the discord, continue reviewing the rules of Armour Astir: Advent, and make the roll20 game we’re going to use for maps and stuff, but most of that is pretty easily handled when I’ve got a bit more time and energy than I do right now.

The first meeting went about as I expected it to. Everyone seemed a little nervous at first, as I launched into my usual spiel about what I’m looking to do, what I’m interested in, and what general rules I’ve got at my table. I never like bringing up my two-strike rule and my whole “if I suspect you’re acting in bad faith, I will kick you out” thing, but time has taught me that it is better to be specific at the start and anyone who balks at the idea of being held accountable for their actions probably has a reason they’d like to avoid being held accountable for their actions. So we went through all of my rules about how to be a respectful player at the table, what lines and veils are, and what sort of thing we’re looking to do collectively. Everyone seems more or less on board with my vision, so there wasn’t a lot of discussion around the various themes and elements I was looking to include, so I did quite a bit of sitting in silence while I gave people a chance to respond. It wouldn’t be a tabletop campaign without slighty-too-long periods of silence, after all, while I give my players enough room to speak that anyone holding their tongue because they’d feel awkward speaking their mind would be compelled to speak anyway in order to end the silence.

It has taken a long time to that specific timing down, but the positive impacts I’ve seen when running games has shown that it was worth it. A lot of people will sit in silence, leaving room for others to speak, and then decide to just stay silent if the GM starts moving the group on from whatever moment they were waiting to speak in. It is the GM’s job to help draw those people out of their silence and into conversation, and one of the best ways to do that without putting someone on the spot. If you wait too long, then people can get uncomfortable or start driving the conversation away from the topic you’re trying to get a bit more juice out of. You really need to be able to find that sweet spot if you want it to accomplish anything. That said, just explicitly digging for more or prompting people is better than nothing, so you can always fall back on that if you wind up getting the timing wrong. After all, it’s different for every group, so it can take a while to find it unless you know and have hand-picked part of the group from the outset. Which is what I did.

I’ve been reducing my digital footprint a bit lately. Trying to cut down on how much stuff I’ve got going on out there that I need to keep track of, so I was hesitant to create another discord for this group (as opposed to repurposing an existing discord), but there’s going to be a lot of information to manage as we play through this gauntlet of games, so I opted to make one anyway. It was pretty quick, since I’ve had a lot of practice, but there’s still a bit more work to be done. I still need to go back to listing my influences and touchstones, but I haven’t really had the kind of idle thinking time that an effort like that requires since the day I finished the necessary parts of the discord and put in my most important influences. I mean, I’ve got another discord to update, wrestling to record, recordings to edit, a Final Fantasy 14 workshop to manage, and rest to get somewhere in there. Somehow. So anything not immediately important is waiting and being considered until I can act on it. And so long as I get the roll20 campaign set up in time, none of this will matter beyond the careful management of my own day-to-day events.