I found another nest of TTRPG-ers by the simple method of mentioning D&D in public and watching who's ears prick up. We were crewing the desk of a charity ball, had a few % no-shows and I mentioned this was great compared to ~25% for a group I help run - what kind of group - D&D - oh really, well I too... and click, connection made.
This has lead to them organising a DM Supergroup to test run the stuff that forever DMs have trouble getting their players to try - very topical as I was just looking at my numbers and I play very little that is not D&D any more.
The money question however was 'what do you want to run' - a proper poser. I have a bunch of *campaign* ideas I want to try and scope to run whatever 5e episodic things I might want at the regular Friday night sessions - but what of the towering wall behind me do I actually want to try at table where I am testing a proper unknown?
Others in the group have proposed intersting stuff that I'm happy to try but never heard of plus stuff that I have heard of and was on my to-do list - Mork Borg, Star Trek Adventures, Band of Blades. What do I want to suggest?
My focus this year so far has just been scaling up the local games society - onboarding new folk and tweaking venue issues. The mass of folk ouy there seem to be coming in off Baldurs Gate 3 so you can take anything 5e and find players easily if you DM. Players for anything else is a lot more tricky, so I've set tons of stuff aside as just not worth the hassle and focussed on bringing new folk aboard, running welcome-wagon 5e Brancalonia D&D. But if I now have the opportunity to *try* that odder stuff, what do I want to try?
After pondering it a bit, I found four themes I want to investigate:
'Best of' adventures - DCC funnel Sailors of the Starless Sea, Tomb of the Serpent Priests using some old-school system
Systems I want to test - Gumshoe/Swords of the Serpentine, Sig: Manual of the Primes, Skycrawl
Refining D&D - testing the retroclones on my shelves to answer the nagging feeling that I should be running a lighter version of D&D (DCC, For Gold & Glory, Delving Deeper, Black Sword Hack, White Box)
Settings I want to try from my shelves/pdf pit - Iron Kingdoms, Rogue Trader (89)
Boiling that down to what do I want to try first
- Swords of the Serpentine adventure from the book
- DCC Sailors of the Starless Sea to run a funnel
Throw those two in the pot as my contributions and play 1-2 others from each of the group and that should be months of gaming before I need to think about this again.
Settings tests are not really the thing to try in this format, and it feels a bit cheeky to try different versions of D&D with a bunch that has come together to try odd stuff (unless it is to test a renowned adventure on its native system) so I think sticking to the first two will be the focus.
Mostly I am keen to try out some of the odder things folk have proposed - particularly the things I never heard of before. It is easy to buy the books and have them sit on the shelves or get a bit of a read but really it is getting dice thrown at table that gives you the real feel for it and that I'd be keen to do.
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