If you’ve wound up at this blog, I thought it might be worth laying out where my thoughts about TTRPGs are coming from. I’m not suggesting that I’m especially interesting, but if you’re going to take the time to consider my opinions about games, you might want some context. So…
What I don’t Do: First of all, I don’t look at social media anymore than I have to. I have a lot of trouble expressing myself or connecting in that setting. I also don’t spend much time looking at reddit or anything like that. I’m largely ignorant of a lot of things that are happening, outside of what I hear from my players, people I meet at conventions, or what I read on creator or crowdfunding websites. I am not quite a luddite, but am often out of the loop.
What I Do: I spend a lot of time preparing and running games. Nowadays, I run about 2 games a week, but I’ve pared back from a heavier load only in the last year or so. I used to run about 3 games a week, but I began to feel that the quality of some of these games suffered—though I’ve been told otherwise—and that I was enjoying the whole endeavor less. I have not gotten rich running games, so if I’m not enjoying them, there seems to be little reason to continue. So I cut back. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to start up another game, and sometimes I lose that fight and find myself taking on another game. It really is an issue sometimes, but I tell myself that I’m managing it. It bothers me most of all that my compulsion keeps me from game design, scenario design, and matters that are unrelated to games.
Still, I am fascinated by TTRPGs in general and enjoy time spent prepping and running them. I mix up genres and systems a lot. I also shuffle longer campaigns with mini-campaigns and with one-shots or two-shots. My favorite genre is horror, but I’ve run a lot of super hero, cozy, sci-fi, heroic fantasy, gritty drama, etc., with tones ranging from deeply sill to very bleak; cerebral to visceral; immersive to detached. My favorite campaign game ever was a recent run-though of the Delta Green campaign of God’s Teeth, even though it was heavy, and at times difficult. My favorite mini-campaign was a 3-arc/24 session game of Masks: A New Generation (which, overall, ran about as long as God’s Teeth). Close runners-up for mini-campaigns would be Tales from the Loop, City of Mist, and Velvet Glove. My favorite one-shot is harder to locate, because there have been so many, but I can think of standout sessions of Ten Candles, Bluebeard’s Bride, Kult, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (technically GMless), Dialect (also GMless), World Wide Wrestling. I’ve had a few really good public pickup games, including runs of Dark Places & Demogorgons, Hypertellurians, and CyBorg—D20 systems all 3.
There are two broad types of TTRPG that I tend to avoid. One is tactical combat. I get antsy, and I like fast, brutal combat, if you’re gonna focus on combat at all. I lean way left, politically, but I’m also not a fan of power fantasy games that are self-consciously focused on fighting against “the government” or “capitalism,” because, for me, they lead to a sort of closed-circuit anger, and then I have to go off and decompress somewhere or just wander around feeling really bad. It is a weakness that I have, and I don’t believe it reflects at all on the validity of the games or the personalities of the people who do like them in any negative sort of way. (Also, for the record, I am not talking about something over the top and pulpy like, say, Eat the Reich, which I did enjoy a great deal.)
I mentioned above that I have interest in game and scenario design. Of necessity, I’ve had to do some of both—as I imagine most GMs have to, if they run a lot of games of different types. It is often necessary to fill in some element or other to keep a game moving. Most of those things are improvised and/or fragmentary, but at other times, you want or need something more deliberate—so you end up manufacturing weird little props, calculating situational mechanics, drawing maps, (badly,) outlining biographical details for an NPC, defining lore, etc. Sometimes you go even farther, and you wind up with a scenario, a setting, and/or a game system.
Necessity aside, if you GM a lot, you’ve probably read a lot of games and scenarios and have developed opinions, notions, and theories about what you think works or might work. For me, sometimes, I’m inspired by a fascination with everything that games can do. At other times, I’m acting out of frustration—a feeling (no doubt driven by hubris) that whatever I’m reading could be better. Eventually, I found myself writing stuff and thinking about unleashing it into the wild. (Maybe then other people can recognize how I could have done better—if I’m lucky.) I have one scenario on itch already, which is a quickie one-shot for Dread. It was something I put together for a charity event in Chicago. (Money was raised to help stop the practice of shark-finning.) I ran it along with another scenario that I’m finishing for a limited print run soon. The players are lifeguards, who are rescuing people from a sharknami. It’s Powered by the Apocalypse. I also have a Cthulhu scenario upcoming, in which all of the PCs are nuns at a rural convent in the early 1960s.
So if you’ve read this far, you know what I do. Here’s hoping that provides some context for the other stuff I’ve written here.