Huh…I think this was a year of lots of long-run games. I expected the list to be much longer! But a few of these were 6-10 sessions long and that really bites into my novelty-at-all-costs time.
No Thank You, Evil! (ongoing ad-hoc “campaign” with my kid and wife, mostly it has continuity)
Sagas of the Icelanders (one shot and a campaign)
Space Wurm vs Moonicorn (a couple one shots and campaign)
The Secret Project (currently not called anything but it involves knights who are also monsters)
Inheritance (facilitated, does that count?)
Urban Shadows (idiotic late-night pickup game in ABQ)
Dungeon Crawl Classics (wut)
Fate Star Wars (a really, really marvelous experience with a delightful table)
Fallout Shelter (PbtA + Lego superhack)
Torchbearer (campaign)
Serpent’s Tooth (one shot at RinCon in Tucson and for the life of me, I cannot remember anything else I ran or played there other than SWvM)
Epyllion (one-shot)
Apocalypse World (campaign)
Zombie World (one shot)
7th Sea (one shot)
That’s it? Really? Weird. How about you?
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No way this is the whole list. How did I not record what I played at either con this year? Damn!
This is more frustrating than my fitbit ignoring my floors if there aren’t at least 15 steps.
I feel like a lot of your post-Tuesday debriefs this year were of the “Shit happens, we ended up playing a board game” variety.
That also happened.
This year we mostly have five players, which might be one adult too many to consistently schedule. It’s a real problem and I’m thinking about how to deal with it.
My RPG gaming this year was relatively lite in the variety dept. Two different 5e games, Various one off games of Fate and a semi-continuous one with kiddo and Star Wars Edge of the Empire oh and a couple one offs of Feng Shui 2. Only got to one con and played a a few more games there.
I mostly played Mageblade and Dwarfland. Because playtesting. I’m keen on reading Saga of the Icelanders.
Also Gangs & Bullshit is I feel being processed in the back of my head. As I’m getting better, I feel the urge of writing getting back.
Let’s see…
• Masks (campaign)
• Blades in the Dark (campaign)
• World Wide Wrestling (mini campaign, & one shot)
• Star Trek Adventures (a couple one shots)
• 44 (one shot)
• Doctor Who (one shot)
• Burning Wheel (one shot)
• Sorcerer (one shot)
• Dogs in the Vineyard (one shot)
• City of Mist (one shot)
• Swords without Master (one shot)
• Age of Rebellion (one shot)
That’s honestly more than I thought I’d done this year, and I still feel like I’m forgetting stuff? A surprising number of one shots this year — a pleasant surprise, really.
I played a long Pathfinder campaign (yeah…), a Stars Without Number mini campaign (8 sessions) and a Dungeon World one shot that became a new campaign (4 sessions and counting)
Ready to go on a journey of existential dread with me? cw: middle aged thoughts, mortality.
Okay let’s goooo!
You were warned.
I realized when I was young that we get about 1000 months to live. That’s it. 1000 months, and that might even be generous: it’s about 83 years. The likely number of quality months is 900, or about 75 years. And ya gotta take out those first 120 months, ain’t nobody doing much except growing up. So let’s say 780 months to do whatever we’re gonna do with the intentionality and agency of adulthood.
Some folks have figured out how to play “a campaign” over many years. If that’s the only game you’re playing, how many months of your 780-or-so allotted months did you spend on it? 18? 24? More? At least in my mind, that number is big enough to feel the bite out of the total. And the total is small enough to imagine: the months are going by faster all the time, too, as each month becomes a smaller portion of the total.
As you probably know, I’m not a multi-year campaign kind of guy. I’d say a “typical” run for me is 6 sessions or so, up to 10 if it’s been great but also a goodly number of 1s and 2s. It probably averages out, taking into account vacations and schedule fuckups, to about 2 months per game. And I love exploring new games (acknowledging that not everyone does).
Tick-tock emmer effer
As of right this minute, I’ve cashed in 617 of my 900 quality months. I’ve got 283 months left. That’s 23 summers, 23 winters, 23 springs and 23 falls. That’s small enough to be countable in your head. You can probably remember 23 summers you’ve already enjoyed.
But what I’m really thinking about is the 140 long(ish) campaign-style games I’ve got left to play. What will they be? What will I have to leave out? What’s really on my bucket list, and what was just blue-sky aspiration?
Nice snack. What’s for dinner?
Now…none of this takes into account convention play. I’ll get in a good 8 games per con, and I go to 3 cons a year. That’s 24 bonus games. But they’re all one-shots and they’re usually with strangers. They’re a flight of beers, a charcuterie board, a buffet lunch. They’re not the dinner party of in-depth play connecting with friends. (And for many of you, you might never connect that way over gameplay. Maybe it’s just the thing you do a night a week to blow off steam, get away from your family, not think about work.)
So what should my 140 games be?
What won’t make the list? What hasn’t even been made yet that’s gonna get on that list, probably displacing something? If 140 games sounds like a lot to you, I can assure you it is not. At this point I estimate I have played 240 multi-session campaign type games in the past 40 years. I’ve only got about a third of all the campaigns I’ll ever play left to play.
Kind of hoping for a burning longship tbh
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