RPGaDAY 2016

Quickly catching up

I haven’t done any of these and the questions look terrible and everything is terrible in gaming everywhere all the time right now mostly because I’ve had too much caffeine AND I’m so completely stuck on Misfortune that it feels like a giant spikey booger is stuck in my brain, causing pain and discomfort every time I take a different tack with the design and I’m feeling anxious and directionless about upcoming conventions BUT I feel like yapping about how terrible roleplaying is so here’s where we are, as of 8/12/16:

1. Dice, seriously? Are you shitting me. Next.

2. Best session is probably that Sagas of the Icelanders session at New Mexicon that MadJay Brown was talking up in his post. It was good. But I’ve had a few mediocre ones and I’m way-deep into a valley of despair and doubt about my abilities right now.

3. Proudest character moment: I really liked how my emo Cure-listening teen angst dragon came out at an Epyllion table Marissa Kelly ran at last year’s RinCon. Otherwise I really don’t play enough to have many choices here.

4. Most impressive thing another character did? What? Is this my perspective as a player, I guess? I don’t even know how to answer this.

5. Nobody tells any stories about characters I’ve played.

6. The game group community question. It’d be awesome if it was on-point and asking about your actual players (my answer would be “nothing!” and then I’d feel guilty for a few seconds). In-game? Probably something in our The One Ring campaign, which has a marvelous community focus.

7. Aspect of RPGs that’s had the biggest effect on me. Oh wow. Um…probably its bottomless capacity to obsess over every detail of it? I feel like I kind of hit my personal limit on other interests — for example I love riding bikes but I’m not delving any deeper than I already have — but in RPGs, it seems like there’s always something else to explore. So my answer is “I’ll be dissatisfied forever?”

8. Softcover is my preference. Hardbacks are beautiful but they feel clumsy at the table. PDF is great because it’s cheap and I can keep a lot of it, but damned if I can actually learn a game from one. Although of course I have, several times (Circle of Hands, King Arthur Pendragon, Tenra Bansho Zero, probably some others).

9. Ideal session: everyone was on the same page about interesting complications, momentum, direction, etc. We somehow achieved a creative hive-mind where collaboration won out even in the face of interpersonal creative tension. It’s a unicorn, so rare that I can’t even say when this actually happened last. My locals are kind of deep into needing to WIN right now.

10. Largest in-game surprise. Oh man I do love surprises. I love it when the surprise opens up a big new creative vista for the game to move into! I love it a lot less when my players are trying to set rhetorical traps so they can “win” their scenes or whatever. Hmm…surprising character deaths! Those are awesome! The top-glory knight in King Arthur Pendragon eating shit in a battle, awesome. The de facto leader in Mutant: Year Zero plummeting to his death, awesome.

11. Which gamer most affected the way I play. Dang. Uh…maybe in college, when I was running this elaborate and ridiculous multi-group Rolemaster crossover multidimensional super-game (and failing all my classes because it was costing me about 20 hours a week). I had mentioned the difficulty of carefully balancing scenes, PCs, threats, etc. and one of the players looked at me, shrugged, and asked “Why do you care so much about balance?” That may have been the beginning of the end of my fixation of tactical games.

12. Most likely to play….wow I DO NOT KNOW. We’re kind of in the middle of The Sprawl right this minute, but PbtA has me middling bummed out right now. Mmmmaybe TimeWatch? I’ll drink some Pepto-Bismol before digging into Gumshoe again, maybe I won’t hurl on the table.