This past weekend, I had the opportunity to play (as a player!) in a tabletop roleplaying game for the first time in a long while (long enough that I can’t remember when that previous time was, but that might be the general fog of the last year more than a measure of a long time). It was a one-shot that a frequent player and friend of mine put together that was a sci-fi, star wars/trek game run in Dungeons and Dragons 5e–because that was the system that everyone was familiar with–but everything was given a sci-fi twist rather than a fantasy one. The GM herself admitted later on, as we talked at the end of the session, that this particular game was basically the rough draft of a concept she had for something that she’d like to run in the Star Wars 5e ruleset, but it had been a long time since she’d looked at the rules and none of us were terribly familiar with them either, so simple and straight-forward with a system we all knew already was the order of the day. I had a decent amount of fun, even if it was a bit of an RP-light session (it kinda had to be, since it was a one-shot), but I definitely oveprepared in ways that were both incredibly useful for the group and a little personally frustrating. I have a tendency to do this sort of thing since, as a forever GM, I’m always offering to fill-in wherever I’m needed and while I got to chase my preferred idea for this game, I wound up doing it in a way that was technically interesting to build and run, but not particularly satisfying or fun.
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