I'm running a lot of games right now. Well, I'm running two. Kind of:
Phaedra is what I've been calling the campaign I have been running, named after the barely-faux-ancient-greece region the game has taken place in.
I am running for two different stable groups, with about 8 sessions with one group and 3 sessions with the other. I've been calling them one 'campaign' since I'm using the same world for both and technically keeping track of both on the same calendar but they've massively diverted in when each is taking place and neither has affected the other (outside of very minor details) so considering them all one big thing is a big of a stretch.
But this brings me to what I wanted to ask about. I have two other games I am looking at getting going:
New Game One: An open-table-ish Halls of Arden Vul game
I like running for my two groups now but scheduling with them is inconsistent and, in particular with one of the groups, usually if any player can't make it, we don't play. This is kind of a big ol' bummer for me every time it happens, because I am keeping myself pretty isolated since I am immuno-compromised and one of my main social avenues is rpgs (it is the main reason that I run a lot of games. That and I don't have a job.)
I want to have a game going that I can schedule with little prep and run with whoever is available, on whatever days I have free (or when I have a canceled session).
(The Shattered Coast glog server served this purpose for me for a bit, but I grew out of love with the server and how it was organized, also GLOGs in general at this point, and officially left it a month or two ago.)
I chose Halls of Arden Vul because I assumed it was large enough that I could just prep whatever area the group was considering going into, and because I was a fool and was taken in by the promises of it being just really fucking big.
I've done a lot of reading the adventure already, and some prep in distilling some house rules for OSE (I might try running it with OSRIC though? Idk, not an important point right now).
I'm not here to harp on Arden Vul though, although I'll talk about it more in a moment.
New Game Two: ADND for my dad
I might have mentioned this in my Holiday DND post, but playing with my dad over Christmas re-kindled his interest in playing rpgs. I've also read too much of Anthony Huso's blog and want to try my hand with 1e. He played ADND back in the day, and I want to run some of the old adventures he would recognize (and possibly have played already, but that will be fine honestly, it was 40ish years ago).
You said you had a question?
Right, so the intention with both of these games is to minimize the type of churn I get stuck on with rpgs. I have a lot of free time and spent too much time writing shit that didn't get to see play. A lot of rules churn and setting churn and campaign churn and I want to avoid getting stuck in that morass again. One of the better things I did for my sanity was just stop writing stuff for my Phaedra games over the holiday break.
Even though there's hypothetically a lot of little things I want to do for the Phaedra games (everything in this post, for example), I just don't have the energy for it. Spending time in from of screens gives me migraines and I just end up spinning my wheels anyway. It wouldn't feel so bad if it didn't feel extremely masturbatory. I love actually playing games and sharing what I've made with others, but time spending creating something that will never reach anyone else just feels like time spent poorly. Maybe this is the protestant in me, Idk.
I have still not reached my question, yikes.
So, one thought I had to minimize prep was to stick everything I am running into the same world. I wouldn't try to keep a matching calendar for everything, given it wouldn't really matter. I've been toying with using Worlds Without Number for giving factions something to do.
Can I minimize the time I spend on the stuff I find uninteresting (making a complete world) if I just jam everything into one world map? Do I need to worry about this shit?
This is probably the type of question that is more just asking for permission to do something.
I'm kind of tired of writing, but I have like 20 drafts at this point so Imma just going to post this.
Happy Friday!
The churn is real - it's something I've experienced any time I've created something, TTRPG-related or not. My process used to be very raw - I took good ideas I had, wrote them down, and tried to expand on them in ways that was both usable in play, and also cool.
ReplyDeleteSince I began development on my new WWN-based setting for my hopefully WWN game, a lot of my process has heavily shifted away from this raw output, and I've been able to go essentially 12 straight hours just building things without feeling any of the burnout I used to feel. Obviously, a large part of this has to do with the offloading of mental effort onto the random generation within the book (godsend, by the way!), but I also think it's helped me shift my brain a bit about what I value in settings, both mine and the ones I play in.
There's a very clear distinction between content that is interesting and flavorful, and content that is usable. Ideally, you make content that is both, but especially when you're working with a very raw creative process, you end up creating a mix of the two instead of a combination. I've been talking a lot with a close friend of mine who's currently working on a homebrewed setting, and it's really helped me understand this idea. His setting exists entirely in a very high-quality moleskin notebook, and he writes exclusively in a black gel pen. He has maybe two dozen pages of work, and all of it is in very flavorful prose. His process is to simply sit down at a desk when the mood strikes him, and he writes. He recently ran into the problem that none of his material really helps him build a game. It's all intensely flavorful and interesting and would certainly help him write a novel, but at no point has he really created anything that's usable at a table. Inevitably, his creative wheels will spin out, and he will return to the drawing board to make the umpteenth setting of his, entirely because he eventually becomes uninterested in his world.
To protect your creative mind, it's important not to kill it with stuff you don't like. If at any point you're working on something and it feels either useless or uncreative/boring, stop working on it! It probably doesn't matter, and your time will be better served working on a cool and useful idea instead of a creatively dead and useless one.
Not to harp on WWN too much, but I'd really recommend using some of its generative tools. Maybe, if you want to run a new game in a fresh setting, you just make a new continent! It's all fantastical in nature, so why not have two continents with different laws of physics? The players never know if you don't tell them.
No matter what you end up doing, I'd definitely recommend using WWN to offload some of the creative process. I don't know how you feel about physical copies, but I recently ordered the offset print version, and would be happy to send you my POD version if you want it, even if you just want it for faction play.
Love you!
Charlie