One of my favorite parts of preparing for the start of a new tabletop game is the moment when everything crystallizes. Whatever errrant thought, subtle influence, or bright flash of inspiration you needed arrives and suddenly it all makes sense. You can see the strings the world dances upon and understand the way everything moves within it. It is the moment when you go from wondering what might be and pondering unknowns to knowing what is and looking for what might change. In the world I ran in a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns starting back in 2019, this moment came as I was taking a break from my then-panicked preparations to do something fun and relaxing. I was watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on Blu-ray not long after it was finally available for purchase and the whole campaign setting crystalized around the idea of missing heroes. It was a fairly simple idea, but that last piece of information fitting into the puzzle meant everything else clicked into place as well. Suddenly, I knew what was going on and what everyone was motivated by. It was a relevatory moment and something I’ve enjoyed every time something like it has come up any time I’m considering a story, be it something I’m writing, a tabletop game I’m putting together, or even just a video game I’m playing.
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Enhancing Your Games By Stealing Ideas From Other Game Systems
I was listening to some old Friends at the Table Patreon content (it is so much easier to access now that I’ve got an RSS feed to pull from and am using an actual podcast app to pull it instead of flipping through patreon posts like I just assumed I had to for every podcast I’ve supported prior to March of 2023) and I heard one of the players talk about some of the lessons he has learned over the years from his experience playing tabletop games and taking comedy classes. He said that some of the best advice he’s ever heard was that, after you spend a bunch of time mastering a creative skill, that you should go do anything else for a few months so you’ve got things to pull from when you return to the improvisational or creative skill you’ve learned. The broader context that this came up in was about preventing yourself from becoming too focused on one type of game or play experience. Play a lot of different things and then, when you return to the thing you want to spend a lot of time on, you will be better at it for having enriched yourself with other experiences. This is something I’ve always felt was true of pretty much every form of creative work. Spend some time honing your chosen craft and then spend time learning about a lot of other things so you have information to pull from when creating things. This is why I’ve spent so much time reading about various bits of history, different occupations, and generally learning about how the world works and why it works that way. Everything informs my writing, so the better I understand anything other than writing, the better my writing will get.
Continue readingSprinkling TTRPGs Back Into My Life
I’ve slowly begun the process of restoring my Tabletop Roleplaying Game schedule. Sure, none of it will start for another week or two at earliest since I’ve still got a move coming up, but it feels nice to have begun the process of making plans. I’ve got a Pathfinder Second Edition game I’m going to be joining with a bunch of people I’ve never met (I got referred to them by a mutual friend) and I’m working on setting up a group in a fun, rot-themed world I made for a different group (whose game is still slowly happening). There’s no reason I can’t have two games happening in this same world, after all. It’s a huge place and some of the underlying stuff I’ve built into it means that it can support a bunch of concurrent games without running into continuity issues. I dunno if my players in either group will every know they’re playing in the same world (all the ones who read my blog will know as a result of this post, of course), but it’s fun for me to consider this. It’s also very unlikely that anything they do with impact each other since I’m trying to keep the games in this world on a smaller scope than I usually do.
Continue readingMy Tabletop Roleplaying Game Withdrawal Is Worsening
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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