Nothing remains quite the same.
As I write this entry, I'm sitting in my game room. Or, what was once my game room. Over the last year this space has transformed into a home office, schoolhouse, and dumping ground for everything else in the house on its way to or from storage, or Home Depot or Ikea. The Pandemic has done a number on this room, and I feel like my soul resembles this room quite a bit. In the same way that Strahd von Zarovich is the land, I feel the state of the One-Eyed Ogre, as we call the game room, mirrors my mental and spiritual health.
I, too, am cluttered. I, too, and pulled in so many directions. I'm serving as an educational paraprofessional to both kids- one of which is ADHD, the other in the throes of puberty and pre-teen angst, and both dyslexic. I'm trying to keep my actual job duties rolling, which requires doing my work on evenings and weekends most weeks since my days are filled with keeping the kids awake (Zane) and on task (both, but especially Kaylee.) We're doing some necessary remodeling after our 40-year-old guest shower tub cracked right through the bottom, and that project has experienced some mission creep. We're just fortunate we have a friend who is a Master Plumber and he knew a great tile person. On top of that, we're trying to refi the house to take advantage of the ridiculously low interest rates, and pull out some equity to refit the rest of the house, since moving in the Austin housing market is priced for people who make a lot more money than I do, or people willing to live a lot farther out than I am. Add to that the insane amount of social and political turmoil that has wormed its way into the tabletop community just as it has every other facet of American life...
So what does this have to do with gaming? Quite a bit, on a personal level. I find that I lack the capacity for the way I gamed before all of this set in. And by all of it, I don't just mean the pandemic, I mean all the politics, all the associated stresses, me sitting here instead of my office on campus, all of it.
Before all of this, I'd run any game for any group. As a founding member of the Royal Dragoon Guards, way back when we were the Caladan Highland Dragoons, I have run big games for big groups for 25 years now. As the main GM all that time, it has been my duty to entertain the masses, and for the most part I loved it. I still look back at those unwieldy games where we had 15, 20 players or more in massive MechWarrior RPG campaigns that had Battletech battles that took up an entire activity center floor at our apartment complex. Our campaigns felt like the early novels, and we were like the Kell Hounds or the Gray Death Legion. It was glorious. Many Arby's 5-for-5s and Taco Bell 59/79/99 menu items died to bring us those days.
As we got older, our games got less ambitious, with the first RDG campaign under that name having only 17 players. Then we broke into smaller groups, and branched out into games aside from MechWarrior. This drew in more players, and somewhere along the line I ended up being the backstop GM. Other GMs had a solid stable of players for their games, and I ran the games for whoever was left. Which was more often than non a revolving door of casual players, who may or may not consistently attend. This also meant it was very difficult to do things that weren't one-shots or at most West Marches-style games. It started to erode my morale a bit, but I have always been a "The Show Must Go On" kind of GM, so we kept it going.
Everything shutting down had some unexpected effects. With our technology, we should have been able to just transition to Zoom or Discord and keep rolling, and we tried that. But the lack of in-person contact made meetings feel off somehow. Individual groups kept gaming, but as a whole our group fractured a bit. Pandemic fatigue set in, and it was hard to get enthusiasm for anything. We offered several online options, and very few of them were put to use with any enthusiasm. When we got to election time in January, the group decided to call 2020 a do-over and just let the 2020-2021 staff roll into 2021-22.
I tried running a 5e campaign. It died. I tried running a couple of other games, they never took off. I got a Star Trek Adventures game going recently, and that's showing some promise as the pandemic thaws. But for months, I was without a regular game, and in some cases even one-shots or anything, and I started to think about my role as the Game Master by default over the last 25 years.
I realized I'm tired. I'm frustrated. And the kind of gaming I was doing right before the pandemic happened wasn't really satisfying me then. What I need is to get back to what drew me into gaming in the first place. I need to get back to playing for the love of the game, with good friends, and an ongoing story. Crafting a tale together that we will recount over drinks for years to come.
And it doesn't have to be anything fancy. A scrappy group of mercenary MechWarriors, a bog-standard BX Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Maybe a Traveller game with elements of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.
Or maybe fancy would be cool. Run Dragonlance, the original campaign. Or Beyond The Mountains of Madness for Call of Cthulhu.
Dig up old favorites, like Marvel Superheroes, Gangbusters, Star Frontiers.
New hotness like Against the Darkmaster, Dune, or Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea.
There's always Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics.
But the bottom line is, no matter what I run, or play, I want to make sure of a few things. The players have to be onboard with the genre and tone of the campaign. I am so sick of dealing with players that create characters completely unsuitable for the game being pitched. If a game isn't your cup of tea, play in or run a different game. If the GM and five out of six players want to do The Hunt for Red October, don't do Down Persicope. Run your own Down Periscope game, and make it the funniest, most irreverent game ever.
Gaming is a group activity, and it's time I ran games I want to run again, rather than selecting my game and players based on entertaining the maximum number of people with the lowest common denominator game. That's part of the job as president of a big gaming club. I know that, and I've done it for many years. But for me, myself, I've got to get back to what I love about games and gaming. I've got to pitch games I want to run, and run them for the players who are interested in that game, genre, and tone. And if one or two individuals aren't interested, that's fine. There will be other games, other GMs, and other players. I have been of the mindset that I need to cater to the masses in the name of keeping the club as entertained as possible. And I think that is still a worthy goal- but it should be a goal that is shared with other Game Masters and not on the shoulders of any one person.
And at this point, coming out the far side of a year-plus without sitting at a table and rolling dice? It almost feels like rebuilding from scratch anyway. So, maybe the silver lining of this dark cloud is that we rethink the way we do our games as an organization, and do them more like regular campaigns.
