Have deliberately left using my '7-step single page prep' late to drive urgency:
Step 0 - open the toolkit - Excel sheet with all my tables and models, powerpoint with realm maps, powerpoint with the palace layout. Sources for all reference I will go into anon. Set out the papers - session sheets, blank, reference stack.
Step 1 - set the time - no problem; work out weather for the next day since we are starting in the evening. If in doubt I use the random weather generator here.
Step 2 - copy over all the events. While doing this a number of events will compress to just tags back to detailed notes on previous sheet. Any obvious extra ones in mind will be added now. Next is to review what happened in the part 5 & 6 of previous week - what happened and where the PCs plan to go. Each of these gets either a tag back to the relevant source or will be expanded on now, envisioning that the PCs will get to them. What did the players flag as the things they would likely go do this week. As I spot these gaps I do a quick fill out into block 4.
Step 3 - Look at the timeline and think how things may play out. What if the party zips through or skips certain activities; what is the next thing they are likely to end up at? In this case the curtain goes up on the immediate aftermath of a tournament where the players did well - lots of glory but zeroed out on resources.
Step 4 - in this case I ended up with some of the scantest notes I have done in a while - a list of additional guests at the feast, some thought in how to do the mechanics for a big tournament event, and a 'what everyone thought' of the main events from the last session. 45mins all told. Tools I actually used: my trusty family tree for the noble house we are playing ( a big excel table ), my calendar to check the names of days, Google (for names in relevant culture) and Ulraunts Guide to Acheron to fluff out a hook that did not get used. That was it, feel like I got away lightly.
Step 5 - Of 13 hooks that were on the list to start the game, 4 got used in a 4.5 hour session; 2 major sections were ad-libbed where the players pulled on hooks from major NPCs, 1 light combat encounter where a clutch 'calm emotions' from the bart pretty much won the day.
Step 6 - "at table" - after we called the end of session but still on the call we booked the next session and I got 7 things the players were planning to go after next. At this point I will also round out the notes I took at table; expanding the 'aide memoire' scribbles; adding names, noting down things I made up on the fly.
Step 7 - I will not try to work up implications immediately; usually I try to down tools for a while after a session. If I do not get the chance to do it until next sessions prep starts then this is the first things to do. Perhaps it ought to be step zero?
29 November 2020
26 November 2020
Swamping the DM-ing apprenticeship model with players
There was a twitter thread mentioning the passing of tribal knowledge within D&D players. The key point was that many assumptions are not made explicit in the guides as it is assumed that the players are embedded within play groups, learning to DM from other DMs with very few DMs starting from the books alone. This can no longer be sustained as the high growth following the release of D&D 5e has changed the paradigm.
From previous post on the rate of new joiners I thought to try and estimate how many new joiners might have been expected to join based on the long run trajectory from the past 30 years.
If the trend of the present day OSR players can be taken as broadly representative of the long-run trend extending through to today then we can make an estimate of what players would have joined if the long run trends had been sustained - approx 20% of the current population.
This suggests that the need to transmit the craft of dungeon mastering must be transmitted through different channels than the apprenticeship model. The original thread suggested this needs to be better DMs guides but I suspect we may see a more multi-channel approach such as watching actual plays such as Dimension 20 and Critical Role, DM guides such as Matt Colvilles Running the Game series or finding assistance in peer communities on Discord or forums such as Reddit or in wise writings on blogs.
I think calls for 'DMs to do more work' and accept more people to their tables are misplaced - DMs cannot do the work required even if they turned their tables into factory farms. Not every player wants to DM, not everone will be local to someone who could teach them even if they wanted. Far better if the conditions are created to allow tables to spontaneously generate. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It worked for me.
Sources are:
OSR Gateway Survey (2019, N=2764)
R/DnDNext 5e Survey (2019, N=745)
NB: link to PDF
Dungeons and Dragons and Data: The Demographics of Players and Their Impact on Character Creation and Game Play (2019, N=1130)
From previous post on the rate of new joiners I thought to try and estimate how many new joiners might have been expected to join based on the long run trajectory from the past 30 years.
If the trend of the present day OSR players can be taken as broadly representative of the long-run trend extending through to today then we can make an estimate of what players would have joined if the long run trends had been sustained - approx 20% of the current population.
This suggests that the need to transmit the craft of dungeon mastering must be transmitted through different channels than the apprenticeship model. The original thread suggested this needs to be better DMs guides but I suspect we may see a more multi-channel approach such as watching actual plays such as Dimension 20 and Critical Role, DM guides such as Matt Colvilles Running the Game series or finding assistance in peer communities on Discord or forums such as Reddit or in wise writings on blogs.
I think calls for 'DMs to do more work' and accept more people to their tables are misplaced - DMs cannot do the work required even if they turned their tables into factory farms. Not every player wants to DM, not everone will be local to someone who could teach them even if they wanted. Far better if the conditions are created to allow tables to spontaneously generate. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It worked for me.
Sources are:
OSR Gateway Survey (2019, N=2764)
R/DnDNext 5e Survey (2019, N=745)
NB: link to PDF
Dungeons and Dragons and Data: The Demographics of Players and Their Impact on Character Creation and Game Play (2019, N=1130)
24 November 2020
Conceptual density or why I had favorite RPG books
I have been buying RPG products for 30 years now. A friend called me out recently by identifying me as a big-spender among what I had thought was a pretty hard core group. I felt very seen, so time to look at what all this has taught me (if anything).
In common with a few things about gaming recently, Against the Wicked City in the OSR articulated the phrase that nailed what I had been feeling and the scales fell from my eyes - "conceptual density" - that an RPG product "contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing". The blog post uses the exemplary Hill Cantons as an example which I would agree with but also take it a level further - in that Hill Cantons was inspired by Slavic warbear art; why not go direct to the source?
Art books and illustrated fables are almost as good as a dedicated RPG product - examples that I realise are sunk deep into my mind are:
- The Book of Conquests by Jim Fitzpatrick - based on the early mythological cycle of Irish stories. Epic, gorgeous, full stop.
- Wherever you can find Arthur Rackhams illustrations - I think I know him from Oscar Wildes fairy tales?
Lizardman Diaries brings the concept into play well with 'visual quirk generators' - an example of this is the Transient Bazaar - putting a grid over suitably evocative images to randomly find on-theme inspiration.
The key point here is that all of this more or less abandons crunch. No new rules, nor classes nor anything, this is purely about inspiration. I have shelves upon shelves of rules and I realised I have jettisoned or never activated most of them. In another piece of insight that helped me clarify what I had felt as a hunch - I do not need more mechanics because basically everything can be a bear.
Even in Planescape which I ran a lot, even during a relatively crunchy phase, the fiddly rules about magic items power waning and waxing across different locations, spells requiring keys and clerics being hamstrung by distance from their deity got mostly left at the door. What I did use, and all the time, were the lore descriptions, what the monsters were *like*, where they lived, what conditions on the planes were, in what nooks and crevasses could someone survive on, say, Pandemonium or Gehenna. There were some mechanical rules but if you were contesting the environment regularly, you were going to lose eventually.
I realise what I will buy a product for has evolved now that I know what I like. Of old I loved the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums; simply looking at entries in the monstrous compendiums and thinking about what those critters would do in the wild. I bought Midnight, Ptolus, and a bunch of other weighty books and found myself never using them. I now realise because I could not find art within that drove me. Ptolus because everything was already detailed out, cross referenced and pinned out like a conspiracy room. Great for what it is - not what I love. What I need are ideas to make it feel different, an element of randomness to kick me out of the rut of my own habits that I would drift towards without guidance.
Of supplements I own, going by what looks most raggedy, the most use I got of old was from:
The Planewalker's Handbook
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II
Planes of Chaos
Maybe I should have just bought DiTerlizzi artbooks.
In common with a few things about gaming recently, Against the Wicked City in the OSR articulated the phrase that nailed what I had been feeling and the scales fell from my eyes - "conceptual density" - that an RPG product "contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing". The blog post uses the exemplary Hill Cantons as an example which I would agree with but also take it a level further - in that Hill Cantons was inspired by Slavic warbear art; why not go direct to the source?
Art books and illustrated fables are almost as good as a dedicated RPG product - examples that I realise are sunk deep into my mind are:
- The Book of Conquests by Jim Fitzpatrick - based on the early mythological cycle of Irish stories. Epic, gorgeous, full stop.
- Wherever you can find Arthur Rackhams illustrations - I think I know him from Oscar Wildes fairy tales?
Lizardman Diaries brings the concept into play well with 'visual quirk generators' - an example of this is the Transient Bazaar - putting a grid over suitably evocative images to randomly find on-theme inspiration.
The key point here is that all of this more or less abandons crunch. No new rules, nor classes nor anything, this is purely about inspiration. I have shelves upon shelves of rules and I realised I have jettisoned or never activated most of them. In another piece of insight that helped me clarify what I had felt as a hunch - I do not need more mechanics because basically everything can be a bear.
Even in Planescape which I ran a lot, even during a relatively crunchy phase, the fiddly rules about magic items power waning and waxing across different locations, spells requiring keys and clerics being hamstrung by distance from their deity got mostly left at the door. What I did use, and all the time, were the lore descriptions, what the monsters were *like*, where they lived, what conditions on the planes were, in what nooks and crevasses could someone survive on, say, Pandemonium or Gehenna. There were some mechanical rules but if you were contesting the environment regularly, you were going to lose eventually.
I realise what I will buy a product for has evolved now that I know what I like. Of old I loved the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums; simply looking at entries in the monstrous compendiums and thinking about what those critters would do in the wild. I bought Midnight, Ptolus, and a bunch of other weighty books and found myself never using them. I now realise because I could not find art within that drove me. Ptolus because everything was already detailed out, cross referenced and pinned out like a conspiracy room. Great for what it is - not what I love. What I need are ideas to make it feel different, an element of randomness to kick me out of the rut of my own habits that I would drift towards without guidance.
Of supplements I own, going by what looks most raggedy, the most use I got of old was from:
The Planewalker's Handbook
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II
Planes of Chaos
Maybe I should have just bought DiTerlizzi artbooks.
22 November 2020
"I was raised on the Lower Planes" - on running Planescape
I have been thinking about the difference between Spelljammer and Planescape and to me Spelljammer is about having a mobile base for your road adventures while in Planescape you have a static one or none at all such as being a caravan. Here we are going to go a little deeper into my experiences running Planescape.
I got my hands on my copy of Planescape on a summer holiday and all my games after that were Planescape. Sometimes they might have started on or crossed the Prime, but anything I ran there were two guarantees - there would be planeswalking and somewhere a dragon was involved.
I ran three signature Planescape campaigns - one that started on the prime and then headed to the planes, two that were planar from the get go.
First was the Katharsis campaign - classic AD&D - running about a kingdom, fighting a goblin crusade, finding the portal that the demon-prophet had been trying to capture... then ripping it open and bailing offworld to dodge the coming demon invasion. From there it turned into a caravan across the planes, slowly losing hangers-on and gear, turning into a pure monster-of-the-week almost 'Sliders' style "what can we do here before we leave by the next portal". This was a mid-teens game, with a 3 core players and a rotating cast of others in a quasi-west marches style. Plane-hopping let me fold in whatever interesting turned up through Dragon magazine or whatever other inspirations crossed my radar at short notice.
The second campaign I ran - Kraken Mesa, a.k.a. Babylon 666 - was hung on the idea of the party getting abducted from their village on the Prime by a bunch of yugoloths on Gehenna who tasked them with clearing out and gaining control of an illithid fortress they had dragged to Avalas (first layer of Gehenna). This was supposed to be faction juggling, clearing out wierd aspects of their fortress, and trying to glean clues from what was going on around them. This was a college era game, initially 6 players, then 5 for the second year.
The third campaign - JCQ - was entirely over AIM chat circa 2005. This had the player as fixers for an interplanar trading combine that had just gotten hit by some foes big play and they players made travelled the planes rescuing their colleagues, murdering their foes and trying to figure out who the enemy was.
The common factor among all these campaigns is the great freedom to throw anything you like at the party - next portal can lead to a dessicated sea where they face a mummified kraken, or to a jungle glade with a silent temple where a god sleeps, or through a hive of psychic wasps. Nothing was too strange because strange was to be expected. Planescape frees you from certain limits of versimilitude because Anything Goes on the planes, they are infinite. You just have to never flinch, keep your foot down on the accelerator and leave the players with the sense that they got away with something daring just by skipping through this place and surviving. Planescape should be plots in the shadows with angels and demons and sprints across the open to seize an opportunity before something of god-like power notices you.
To that note, for any DM thinking of running Planescape I would suggest spot the bits that really appeal to you and just do those bits. Some of what is out there will not appeal but there is so much good stuff and the to-ing and fro-ing of the infinite planes will generate so much material as you go that you will have a long, long campaign working through all the bits you really wanted to do.
I got my hands on my copy of Planescape on a summer holiday and all my games after that were Planescape. Sometimes they might have started on or crossed the Prime, but anything I ran there were two guarantees - there would be planeswalking and somewhere a dragon was involved.
I ran three signature Planescape campaigns - one that started on the prime and then headed to the planes, two that were planar from the get go.
First was the Katharsis campaign - classic AD&D - running about a kingdom, fighting a goblin crusade, finding the portal that the demon-prophet had been trying to capture... then ripping it open and bailing offworld to dodge the coming demon invasion. From there it turned into a caravan across the planes, slowly losing hangers-on and gear, turning into a pure monster-of-the-week almost 'Sliders' style "what can we do here before we leave by the next portal". This was a mid-teens game, with a 3 core players and a rotating cast of others in a quasi-west marches style. Plane-hopping let me fold in whatever interesting turned up through Dragon magazine or whatever other inspirations crossed my radar at short notice.
The big 'Planescape signatures' I would tag here was the rapid switching between terrains, the continuous 'a stranger walks into town' effect and the chance to do some crazily epic things like hike up Mount Olympus to meet Ares (patron of two of the party).
The second campaign I ran - Kraken Mesa, a.k.a. Babylon 666 - was hung on the idea of the party getting abducted from their village on the Prime by a bunch of yugoloths on Gehenna who tasked them with clearing out and gaining control of an illithid fortress they had dragged to Avalas (first layer of Gehenna). This was supposed to be faction juggling, clearing out wierd aspects of their fortress, and trying to glean clues from what was going on around them. This was a college era game, initially 6 players, then 5 for the second year.
The big 'Planescape signatures' was being present on Gehenna, dealing with demons and devils on a regular basis who were too powerful to straight up fight, interacting with lots of the odder features of Planescape as parties interested in profitting off the Blood War made their way to their door. My players would probably recall the ridiculously over-engineered props I made up including a hand drawn cloth map of Avalas that was kept in a bag of soot for the authentic smell and filth.
The third campaign - JCQ - was entirely over AIM chat circa 2005. This had the player as fixers for an interplanar trading combine that had just gotten hit by some foes big play and they players made travelled the planes rescuing their colleagues, murdering their foes and trying to figure out who the enemy was.
This campaign was very dear to my heart because all the players were veterans of Kraken Mesa and as one would later say as in our title "I feel I was raised on the Lower planes" - and so I could push subtle lore stuff to them which would be picked up. "These brigands had green steel coin in their purses - Ba'atezu paid them, whats their angle here..."
The common factor among all these campaigns is the great freedom to throw anything you like at the party - next portal can lead to a dessicated sea where they face a mummified kraken, or to a jungle glade with a silent temple where a god sleeps, or through a hive of psychic wasps. Nothing was too strange because strange was to be expected. Planescape frees you from certain limits of versimilitude because Anything Goes on the planes, they are infinite. You just have to never flinch, keep your foot down on the accelerator and leave the players with the sense that they got away with something daring just by skipping through this place and surviving. Planescape should be plots in the shadows with angels and demons and sprints across the open to seize an opportunity before something of god-like power notices you.
To that note, for any DM thinking of running Planescape I would suggest spot the bits that really appeal to you and just do those bits. Some of what is out there will not appeal but there is so much good stuff and the to-ing and fro-ing of the infinite planes will generate so much material as you go that you will have a long, long campaign working through all the bits you really wanted to do.
21 November 2020
Comparing polls on game session length (2014-2020)
tl,dr: typical session length remains stable at ~ 4-5 hours in polls over time.
Attempting a wisom of crowds, crude longitudinal survey I compiled a bunch of different player surveys over time. First off thanks to all those out there who leave clear, findable records of their surveys. Kudos.
Second - the major problem with this kind of survey is that people bucket their time ranges very differently from coarse "1-2, 3-4, 4+" style to 'enter a number' clear space which leads sometimes to mini-essays that are difficult to parse (what was one supposed to make of "currently X but had a lot of Y"?). Hence the cumulative population curves to try and squeeze an apples to apples comparison out of all this.
Overall the story appears to be that most of the player population is getting in 2-6 hour sessions, with 2.5-5 hours covering about half of all players. This gels with what we typically see on the front of Adventurers league modules and what we used to run for a convention slot at Leprecon.
However, this then tells me my 'normal' gaming experience is pretty atypical. The yellow curve on the graphs is a slightly different question from the 2014 survey asking 'how much gaming per week' and the lows and highs indicate that a) some people are not getting in any gaming (~15% of respondents at the time) and some portion of the population is getting in a hell of a lot of gaming ~30% getting in 2 typical sessions and ~5% playing very long haul sessions.
Taking the 4 examples from my own experiences
- my local Adventurers Leauge Friday night meetup gang used to meet at 7pm and run regularly to past midnight on what were supposed to be 2-3 hour modules.
- my current home game started as a 4.5 hour evening slot - 7pm to midnight by design, aiming for every second week and had crept up towards weekly 6+ slots. This may be pandemic driven of course.
- I played a friends L5R campaign that was a weekly after work 7pm to 11:30 (4.5 on the nose).
- years ago we ran Living Arcanis modules which were similar 7pm to midnight 5hr sessions.
I wish I had data enough to cross check against ages - I bet there is a frequency drop, length up-tick that corresponds to people hitting 'serious job + family' - and therefore the logistical trouble to get a table together drives a preference for longer games.
Sources:
Attempting a wisom of crowds, crude longitudinal survey I compiled a bunch of different player surveys over time. First off thanks to all those out there who leave clear, findable records of their surveys. Kudos.
Second - the major problem with this kind of survey is that people bucket their time ranges very differently from coarse "1-2, 3-4, 4+" style to 'enter a number' clear space which leads sometimes to mini-essays that are difficult to parse (what was one supposed to make of "currently X but had a lot of Y"?). Hence the cumulative population curves to try and squeeze an apples to apples comparison out of all this.
Overall the story appears to be that most of the player population is getting in 2-6 hour sessions, with 2.5-5 hours covering about half of all players. This gels with what we typically see on the front of Adventurers league modules and what we used to run for a convention slot at Leprecon.
However, this then tells me my 'normal' gaming experience is pretty atypical. The yellow curve on the graphs is a slightly different question from the 2014 survey asking 'how much gaming per week' and the lows and highs indicate that a) some people are not getting in any gaming (~15% of respondents at the time) and some portion of the population is getting in a hell of a lot of gaming ~30% getting in 2 typical sessions and ~5% playing very long haul sessions.
Taking the 4 examples from my own experiences
- my local Adventurers Leauge Friday night meetup gang used to meet at 7pm and run regularly to past midnight on what were supposed to be 2-3 hour modules.
- my current home game started as a 4.5 hour evening slot - 7pm to midnight by design, aiming for every second week and had crept up towards weekly 6+ slots. This may be pandemic driven of course.
- I played a friends L5R campaign that was a weekly after work 7pm to 11:30 (4.5 on the nose).
- years ago we ran Living Arcanis modules which were similar 7pm to midnight 5hr sessions.
I wish I had data enough to cross check against ages - I bet there is a frequency drop, length up-tick that corresponds to people hitting 'serious job + family' - and therefore the logistical trouble to get a table together drives a preference for longer games.
Sources:
| Name | Year | Size | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elderbrain | 2020 | 2044 | Survey |
| Facebook D&D 5e | 2020 | 1131 | Survey |
| Sly Flourish DMs | 2016 | 6600 | Survey |
| Reddit D&D | 2014 | 1734 | Survey |
19 November 2020
Review: Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart & Scrap Princess
tl:dr; awesome stuff, go get it.
I had the great good fortune in a recent break between local lockdowns here in Vienna to walk into my Friendly Local Games Store and spot Veins of the Earth sitting in the midst of their RPG shelves. One of the easier purchasing decisions I have ever made - I have heard of this book spoken in legend, I even considered buying it online but the shipping scared me off until here it was.
And looking at it, I see why shipping was an issue.
So beautiful, an artefact of a book like few others I have handled recently. Reading through its tales of eldritch underground horrors and leaping subterranean predators has been just the palate-cleansing pick-me-up I have needed from the news during this hell-scape of a year.
The first half is a bestiary with such wonderful entries on creatures and cultures that I have been bugging my SO by reading the best bits out to them. The second half is on running a campaign in the Veins; modifying rules and giving a toolkit to create your own exploration set.
The art by Scrap Princess is magnificent throughout to give the aesthetic, similar to DiTerlizzi for Planescape or Brom for Dark Sun.
What I love most about this, is the voice. From the initial statement of logic about why the book came to be - because we know more about caves now and we know they should be tougher and weirder than walkable caverns of yore - there way that Patrick Stuart lays things out is great to my mind. He tells you the why, and the intended feel, or look, or atmosphere. I like this principle driven way of doing a setting a lot - here is why we are changing this thing, encumbrance, light, climbing - there is detail here, because it is important for the feel for these reasons.
I know I am very late to the table on this - I have seen people rave about Veins of the Earth on the OSR blogs for years, but now having read it all I can say is the hype isn't wrong. This is one of those things that I just cannot explain, you have to pick this book up for yourself. I have held a few beautiful artefact books this year, but this is the honored ancestor. Go see for yourself.
If you want a more detailed breakdown of the content plus some actual play see the Luminescent Lich if you want to read or Questing Beast if you want a video.
I had the great good fortune in a recent break between local lockdowns here in Vienna to walk into my Friendly Local Games Store and spot Veins of the Earth sitting in the midst of their RPG shelves. One of the easier purchasing decisions I have ever made - I have heard of this book spoken in legend, I even considered buying it online but the shipping scared me off until here it was.
And looking at it, I see why shipping was an issue.
So beautiful, an artefact of a book like few others I have handled recently. Reading through its tales of eldritch underground horrors and leaping subterranean predators has been just the palate-cleansing pick-me-up I have needed from the news during this hell-scape of a year.
The first half is a bestiary with such wonderful entries on creatures and cultures that I have been bugging my SO by reading the best bits out to them. The second half is on running a campaign in the Veins; modifying rules and giving a toolkit to create your own exploration set.
The art by Scrap Princess is magnificent throughout to give the aesthetic, similar to DiTerlizzi for Planescape or Brom for Dark Sun.
What I love most about this, is the voice. From the initial statement of logic about why the book came to be - because we know more about caves now and we know they should be tougher and weirder than walkable caverns of yore - there way that Patrick Stuart lays things out is great to my mind. He tells you the why, and the intended feel, or look, or atmosphere. I like this principle driven way of doing a setting a lot - here is why we are changing this thing, encumbrance, light, climbing - there is detail here, because it is important for the feel for these reasons.
I know I am very late to the table on this - I have seen people rave about Veins of the Earth on the OSR blogs for years, but now having read it all I can say is the hype isn't wrong. This is one of those things that I just cannot explain, you have to pick this book up for yourself. I have held a few beautiful artefact books this year, but this is the honored ancestor. Go see for yourself.
If you want a more detailed breakdown of the content plus some actual play see the Luminescent Lich if you want to read or Questing Beast if you want a video.
18 November 2020
On childrens story gaming and later play style
Long, long ago (fado, fado in Eireann) myself and 3 of my primary school buddies cooked up our own story game and I wanted to talk about this as I think it roots my play style since.
Broadly speaking, there was a disc-shaped world (guess what we had been reading) held up by wasps on the back of a giant dolphin. Not sure it would get us around IP infringement today but it served for then. Each of us had a continent on this world of Ping - Pong, Zip, Stink and Kongk - that filled out a copy-book, each of us appeared as a character in the others continent.
Our characters ran about on each others continents doing stuff, mostly putting odd plans in motion, chasing after story hooks and resolving conflicts through argument or essentially a loudly contested GM-fiat system. The fact that each of us ran and played simulutaneously kept things fairly on the level though not without some lumps and bumps.
This would have been ~1990 and at the time we were reading Fighting Fantasy books and White Dwarf and playing Heroquest and Space Crusade. We were way out in the west of Ireland, very little made its way out that far (our original White Dwarf was snatched off a shelf by one of us on a trip to the North), so all of this developed more or less in isolation from any other live gaming inputs. Having figured out there were things out there, we got subscriptions to White Dwarf (1991) then Dragon Magazine (1993). We more or less simultaneously got our hands on some Advanced Fighting Fantasy material and Black Box D&D which told us there were ways to do what we had been doing, but with systems! Dice rolling! Wierd dice! This found an easy welcome.
From there, there was an attempted launch of a AFF game that did not take off. A year or two later I ran a first D&D game which ran for a fair few sessions. At this point there were groups of friends (all boys) who had more or less moved from boardgames onto RPGs, which then got super-charged when Magic: the gathering hit town. The local book store held Friday open table sessions, this allowed like-minded folk to congregate and from there a whole bunch of different games took off - AD&D, World of Darkness, Conspiracy X, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
I think the early system-less experiences drilled in a sense of the activity being seperate from the particular system which made the statement 'for a specific setting, use system X' non-controversial for me. Always we had a DM who owned those books, knew the given system and the rest of us sat to table and played.
All this is sparked from a twitter thread I saw saying kids today find the demands of a game having a big-S story, as they have learned from watching streamed games, intimidating and a barrier to entry. While I agree with that specific point, I think the broad point of 'come for the story' refreshing as it implies there is hope that a broad ecosystem of games can flourish, each supporting different styles.
Seperately a lot of the responses to that thread saying 'story driven is bad' I think miss a distinction where people equate 'story driven' with 'rail-road' which is to chop a pretty subtle continuum into just two chunks. I fully agree with the point that if you have a story to tell and you do not want the players to interfere probably you should go write a book instead. If you have some big story hooks to drop and then you are willing to run with what the table does with those hooks - that is going to be a game. Maybe it will be a simple 'players flee the consequence of their actions' monster of the week type thing - thats fine, so long as it all makes sense.
To sum up - we got years of fun out of system-less rule-of-cool and I think that grounding in 'we come together to tell some sort of story' makes for a good foundation to then pick up a variety of systems and settings and enjoy the best of what is out there.
Broadly speaking, there was a disc-shaped world (guess what we had been reading) held up by wasps on the back of a giant dolphin. Not sure it would get us around IP infringement today but it served for then. Each of us had a continent on this world of Ping - Pong, Zip, Stink and Kongk - that filled out a copy-book, each of us appeared as a character in the others continent.
Our characters ran about on each others continents doing stuff, mostly putting odd plans in motion, chasing after story hooks and resolving conflicts through argument or essentially a loudly contested GM-fiat system. The fact that each of us ran and played simulutaneously kept things fairly on the level though not without some lumps and bumps.
This would have been ~1990 and at the time we were reading Fighting Fantasy books and White Dwarf and playing Heroquest and Space Crusade. We were way out in the west of Ireland, very little made its way out that far (our original White Dwarf was snatched off a shelf by one of us on a trip to the North), so all of this developed more or less in isolation from any other live gaming inputs. Having figured out there were things out there, we got subscriptions to White Dwarf (1991) then Dragon Magazine (1993). We more or less simultaneously got our hands on some Advanced Fighting Fantasy material and Black Box D&D which told us there were ways to do what we had been doing, but with systems! Dice rolling! Wierd dice! This found an easy welcome.
From there, there was an attempted launch of a AFF game that did not take off. A year or two later I ran a first D&D game which ran for a fair few sessions. At this point there were groups of friends (all boys) who had more or less moved from boardgames onto RPGs, which then got super-charged when Magic: the gathering hit town. The local book store held Friday open table sessions, this allowed like-minded folk to congregate and from there a whole bunch of different games took off - AD&D, World of Darkness, Conspiracy X, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
I think the early system-less experiences drilled in a sense of the activity being seperate from the particular system which made the statement 'for a specific setting, use system X' non-controversial for me. Always we had a DM who owned those books, knew the given system and the rest of us sat to table and played.
All this is sparked from a twitter thread I saw saying kids today find the demands of a game having a big-S story, as they have learned from watching streamed games, intimidating and a barrier to entry. While I agree with that specific point, I think the broad point of 'come for the story' refreshing as it implies there is hope that a broad ecosystem of games can flourish, each supporting different styles.
Seperately a lot of the responses to that thread saying 'story driven is bad' I think miss a distinction where people equate 'story driven' with 'rail-road' which is to chop a pretty subtle continuum into just two chunks. I fully agree with the point that if you have a story to tell and you do not want the players to interfere probably you should go write a book instead. If you have some big story hooks to drop and then you are willing to run with what the table does with those hooks - that is going to be a game. Maybe it will be a simple 'players flee the consequence of their actions' monster of the week type thing - thats fine, so long as it all makes sense.
To sum up - we got years of fun out of system-less rule-of-cool and I think that grounding in 'we come together to tell some sort of story' makes for a good foundation to then pick up a variety of systems and settings and enjoy the best of what is out there.
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