Running Games and Not Running Games
I miss the music the most, I think. For the first time in seven years, I am not running a TTRPG game.
I don't anticipate this will continue forever. I want to come back to running so, so badly. Perhaps I'll just break for a few months — might roll back to some of the old favourite games, or try some new ones. But for now, it's undoubtedly the right thing: and also kind of sucks.
The Unbearable Ill of Inadequacy
I'm going to say something I genuinely believe that might be a bit controversial amongst my friends: I think I'm an absolutely terrible creative.
I think that's different from me being creative. I think I'm very creative! For the last seven years, I've thought about these games so much that they've hurt. Before I had a job, or back during school at lockdown, I think maybe half of the words I would say would be me trying on the personalities or perfecting the voices of characters I knew or thought would show up. I constantly add details to the world, draw it closer to plausibility and verisimilitude and excitement in the hope that people other than me will love it as much as I do. I revel in the reveal of twists and turns, precisely wind up combats that unwind and spring into 50/50 dice rolls right at the end between victory and defeat.
That's different from doing the job of creativity. I can sometimes bash out the old short story, but anything longer I really struggle with. I have had grand stories I've wrangled in my mind for years, constantly adding and refining and detailing, but I can never bring myself to actually turn that into a beginning, middle, and end: even though I know what they are! I can do voices to make my friends laugh, but I wouldn't ever say that I was a good actor. I can sing well, very well, but as a matter of mechanics, not through the heart-soaring interpretation and soul a professional can lend. And I can't draw, can barely compose. I've come almost close a few times, but the second game development becomes a challenge of content instead of underlying technology, I've never been able to maintain interest. Creativity is something but being a creative is a refinable skill and it was one I have not yet refined.
...except in games mastering. Like Evil Dan before me, I'm good at this! I often feel it's because there is, by weight, less me in it: the storytelling job, the mechanics, the thinking about what takes you from A to B is shared, either a lot or a little, among a whole table. I can do the bits I'm good at, and that to my eternal joy people tell me I'm good at: endearing characters, funny jokes, dastardly villains, identifying connections between characters and places and nudging my players to bring out the emotions in them. I cannot bring myself to tell even a mediocre story anywhere else, but I love this, I enjoy this!
Oh, and the music — I am proud as hell of the music. Music from video games, initially: but then I brought in classical composers, TV and movie scores, passion projects, Cirque du Soleil albums, Swedish electric organ folktronica. Characters had motifs: Brightwood and Dyakova have their accordion, while the dual life of the Controller was scored with an official Professor Layton waltz and a scrappy but heartfelt fan cover. I have an enormous library of music, and I can slide the right piece in for every situation. I use the same few pieces to indicate surprising information, and it warmed my heart to see players identify this, and instead of break their immersion, lean forwards and get their pens out. But I also make sure to use at least one new track a session — and I constantly have to be on the hunt for more.
You can't do that anywhere else! Certainly not commercially. That's IP theft at an enormous scale! Even if this was for a purpose never to be shared, I still feel a pang at times that I cannot contribute to every aspect. Even then, the greatest moments are sprung from the minds and actions of the others at the table. It isn't that I couldn't have come up with them, but that I know I wouldn't have, because I didn't! And that's awesome! I can create the things I always wished to create but that I can't, because it's collaborative, and it turns out collaboration is pretty good for you / everyone / humanity.
TTRPGs, especially D&D, really invite collaboration in ways that it is hard to sell people on. If I wanted a writers room for some stories I've been internally kicking around, deeply personal stories, I feel like that would require really going out on a limb with people I consider good friends: uptake would be low. Conversely, D&D is known, it is preexisting, it is cool. Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan play it! It's got history, and a chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and an enormous marketing machine that makes people want to be part of it.
The fact that people want to collaborate with me, shitty-ass me, so willingly is an utterly magical and unique feeling. I wish so much that I could tell the younger me that soon people would want to spend hours a week not just to be vaguely around me but to believe in and listen to what I said, and to offer their own ideas and brilliance in kind. When it started, it was best described as transcendent. That kind of feeling has only almost been matched by the single, stressful play I helped pull together at university, over a hard few weeks. And it was work and I loved it, and I could do it for a few hours every week!
And now after seven years of that willing, effortless collaboration, I don't have it any more.
Giveth and Taketh Away
For four years, I ran two groups simultaneously.
The first fizzled out, fizzled in again, and then flashed out in spectacular fashion. It's first campaign flourished in the time vacuum of the pandemic, then faded when everyone got lost in exams, and I moved to university.
The second was a tightly-calculated tragedy played out in 15 sessions over 4 years. A small village on the edge of an expanding empire and stood above an ancient treasure, whose fate would be ruined by the arrival of the adventurers and their selfish, contradictory means. It took so long to run that people had enough time to change into people who resented the campaign, and then change back into avid participants before anyone had the confidence to bring up a stopping point. In it's final session, the players all actively and individually assented to stopping villain A, only to mutually react in fear and regret and acceptance when they realised they couldn't also stop villain B. Their allies were all slain, the evil was unleashed, and the artefact they sought was false from the first second of the first session: every facet predictable to different degrees, and every negative outcome the result of the actions they had made that seemed only sensible at the time.
At the end of the final session, the six players were kind enough to give me a round of applause. I have never felt something like that before.
Group two, started four years ago at university, did not go so well. This was proper weekly (meaning weekly at stretches and then barely present for others). Different players have always led to different bits of friction, but none of the players are terrific at engaging the others: it's a higher effort and much more intense kind of game to run.
People always said the enjoyed it, and wanted to try more narrative things, but these never went that well. People would constantly try and play others' characters for them and make out-of-game leaps while enacting great in-game forgetfulness. I tried to nudge people along, ceding control of the end-of-the-world plot to them by saying that they could determine any solution they wanted within their character's backstory: but this had to be abandoned after I burned out bad because no one took me up on this after several weeks. There were other people present, but it wasn't collaborative in nearly the same way. For me, the GM of the game, it was very rare to be surprised, shocked, or delighted by the actions of the players.
We tried Grimwild a very good and fun little narrative RPG, also to try and spur this collaboration. People were wide eyed and excited for the first few sessions, but soon that also dropped off: and in a game with a much wider share of momentum responsibility, that proved fatal. After a few rudderless sessions, and one particularly bad one, I called for a long, long break. Which tends to do exactly what it says on the tin.
I understand a lot of things I could have done better. Realise that I love, but importantly the group also loves and jams way better with, the Blorby style of play more than an improvisational one. Be more direct with the interpersonal issues and strain that could happen, that proved poisonous once left to fester, no matter how small. Be honest about the stress my job and living with my parents causes me, and be more graceful when this stress can lead to players at the table being a better person or player than I am. Focus on the magician moments and the spectacular things I can do, and maybe experiment somewhere it won't kill a four year game with close friends. And a whole bunch of smaller, moment-to-moment fixes my friends pointed out and that my partner was happy to educate me further on.
But I do not want to fix these things now. I can afford to slow down, let myself rest, take these things as they come. Write and practice the piano accordion a bit. Let other people suggest their own ideas and post-mortems too.
But, for now, I should let the hobby rest.
A Hole in My Heart That Light Passes Through
And this is good and right and proper, but it sucks.
I am "the Dungeon Master". When I meet nerds at work I tell them "I am Games Mastering a campaign at the moment." That's been true for seven years, for most of my time at school, all of my time at uni, and most of my time now at work. But it isn't true anymore!
I listen to music and think, "that would work so well in..." What moment? Certainly nothing coming up soon. I think of fun voices and characters and have nowhere to put them. I read new TTRPGs, but I can't do anything with the interesting mechanics or ideas they espouse, and I'm sure to forget them by the time I could. The characters, good lord the characters, both NPCs and PCs, sit at the bottom of my heart and I don't know if they will go anywhere. I spent hours thinking of the perfect speech from a deity in my setting about the problem of evil and fate in my metaphysics; managed to whittle it down to the perfect few words. Now, I don't know if anyone will ever hear it, or if I'll ever get the chance to speak it at all.
This feeling above is the whole crux of why I'm writing this, and while it's simple to explain, I need a few more words to get across how it really feels. It's almost like grief, I suppose? The worst part about losing someone or ending a relationship is finding something you know they would love, or that you would love to do together: and then feeling that pit once you learn it's impossible. I can feel that pit! It's all pit now. Every video game I play, every book I read, every track I listen to. I hadn't realised how much of me was in this identity, this activity, this promise of future stories and sessions never come to pass. Now that it's gone, I'm finding out the hard way which bits of myself are and are not complete without it. Whether or not this is good or bad or normal, it sucks!
Of course, I can still run games for other people. Nerd Social Fallacy 5 dictates that you shouldn't play TTRPGs with your friends necessarily, but that you should play them with other TTRPG players. But I feel guilty even contemplating the idea. I can't sit right with the idea that I'd put my friends and our hobby out to sea, promising more in future, and then launching into something new with someone else. It feels like taking a break from your partner and then immediately kissing someone else: I have been on both sides of that equation, and it is rotten, utterly rotten, both ways.
Perhaps I shall write, instead. I am not a good creative. But I used to not be a good programmer, or a good software engineer, and now I reckon I'm alternately good at at least one of those at any given time. I am a firm believer that almost any skill can be taught or learned by the vast majority of the population. And maybe, one day, if I spend a fraction of the effort that I have spent over seven years on these campaigns...
I could write that book with the ingenuity that I have relied on others to provide. Compose that music as fitting as that I shamelessly pirate from others. Draw the art I must scrape from the internet for my wikis. Devise those rules that are the equal to any RPG I've ever played. Not to replace the collaboration, which is undesirable, or to replace my friends, which is impossible, but to improve myself and what I can do. And maybe, one day, run a god damn good game of D&D again, or whatever else. Better than ever before.
Isn't it the same with grief? The hope that whatever we did before, the time we spent and energy we expended, hasn't been wasted with the thing's passing but was instead a wonderful time to be alive in? Maybe this is Twelfth Doctor-pilled of me, but if when I am forced to grieve by the events of my life and the world, it's always with the hope that I can come out better on the other side of it. As I hope to be better when I pick the dice back up. Or even if I never do.
Is a spell cast when it is heard, or when it is spoken?
- Unreleased