Another crack appears

My gaming group has been going strong for... well... a long time. A very long time. Some of the players I've got in my group I've known for more than half my life.

And I'm "gettin' on in years" as Grandpa used to say. (He never actually used to say that, but I find it funny to attribute the saying to him all the same.)

In the last few years, we've started bleeding players. One-by-one, we've had players drop out of the game. Each had his own reasons and I respect them. We managed to get one player into our group for a time, but that didn't work out.

And so now our group is about half of what it once was. Maybe a shade less.

And it's making things hard.

One of my players just asked availability for the next month's game. The discussion began and we started to realize that our little group can't get together again until mid to late summer.

Ouch.

That's a bit of a blow, given we normally aim to play monthly.

I guess real life is finally catching up with us.

Fucking sucks.

Shaking my head

My table-top gaming group lost a player today.

When we're not having our monthly sit-down session at someone's place, I try to fill the gaps with an email session. It helps me get tiresome exposition out of the way while practicing my creative writing skills. Some of our email sessions are quite entertaining reading. One day I hope to edit them into a proper story.

I'm not sure how I'll handle the current one.

When I look back at what happened, I can't say I'm sure what went wrong. It was an argument, but I'm still fuzzy on how it got out of control so quickly. It was role-playing. One player has a gruff sort who is the leader. Another is playing an opposite gender character from a very different culture. The dispute started over something fairly small. The leader character was insisting on a promised (indeed, a vow) of silence over a plot twist. Everyone agreed. The outlier player character seemed to have agreed, but the player for the leader character pressed for a specific promise. The player for the outlier character got offended. There were some tense exchanges, seeming to be in-character, then everything sort of settled down.

In all honesty, it wasn't all that unusual of an exchange. In role-playing games, often players get a little "lost" in their characters. Terse and tense exchanges happen. Sometimes there's some seriously hard feelings. I've been on both ends of those kinds of exchanges and this particular situation didn't even seem to merit honorable mention when compared to those.

Clearly I mis-judged.

The player for the outlier character was still quite offended. Part of it was the player's interpretation of the character's view. Part of it was seeming to be a very personal offense taken from what the other player said. I've re-read everything multiple times and I honestly can't see the cause for complaint. But I'm not the one who is offended.

There was another exchange over the long weekend. It concluded today.

And I lost a player.

I'm not sure I could have done anything to fix this. I'm honestly not sure I wanted to. Now I have a very, very small gaming group and I'm wondering if it's got a sustainable future.

Perfect start to a fucking Tuesday.

Game Thoughts:

Last Saturday was our monthly game. Possibly the last time this year the entire gang will get together around the table, thanks to real life and all that.

It wasn't my best game.

When the group last left off, several of their number were captive of a foe I'd been building up over several sessions. More of this foe's targets were still among the group. So the group set out to get to safer ground, with some undercover and disguised.

As I like complexity to my plots, I decided to see if the captives could manage an escape from my villains. Essentially, I played a side game with myself before we got together. Things got to a certain point and I decided I'd see where the tabletop game would go from there.

And that's where I fell down a bit. I let the party split (usually a no-no in role-playing games) but I'd intended to force things so everyone was present for any big bad encounters.

I lost control of the plot for a bit and had two players pretty much just sitting around bored for a couple of hours.

Yeah. I done a bad thing.

After our heroes delivered a bit of righteous smiting against bad guys, I got everyone together and threw even more bad guys (of a different sort) at them in a totally contrived fight. Only this time, I sort of forced things so everyone had to cooperate.

I thought I'd thrown some challenging bad guys at them. Fucking hell, they walked through my bad guys like they were paper dolls. It was a little embarrassing, all said.

I'm almost done with this story arc. Maybe I'm just running out of steam for this one. Hm. I must ponder.

Game Thoughts:

We had our monthly GURPS game on Saturday.

Set a day after we did a marathon viewing of the last three episodes of "Game of Thrones", it made for an intense, nerd-heavy, weekend.

Was kind of bad timing as well.

As I've probably indicated before, I run most of the games my group participates in. The masochists I game with seem to be fine with that and I really enjoy the opportunity to engage in world-building and story telling.

Unfortunately, I do tend to be inspired by some pretty fucked-up stuff. "A Song of Ice and Fire" is only one of myriad horribly messed-up stories that tickle my demented imagination.

If you've seen the last season of "Game of Thrones", you know (to nobody's surprise) that some really fucked-up shit goes down.

And, unfortunately for my players, I do like introducing fucked-up shit in my games. And this weekend, the two met in a whirlpool of wrong.

The current campaign I run is set in a generic, home-grown, Tolkien-inspired, fantasy world. You've got your Elves, your Dwarves, your Orcs, and various other fairy tale-inspired non-human races among the various cliche human cultures. We've got a terrible "evil empire" and various "evil kingdoms" dotted about the world and all sorts of terrible things inspired from sources ranging from Lovecraft to Tolkien to more obscure sources.

The world was created by four of us collaborating in the beginning to build a world from scratch.

We ran a 15 year campaign set in the world in which epic heroes rose from humble(ish) beginnings to a climactic showdown with the main Evil Empire, resulting in its defeat and a chaotic mess of a world left behind.

The campaign I'm now running overlaps with those events a bit. It's a humble group of misfit mercenaries under a tired, crippled, old mercenary commander with a checkered past. The PCs have more in-depth character stories and harder limitations in place to keep the campaign's power level from getting too insane.

I'm using this campaign to toy with storytelling techniques and ideas I've been thinking about. I've got a larger story arc in mind for the hapless mercenaries that I'm breaking up into "books".

Book One ("The Refugees") involved the mercenary company forming and meeting one another as well as the introduction of the various side-characters (NPCs) that I'm notorious for. I do like lots of background color. My dramatis personae list is absolutely insane. The story arc involved escorting hapless refugees from a besieged city to relative safety. In it, villains were introduced and plots teased.

We finished "The Refugees" a year or two back and are now almost done with my tentative Book Two ("The Journeyman Quest"). The story arc has the mercenary company escorting a wizard and her assistant/bodyguard as they try to take a book (another wizard's journal) back to their home island, hundreds of miles to the west across very hostile territory. Other people (some more hostile than others) seek the book and, as the plot has progressed, it's become clear that the book and this guard-job is only a tiny part of what's going on. Backstories of player characters and NPCs have tied together and both old and new threats have crossed the company's path.

That was more background than I'd intended to write, but whatever. I guess it offers context.

So the games I run tend to be cyclical. Some are expository. Some are low-key. Some are the heroes kicking all kinds of ass. And some are "hose jobs".

Saturday was a hose job.

I've been teasing a threat for many sessions now. A rival group of mercenaries who have been hired to capture several of the company's membership (PCs and NPCs alike).

I had the first real encounter happen last night. And it was a clusterfuck of wrong. By the end, I'd left one PC half-blinded while another had actually rung the doorbell on Death's door.

Some were captured and some just left for dead.

Wasn't exactly where I wanted to leave things, especially after the psychotic insanity of "Game of Thrones" in our minds, but it was what it was.

I'll admit to a nagging feeling of guilt. Maybe I should have softened things. But then, I think, it makes the threats I have been building up just wuss out. Messes up my narrative.

It's a hard balance to find in games.

Gives me something to ponder for the next month, anyway.

Drama and Gaming

When preparing to run a table-top role-playing game, I learned long ago that it's an exercise in futility to write out too many details.

Players are just impossible to predict. They do shit you never thought of. They do shit you really wish they hadn't thought of. They just do shit sometimes.

So I don't get into the details too much. I write myself up a nice outline. I prepare my list of non-player characters (NPCs) and then improvise.

I've described table-top role-playing as a sort of improv theater. I think the description has merit.

Sometimes I slip up and go nuts defining things. It's always tempting to go for some grand prophesy or achieve some Tolkien-esque level of epic.

Invariably, it's a bad idea. True drama needs to grow organically from the party.

Oh, you can drop all the hints, conspiracies, clues, and teasers in until SMOD comes to finish everything off in a fiery crash of doom, but the fact of the matter is that players hate being railroaded. They only appreciate drama if it comes from their choices and actions.

Usually.

I've been running games for... well, let's just say a long time and leave it at that. Inevitably, there are times when player characters just run out of luck and get killed off.

Oddly enough, it's a fairly rare thing in my games. It's sort of a joke in my games that any NPC I have that has a full name and backstory has a life expectancy measured in minutes.

A cruel jibe, but not an incorrect one.

Anyway, I don't generally kill off people's characters, even if I don't like them. There's always a way to tweak even the most odorous of character concepts around to mesh in a campaign. If not, there's always subtle ways to encourage players to change characters. It's gauche and barbaric to up and kill them off.

It's too quick, too. I'm a sadist. I usually want them to twist a bit.

Why am I talking about this? Well, last Saturday was my group's monthly sit-down game.

And one of the PCs didn't survive the game.

In fairness, I didn't plan on things going the way they went.

I started the game by arriving in a foul mood. I'd been depressed and not really in a gaming mood. I had an outline that required the heroes to get rid of a BAD THING. I'd intended to get rid of an NPC who was a traveling monk who was with the party and leave some kind of lasting mark on those who were last with him. I was running a very dark game (even by my standards) and I had an idea in mind that would lead to something suitably horrible later.

I did say I was depressed.

Then along comes that whole Player Uncertainty Principle. One of the PCs, whom I'd recently messed with to make the character have more of a dramatic path, took a more heroic course than I'd intended.

Fascinated by the turn of events, I fell back into my habit of letting things run their course and I altered my plans.

By the end of the night's session, a character who had been something of a clownish joke was sacrificing his life to save people he'd never seen or met. If I'm not wrong, there were a few tears at the table as all this went down.

And I think a couple of players were pissed at me for letting things go the way they did.

I have to say, it was a beautiful moment. Bittersweet, heroic, and dramatic. Probably one of the best moments of drama I've ever had in a game, truth be told.

I wish we'd recorded it. Goddamn that was awesome.

A prolific sign of a problem

It hit me the other day. I was taking a long, hard look at my life and career and finding myself falling short of where I feel I should be.

It's depressing to realize you're not as good as you should be at what you do for a living.

So it made me think: what the hell am I doing with my spare time that's taking me away from my life? What's distracting me so?

Then I took a good, long look at a single website.

It's not what you think. For many years now, I've been running a table-top role-playing game. I've mentioned it before more than a few times. Hell, a campaign of some 15 years wrapped up a few years back.

I decided to go through the Google Group we use to store most of our game background.

I stopped counting after I hit 300 pages. I estimate there's over 500 pages of material on the site. About 90% of that, I've authored.

And that's just for the one Fantasy campaign.

This doesn't count the content defunct Yahoo Group we used to use for storing this info. I still haven't ported over a lot of those pages.

This also doesn't take into account the "secret super powers" modern-day campaign I had as an alternate.

I figure if I ever get my druthers and clean some content up, I would be able to compile a novel of our gaming campaign with a word count that may well rival Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin's works.

Wouldn't be anywhere near as good, mind you. It would be derivative as hell of myriad fantasy writers, but it would be a verbose as all hell story.

So that's where I've sunk a ton of my life.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, but at least now I don't feel I should be burning my geek card over May the Fourth.

I'll probably just singe it a bit. Set phasers to "cook".

D&D and boys & girls

When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons (aka "D&D") was pretty much only something boys played.

Nerdy boys, at that.

It wasn't until college when we'd have ladies join our gaming groups. Usually it was the girlfriend of one of the players, but not always.

I'm not sure why my gaming groups never regularly had female players. I'd like to think we weren't driving them away, but who knows? Certainly they rocked at it.

Why am I pondering this? BoingBoing had an article on the topic of girls playing D&D.

I personally think girls should be encouraged to participate in this hobby. Hell, I think schools should encourage role-playing games as part of the educational process for both boys and girls. I think table-top RPGs, done correctly, encourage imagination, open-mindedness, and empathy.

Given how utterly fucked-up the world seems to be, I think we could all benefit from some more imagination, open-mindedness, and empathy.

More reflections

I'm spending a few days wrapping up my thirteen-year game in email. Crafting epilogs and the like.

Meanwhile, one player has his own thoughts on the campaign..

So what next?

Well, I have other campaigns in-progress. One modern-day-ish campaign of super-powered hunted characters. You know the trope. Scanners meets "The Tomorrow People" meets "X-Men". It's stalled from the loss of certain key players, but I hope to revisit it one day.

Got a few other fantasy games going in the same world as the uber-campaign, though I'm only running one of those.

I plan to focus on "real life" endeavors a bit more and polish up some job skills. Maybe shed a few pounds, too. Yeah right...

End of an Era

In February of 2001, four friends and I started recording a home-grown role-playing campaign we'd created from scratch using the rules from Steve Jackson Games' GURPS.

Before the year ended, our numbers were around seven or eight players (it varied as schedules allowed).

For the next thirteen years, we'd game at least once a month (with the occasional skipped month due to schedule problems). Some of our number would marry. Some of our number would jaunt off across the globe, only to return later. Some of our number would leave, answering the call of real life. Some of our number would be asked to leave, as personalities conflicted.

Last night was the conclusion of thirteen years and five months of fairly-frequent gaming in the classic fantasy vein: lowly would-be heroes rise up to save the world, etc.

Sure, it was loaded with tropes. So. Many. Tropes. It wasn't particularly original, though I found our spin on things to be pretty clever (in all humility).

However one looks at it, it was thirteen years of sitting around a table with good friends, some dice, some paper (and later, laptops, 'cause... 21st Century and all that). It was thirteen years of pizza, Chinese food, sushi, beer, candy, pretzels, chips, and FSM-knows-what-else. Later it was home-cooked meals, sometimes by one of our number, sometimes by an incredibly-understanding spouse of one of our number.

That was a damn good thirteen years.

We're not done as a group. We've got other campaigns - most of which are set in the same made-up world - but the campaign that served as the foundation to all of it is now over.

It's a bittersweet feeling for me. Both a relief and something I'll miss terribly. Now I need to figure out how I'll redirect my OCD elsewhere.

Heh.

To those I game (or gamed) with, if you're reading this, thank you for your time, your patience, your participation, and your special brand of crazy. I expect to be rolling the dice at the retirement home with you lads.

Marching on

Yeesh.

What a weekend!

After entering the 21st century with my piece of relatively-modern technology, I used it to get in touch with a friend of mine in my gaming group who has largely been absent from the realm of electronic communications.

Turns out there was a reason for that: he wasn't entirely sure how to tell me that he was quitting my gaming group.

In normal circumstances, that's not really a big deal but then again, I suppose it is. I've been gaming with some friends since high school (which was... a not inconsiderable amount of time ago). I can imagine that was a fun decision to make.

I suppose this is a hint that I should grow up a bit and focus less on my table-top gaming and more on real life issues that I've been neglecting.

Can't say I like that notion, but growing up is not a painless process.

And there's a weird sense of loss in this. The game was more than just a distraction. It's served as a sort of glue for some of my older friendships. Whether intended or not, this is going to impact that one friendship. It's a bit depressing.

Fun times.

"Life is but a game"

It's funny that I don't always realize how much I rely on role-playing games to distract me from whatever damages my calm as I go through the day-to-day of a life of quiet desperation.

I used to do creative writing as an outlet, but I easily grow dissatisfied and bored with my stories. I'm usually uncomfortable sharing them for much-needed feedback and critique and they tend to wither without some kind of interplay or reaction. So I wind up with dozens and dozens of outlined or half-written (half-written if I've been especially productive) stories that languish in dusty corners of hard drives or on printout in forgotten boxes in my apartment.

When I was a teen, I got into table-top gaming. It started with TSR's "Star Frontiers". I'd played "Dungeons and Dragons" a few times before that, but never really got the hang of the game. Concepts like "armor class" and arbitrary alignments puzzled me or left me cold. I was heady from whatever was the latest sci-fi craze at the time and the cover to a boxed set of the recently-released "Star Frontiers" called to me like a siren luring a sailor.

The rules were simple. There were alien races and humans. There were lasers and spaceships. There were only two dice (2 ten-siders, or "2d10" in the parlance) not the six-bajillion dice that D&D requires. I was in love.

My friends and I played, created worlds and crazy campaigns. We fought aliens, wars, and conspiracies. It was as glorious as teenage minds could conjure up in-between the pressures and demands of school as well as the competing the draw of girls, cars, movies, and what-not.

"Star Frontiers" opened the doors to us to try other games. TSR did some kind of Marvel superhero game we tried that was entertaining enough. We played a "Doctor Who" RPG that got really weird at times (as befits the subject matter). We tried out "Gamma World" (a post-apocalyptic setting) and then I came across a new system with a weird name.

A company called "Steve Jackson Games" had created a new system called "G.U.R.P.S.", which stood for "Generic Universal Role-Playing System".

I swear it was the answer to my gaming nerd prayers at the time.

You see, I'm fickle by nature and easily-distracted by whatever tickles my imagination. One moment, I'm dreaming about some kind of scenario with spaceships, blasters, and force-fields. The next I'm dreaming about people with paranormal powers in a modern setting. Or a near-future setting. Or I'm thinking of the sort of fantasy stuff that flooded the shelves of so many bookstores (and still floods the few bookstores that remain). To have a generic, one-set-of-rules-fits-all, system was a dream come true.

We started playing with the rules (second edition, still in a box... I still have the dice that came with it, nearly rounded from use and almost impossible to read). It took some getting used to, but my group got hooked. We played the "canned" adventures then slowly crafted our own mythology and interwove it in the canned settings.

Then college happened.

We gamed occasionally in college, but my main gaming friends were scattered across different schools and it was hard to gather regularly. Still, we stayed in touch and got together on occasion to continue the epic adventures of our [insert genre archetypes here]. I met a few people at my own school who gamed a bit. I did a short game with a few guys in my dorm that went weird and dark really fast before the semester put that to an abrupt end. I made a lifelong friend the semester after who, in addition to becoming like a brother to me, became an integral part of my gaming endeavors from that point forward.

Eventually I moved out of the dorms and with that friend and others, continued our games, both in the apartment I had in college and at other friends' places at their colleges.

The game continued and our campaigns became more involved and more personal. We created personalized villains, intricate backgrounds, lives, followers, spouses, children, and homes for our characters. It was, I imagine, like having a child and watching that child grow into what you wished.

As I muddled my way through school and trying to figure out the future, it served as an anchor to keep me grounded a bit.

Fast-forward to the post-school days. "Real life" kicked in and free time for gaming was... hard to come by. My friends became scattered further and further. Some move to different states. The game faded into the background as other distractions took hold. In my case, it was martial arts, a couple of clubs, attempts at creative writing, and just trying not to have a nervous breakdown from my laundry list of soul-crushing employment opportunities.

Fate, being a bit of a weirdo, decided enough was enough and got my gaming friends together again in a roughly-convenient geographic location. And they brought fellow nerds with them.

Next thing I knew, we had more gamers. At some points, we had more than we knew what to do with. Personalities conflicted over the table. Arguments got personal. It was weird, and sometimes uncomfortable, but we didn't walk away from it. Funny thing that.

At one point, some of those friends and I talked. I can't remember who came up with the idea. I wonder if only one of us did. We decided to create our own campaign worlds fresh. We'd engage in communal world-building.

Four of us met and drew maps, discussed cultures and religions, planned out different peoples and races, discussed magics and villains and heroes. When we were done, we had the skeleton of a world.

It took a lot of convincing to get the others on-board to play, but we managed. The four creators turned into three. The three would assume the rotating role of "game master" and we'd keep the world on a roughly-even track.

The three became two as life caused one to move away. Our numbers in the game shifted as people came and went. The two expanded "GM duties" to others, on occasion. We occasionally left our home-spun fantasy world for other endeavors in this time. Homemade "space opera" settings and modern-day "paranormal powers" settings served as alternates. Continuity started to consume my thoughts and fuel my OCD just a little too much. We started recording our stuff on websites. First a Yahoo eGroup and later a Google Group. Then another.

By my count, the two sites that exist for the games I currently contribute creative content for have about 616 pages of content. I've authored or heavily-edited approximately 600 of those pages myself.

And that's just the online stuff. My hard drives and Dropbox folders have so much more that it occasionally overwhelms me.

I recognize all of this for what it is: escapism and a desperate attempt to find stability and control in a world that's a bit beyond me. It's an exercise for my OCD and a compensating tactic for the parts of life I can't seem to handle. And I'm comfortable with that. I'm not sure I'd ever have it any other way.

d20 for the future

After a day rife with disappointment and depression, I hiked off to my martial arts class hoping that kicking the unholy shit out of some helpless punching bag (or getting the unholy shit kicked out of me by a very capable classmate) would distract me from my bad mood.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Class wound up being canceled for reasons I don't really care about.

I did get time to chat with some of my classmates, several of whom are quite a bit younger than I.

The topics varied but I really perked up when some of 'em were discussing their latest Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

At first, I did a complete double-take. I thought most folks of a certain age only played online games. I am apparently quite wrong. These folks were talking good, old-fashioned, tabletop D&D.

We chatted tabletop gaming for a bit (I haven't played D&D itself in a few eons, as I favor a different system) and I found my mood lightening up considerably. Dunno why, but it gave me a sort of hope for the future that there's folks out there (I called them "kids", but they're not really, I suppose) who do tabletop gaming.

It really is the little things in life.