I completed GM’ing a role-playing game campaign recently. It was a distilled version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse which we called Werewolf: Accelerated as it used the Fate Accelerated system. Some might say it wasn’t that long. It was only fourteen sessions, but it took a while with breaks, covid and whatever else. In the age of people running 3+ games a week or campaigns for years on a weekly basis, you’d be inclined to give me a condescending pat on the head and move on.
And possibly question why does this need a blog post? Narcissistic swine. What if I was to tell you it took me 26 years to get to this point? Yeah, slightly crazier now, right?
When Gaming Ended
I’ve been involved in the hobby for so long when I became involved in it exactly has been lost in the mists of time. Let’s say I was thirteen. It’s probably not that far off. As I write this I’m 50. Yes, that long. It was trundling along fine with different groups of friends including being the forever GM for a group of friends assorted from previous groups and via a Star Trek fan club.
Then I met my wife to be. It was complicated. Probably worthy of a US sitcom. One of those that is supposed to be funny but often isn’t that funny and is more of a drama? Anyway, the result was I chose my wife to be over all my friends at the time.
Gaming ended. This was 1996. Let’s say a neat 26 years ago. That means I’ve been in a struggling state with my hobby GM’ing wise for half the time I’ve been involved in it.
Epic. Okay, that is crazy now this is causing me to reflect on it.
Why 26+ Years of Hurt?
26 years. Long time. I’ve literally been waiting to run a successful TTRPG campaign for almost as long as England has been waiting for international silverware. Possibly someone should write a song about it?
26 years of stress and disappointment. Not serious stress and disappointment. Perspective and all that. At the same time it was an existential struggle with my hobby.
So, why? Numerous reasons.
For four years of it, I wasn’t playing at all. During the years of 1996 to 2000 I was in my epic armchair gamer phase and I wasn’t playing or running anything. I was just buying stuff. Lots of stuff. I at least read everything? The only gamers I actually knew were on internet forums. These are what early internet adopters used before social media. I was also learning a lot about role-playing game theory and was plugged into the whole first ‘Indie’ and ‘story’ game movement as an observer discussing various theories. Working things out, etc. Checking out the odd game. I learned a lot at the time about what I wanted out of a game.
We’ll come back to this. It’s important.
I did eventually start gaming again when a new gaming group formed out of some North East UK souls desperate to find a group or form a group out of a coalition of the willing rather than being mired by a horde made up of the perpetually inclined to give lip service to being willing as long you recognise this hobby comes behind 5+ other things I like to do. The arrival of Dungeons and Dragons 3E was the trigger for this. That’s not overly relevant to the tale, but it’s an interesting anecdote and it’s also my current gaming group of 21 years.
Now back to the reasons.
The theory was damaging. I went through a period where the theory I absorbed during my armchair gaming phase was more damaging than helpful. I told you we’d come back to it. Thinking about it, it went from helpful, to damaging, to helpful again. That sounds odd. Probably needs some explanation. It was helpful at first to allow me to navigate to what I liked and wanted. It was then damaging because during my ‘forever GM’ phase I just did it without thinking, now I didn’t, I actively thought about it. That’s not a bad thing, but there was obviously a period during which that thought hadn’t fully manifested in a way for me to execute it. As a result, thinking about it was a barrier.
I have high standards. I do. I admit it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this but it did also result in some games being called before they had the chance to maybe become something better. I was cancelling games a session or two in assuming they actually reached play during this period. This does intersect with group dynamics, but it was an element of my shit that was a problem.
Game systems annoyed me. They really did. There wasn’t a single game that I read that felt entirely right to run. There were just elements of them I liked while other parts of them completely bugged the crap out of me. It was like I was searching for something that I couldn’t exactly identify but I knew everything I was reading or trying wasn’t exactly it.
I assumed everything was my problem to solve. This is a common trait. It’s something I have to manage all the time in situations other than running role-playing games. At work, I constantly have to ask my self am I the best person to solve this problem? Can I solve this problem? Otherwise, I hold onto things I can’t solve and get stressed about them. In the context of this, I assumed too much responsibility for it being entertaining, everything making perfect sense, getting the characters effortlessly, but also ‘realistically’, from point A to B (I accepted these weren’t set in stone, but there is always a point A and B). Ensuring everything was logical and consistent and could be backed up.
Basically, too much GM responsibility.
The dynamics of the group were wrong. I have no idea if anyone else agrees with me, but I’ll politely argue it was true firmly and robustly. For me, the dynamics of the gaming group were not working. I kept trying like Homer Simpson reaching for the cheese because some of the issues were mine but it took me a while to realise even if I’d got my side in order this would still have been an issue. To be clear, the group was working, just not for me from a GM perspective. Possibly my tolerances were lower for such things.
So, What Changed This Time?
Obviously, something changed. Just don’t ask me to define exactly when. It’s a spectrum. We like spectrums these days. It was a journey. If you like your Reality TV cliches. So don’t expect me to put these reasons on a timeline. They just exist, as Doctor Who might say, in a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey fashion.
The games got better. Let’s be honest the whole indie and story games movement felt a bit like academic research in terms of its maturity path. It started by throwing everything that had gone before out, a sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater thing in a wish to experiment. Then it did the whole let’s argue about multiple theories and games design approaches as if they’re mutually exclusive. It created its own language to describe new concepts. Totally understandable why this happened, but like all ‘research’ and ‘exploration’ journeys of this type they only reach peak usefulness when: –
- It’s accepted the theories being argued are all valid and maybe its the synthesis of them that is the win
- That maybe all that old stuff that needed tossing out to free up space for experimentation wasn’t actually all bad
- The language and patterns become more codified, repeatable, understandable and routine
When this happened it solved my constant annoyance with game systems as I found ones that were doing exactly what I wanted. I found what I was looking for when all the above synthesised essentially into what would be called fiction first games. All those games that have enough of a traditional feel but are working with the fiction and resolving the fiction.
Fate. Cortex Prime. Forged in the Dark. I am sure there are many others. You get the idea.
I accepted fiction first as my truth. I accepted fiction first wholesale. I took it upon myself as a religion. I wrapped myself in it as a comfortable duvet and literally every problem I have with game systems and executing gaming at the table, which I didn’t use to have pre-1996, but seemed to have post-2000, just vanished. Because when you move to fiction first literally a metric shit load of problems that appear in gaming sessions and people discuss on the internet just miraculously vanish.
Gone are all the needs to present verisimilitude. Gone are all the conversations of exactly what can I lift, how far away is this, how long will it take me to travel there, well it took a week last time, exactly how far do horses travel in a day. Come on, the fiction we watch on which a lot of our games are based don’t give a rat’s ass about all these questions.
How do characters flow from whatever point A and B is at any particular point in time? Find a way that works in a fictional exciting way and go with it. Chances are your players will provide a more exciting one for you anyway. Done.
I did an MBA. Masters education. I’m sure everyone’s experience isn’t the same as it depends on who you are at the time and fully understanding why you’re doing it. In my case, my master’s education, and the process of it literally transformed me as a person. Like a caterpillar coming out of its cocoon sort of level. That’s a bit flowery and romantic, but there is a core of truth to it.
It was irrelevant what I was learning as a subject. A bit like coaching a sports team, so All or Nothing tells us on Netflix, you trust the process. That process, done by distant learning, involves learning three new subjects, often from a cold start, to a high degree of depth, while contextualising it into your previous experience and future self on a short time-scale. Then you repeat that process continually many times over for three or so years. It was brutal but fun. To get through that process you learn a lot about yourself, how to think, how to deal with complexity, abstraction and communicating complexity, uncertainty and expectation.
This process lead directly to how I plan my campaigns to effectively plan via abstract navigation.
I got divorced. This is a weird one, but it could look from the outside like I stopped running role-playing games when I met my wife and started running games when she left. This is what happened, but it isn’t really causation. My ex-wife didn’t hold me back from my hobbies in any shape or form. I mean, come on, we met cosplaying at a Star Trek convention. At the same time, the divorce did represent a shift. It wasn’t being free of my wife that changed my attitude to gaming, but the process you go through to re-evaluate what’s important when faced with the existential experience of finding yourself abruptly going through a divorce.
It inevitably changes you as an individual. I started doing more adventurous travel. Making bolder, personal choices. Looking at gaming again. Simple.
The group dynamics changed. Membership changed. Group dynamics changed. There was much less of a really factor often before we even got past character creation and session zero. As I say, I probably see this differently, but that’s fine as has been said already people have much different tolerance factors for these things and I’m very much in the low tolerance zone if I’m going to dedicate my time to it.
A Little Secret, It Was The Second Attempt!
The truth is this campaign was the second attempt to do the exact same thing. This was the Fading Suns campaign. I was really stoked about a Fading Suns campaign and I was confident it would go to a conclusion. Well, more confident than I’d been before anyway. Check this out: –
- A setting I liked distilled into its core concepts? Check
- The rules of the game ditched for Fate? Check
- Using a planning horizon to control my anxiety? Check
- Keeping high concepts and ideas in mind to collapse into reality in reaction to player input? Check
- Existential threat from the darkness of space? Check
- Going for epic visuals of a fantastical (in this case space fantasy) nature? Check
I literally repeated the exact same model for Werewolf: Accelerated. Obviously, some of the reasons for that second attempt working hadn’t yet fallen into place at the time of the Fading Suns one (primarily Fate as a system and the group dynamics, with a side-order of the genre being interpreted differently I think, but it’s not worth deep diving on it here).
And, Finally…
So, that’s it. The 26 years of failing to GM is over. The #ttrpgfamily masses can rejoice for me. I realise in truth you don’t care. This posts won’t even be found in the vast, uncaring digital reality that is the internet. If you have got this far hopefully this was interesting and just shows how we can have strange dysfunctional relationships with our hobbies.
Especially one that is as complex a practice as running a role-playing game. I know this is true as I spend way too much time on Twitter.
Enjoy.