I am still going through tabletop roleplaying game withdrawal. I went from running or playing in four different tabletop games every week to playing so infrequently that I can count the number of sessions I’ve participated in this year on a single hand. The group I ran for coworkers fell apart as we discussed what to do other than Dungeons and Dragons back in January, when it became clear that everyone just wanted to kill monsters and get loot except for the one player who was interested in storytelling that had just withdrawn from the game for personal reasons. My Sunday group hasn’t faired much better as scheduling issues, combined with a player withdrawing for personal reasons (different player and different reasons) on top of the whole Wizards of the Coast debacle basically destroyed the group. I tried to put a new one together prior to that, but it involved both of the players who had to withdraw for personal reasons so that fell apart as well. I attempted to save the disintegrating group by offering some level of player attendance flexibility using games that didn’t require the same people to play each session, but we’ve yet to meet even once since I can’t get people to commit to a session.
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Saying Farewell to My Favorite D&D Campaign
Last night, I sat down with the remaining players from my almost three-year-old Dungeons and Dragons campaign to talk through the end of the campaign. Though we struggled to have more than 1.5 sessions a month for most of that time, we got pretty deep into the paint. This was a world I created back in 2019 and have been running a weekly/weekly-adjacent game in ever since. It has a customized magic system (not THAT customized, but still tweaked a bit), an entire set of pantheons, complex geopolitical and economic systems, and was my attempt to create a “young world” for roleplaying games. I planned to carry the world through many campaigns, playing out its entire history with my friends as we progressed from one campaign to another. Now, as we move toward other systems and science-fiction themes instead of fantasy themes, I am revealing everything I’ve spent so long creating and saying my own farewells to this world as my players and I say farewell to the story we’ve spent time over the past three years telling.
Continue readingLike Most Myths, Wildermyth Is About The Characters
I’ve been playing a bunch of Wildermyth recently. I’ve played through almost all of the campaigns on my own, some of them multiple times with different groups of people, and there’s only one left that I haven’t played at all. At this point, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the storytelling pieces of this game, even if I don’t always remember the particulars of every encounter. Throw in a general understanding of the strategy behind the game and a nearly complete understanding of how all the abilities synergize (except for Hero Theme abilities, since I’m still working on collecting all of those), and I feel like there are no real secrets left for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of random encounters I haven’t run into, given my penchant for creating specific types of heroes, but I’m working to correct those biases and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to tick through all the achievements as evidence of my gameplaying breadth.
Continue readingMy Journey Through The Pokémon Games Continues
After many long months, I finally finished Pokémon X. I still have a legendary or two to capture, but I’ll admit that I’m happy to be through the game. None of the post-game stuff in this generation is particularly interesting to me and I’m very tired of how cinematic parts of the game are. I’m not there for cutscenes or to watch movies I can’t skip. I’m there to play Pokémon while riding my exercise bike and going to sleep. I don’t want to be actually engaged or entertained, just mildly distracted. Which is a bit of a problem, since I moved from Kalos to Alola. I decided to skip straight to Ultra Sun rather than consider playing Moon since I remembered how painful the first iteration of the game was and how much of that pain they eliminated in the Ultra version of the game, but I completely forgot how frustrating it was to hunt for Pokémon in a world where the Pokémon vary from one grass patch to the next on the various routes.
Continue readingGMing Withdrawal and Melancholic Musings
I haven’t run a tabletop roleplaing game of any kind in a month and a half. As of just this past weekend, I’ve gone from having three regular-ish groups (weekly or at least twice a month on average) and one occasional group (with no pattern to our sessions) to having a weekly-intential group that hasn’t successfully met and might never since we’re now down to three players and me. As far as my tabletop gaming ecosystem goes, I’ve removed one player for picking the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing (along with assigning me blame for making him feel bad about it, amongst many other issues), lost two players to family difficulties that will keep them away for an unknown number of months or years, and two entire groups have dwindled to nonexistence thanks to scheduling difficulties and general burnout. I do not know when my next TTRPG session will be and I do not know what it will look like since my groups have all shrunk or haven’t scheduled a session in two months.
Continue readingThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Has Revived My Enthusiasm
Now that I’ve had a little time to rest, recover, and try to avoid obsessively rewatching the new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I think I’m ready to write about just it. I was tempted to do that yesterday, but I was so overwrought from everything going on that I couldn’t handle even just being excited about something. I had to put it out of my mind (and stop trying to preorder the Collector’s Edition) so I could calm down and try to get some rest. I didn’t really get much rest (since every other part of my life is still a stressful mess), but I’ve managed to collect myself enough to say that I’m super excited to see what the game is going to bring to the table. I mean, it looks like Link loses an arm right away and then gets that cool, clawed tech arm that seems to be an expansion on his Sheikah Slate abilities, so I can only hope it will keep getting better from there.
Continue readingBuyer’s Remorse and My Frugal Nature Are the Only Things Keeping Me Playing Fire Emblem: Engage
Even after about forty hours of Fire Emblem: Engage, my opinion of the game hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m starting to feel like I signed up for a task and am personally obligated by my sense of propriety to finish it. Too much of that forty hours is puttering around in chores, trying to do the extra missions, and figuring out the hard way that I’m never going to complete the character support stuff I want to pursue. There’s too much of it and the methods of building support between non-player characters is too frustrating and exhausting to work with. I’ll admit I was pretty spoiled by Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but most of the games before this one also had a huge number of ways to increase inter-character support while the latest entry in the series has battles, meals, and the training stuff that randomly throws another character into a training match with the character you selected. Even thought they’ve added a new support building system since I originally wrote this (more DLC and a free update dropped after last week’s Nintendo Direct), it’s still a very clunky, slow system in a game that gives you a huge number of characters. All in all, it’s a bad system, for a lot of reasons.
Continue readingBuilding Friendships in Minecraft in 2023
In the continuing adventures of my time back in Minecraft, I wound up spending a bunch of last weekend building a mountain to conceal the beginnings of a tower I had painstakingly created; helped a friend create a small lake/large pond; spent hours farming materials for and then building the central portion of the canopy of a massive tree (which is likely going to be scrapped, it sounds like); and then invesitgated a series of underground caverns that were full of resources, eerily silent creepers, and way too much lava for my personal comfort. I dabbled in magic, killed a lot of spiders, engaged in amicable trade, and did my best to save the lives of a bunch of fellow players who kept falling off things (my efforts were largely in vain, unfortunately). All-in-all, it was a busy but fun weekend of construction projects and trying to push myself through the boring but necessary parts of getting the enthusaistic reaction I desire when I eventually unveil my secret project to the rest of the server.
Continue readingGenre and Storytelling as I Move Out of My Comfort Zone
As I look at running new types of Tabletop Roleplaying games, I am confronted by the fact that most of my creative storytelling work and experience is fairly comfined to the Fantasy genre. I’ve written, read, and played fairly extensively in it and all it’s offshoots, so I feel most comfortable working within that context. I’ve also dabbled in Science Fiction as well, as you can see in some of the writing I’ve posted here (most notably, of course, my Infrared Isolation series). I tend more toward near-future in my sci-fi reading and distant-future in my sci-fi gaming, but I feel like I’ve explored enough to work in the space in a very general sense. When you drill down into the specifics, though, I tend to feel a lot less comfortable and I’m being forced to confront that discomfort pretty broadly these days now that almost half the games I’m advocating to my players are Mech games.
Continue readingDisinterest and Burnout: The Slow Death of a D&D Campaign
It turns out that not every single one of my tabletop groups is excited about the idea of playing something new. One group, now that Wizards of the Coast has walked back some of their fuckery, is not very interested in playing other games. At least one person in the group found a reason to be disinterested in everything I suggested and while they said they’re willing to consider some stuff if I give them a bunch of information and some time to think about it, I’m not exactly expecting them to embrace anything new at this point. I’ve been running a game for this group for a few years now and I’ve known them for even longer, so I feel pretty confident when I say that they’re not exactly the most flexible group. Historically, they’re one of my most draining groups to run for. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy our time, just that I feel like I have to do a lot of work to keep the game going.
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