For all the games I've loved before
Okay so if you're a regular reader of the blog, you probably know what happens in my games. I guess this is just a little ramble about actual matters of space and procedure, as well as my old games from many years ago, moreso than the actual play of the game. Inspired by yonder post from Grace which I enjoyed greatly. It's turned into a very long ramble, so if you will indulge me;
HOW MY OLD GROUP DID IT
My old Sunday group, who I still love dearly as friends, ran 5e and other stuff every now and again. We'd been together for a number of years, and I think it still works the same as when I left due to creative differences. There were two games - when I left, one was Mazes and Minotaurs, and one that had just ended was 5e (Rime of the Frostmaiden. I was a serious-faced and irritable little kobold paladin named Aleyda. She had an axe.) There'd been a couple of roster changes; some people who'd been there at the very start left a little bit in and were replaced, another person left fairly soon before I left (at the start of my ill-fated Lancer game, which wouldn't last two more sessions) under unhappy circumstances, and of course I left at the very end of this story, but these happened over a period of something like seven years and overall the roster of people was very stable.
As I mentioned earlier, there were always two games, alternating weeks. When one ended, it would be someone else's turn to run a campaign. The campaigns were varied in vibe and quality and so on based on who ran it, and were usually about a year long. Everyone made their PC on their own, brought it to the GM, and so on; very much like Jack's game in that regard. Miniatures were fairly uncommon, we usually used d12s or other unloved dice, but one player (the artist of the group, which I think is a very valuable addition to any group) would make their own standees, and when they ran their game they made us all little painted standees with our characters on them, which we were all very pleased by. One guy had a dry-erase Paizo mat, the like of which I am still trying to find in this country.
I don't have much to say about my prep - it wasn't enough. I never really ran anything for this group that I was satisfied with; it was always too easy or too hard. About a year before I left, I ran a Lancer game for them, which was prepped one combat at a time with a theater map created in an image editor. This was not well-liked and got cancelled like three sessions in. I then ran 5e and they died a bunch and that one got cancelled like three sessions in as well. Overall I liked being a player here, mostly, but I didn't like running for them. I left for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I increasingly was clashing with the other players. My memories are fond and I still like all of them.
MY OLD ONLINE GAMES
I ran a lot of these while I was with the group, mostly with strangers online. I used roll20 for maps sometimes, but didn't originally. There was a brief period where I ran a lot of open-table games, but this passed. They all died after a couple of sessions, except one AD&D one which eventually turned into a just-regular table and then into a Traveller game. I don't remember much except a PC named Connie Lingus.
Eventually I ran a Lancer game for a while, which I enjoyed greatly; the players were Alice (who played a bunch of different things and was never quite satisfied until her Pegasus,) Max (who played a goblin,) Icarus (who played a couple of different things but was very effective with all of them,) and Hangman (who was the group's sniper and clear MVP.) This was run on discord voice, Thursday nights, roll20 for maps. I think I did a fair job. On the prep side, it was one combat encounter at a time; I drew fairly pretty maps in Dungeon Scrawl, slapped together an opfor that I thought would be cool, and called it a day. The plot was just vibes-based escalation of stakes, but it worked well and the crowd liked it. Overall, I liked Lancer, but it's only really got one thing going on, and once you've seen one campaign worth of combats you've seen them all. It could use a bigger-scope system, I think, but that sort of thing would be a nontrivial addition. I also think that the base enemy roster is lacking, and supplemented it with all the third-party NPCs I could find online without ponying up money.
I ran a Flying Circus game after the Lancer one. I think the system is really cool, but some of the math doesn't quite work out. Flying Circus PCs have a very broad attack surface, because the game has a fair number of layers; they've got money and stress and wounds on the long scale, and altitude and airspeed on the short one. In D&D, most stuff collapses to the HP economy; in Flircus, most of the problems collapsed to the gold economy. While I liked this, I didn't really enjoy having two witches in the group - maybe the game ran a bit long, because by the end of it the campaign was turning into the Witch Show. I think that the lack of RAW PC death kind of hurts it here, because once a witch gets enough advances on her, she ends up hitting a point where she's able to cast any spell she likes because she always rolls spells with a +5 bonus (and, if she has a Chariots of Steel Apprentice, a reroll.) Since there's not really any attrition on a PC's advancement, over a not-excessively-long campaign Witches especially will trend toward a very very high power point. There wasn't much prep required here, which was kind of a shame for me since I like doing prep, and I generally like the traditional mode of combat where the GM's guys basically work the same as the players' guys more than the weird floppy narrative thing that Flying Circus had (and also my fairly-long Offworlders game, which was basically similar to Flying Circus but with fewer redeeming factors.)
I also ran a Lancer game for a while with some friends. This one was originally just a continuation of the Lancer game I ran for the Sunday group, but it changed significantly over the initial prep hurdle and became something else. DOJ/HR DISCRETIONARY TEAM INDIGO were assigned as consular security to the planet of Verdevilla, had to rescue a Union Administrator's NHP, and became involved in political intrigue between the Karrakins and the corporate states over a neutral government in the contested Dawnline Shore. I mention it here for completeness, and because I want to run a sequel to it one day.
THE LAKE REGION
The Lake Region started last year (or maybe the very tail end of the year before that) after I had decided on leaving the old Sunday group. There are two groups, the Saturday group (who I used to run for on Sunday nights after D&D) and the Tuesday group, as you probably already know.
The Saturday group started after D&D, as I said above. Both groups have suffered some shuffling of players; after the shuffling was over, the Saturday group was left with three players and the Tuesday group with four. Because the Saturday group had two players for a while, I let them have two characters each; when the other player showed up, I let her have two as well. I'm pretty laissez-faire with cancellation; it's not that important and I plan to be there next week. Weekly with easy cancellation is best, to me; all models cancel a lot, and so if we have a time slot every week but people have to cancel half the time, I appreciate the flexibility of that more than having an every-other-week game where people will still occasionally cancel and we won't have another session the next week.
The Saturday group play in basically the same manner as the Lancer people, but with more prep. Their maps are on roll20 and we hang out in discord voice. The Tuesday group were recruited from my university's RPG club, and we play in whichever classroom they can find for us; at the moment, we're in some little bookable meeting rooms in the Engineering building because the club doesn't open back up until March.
I set the two groups in the same world to save on prep work; overall, I think this has worked well, because content earmarked for one group but passed by can be reused by the other, and content placed generically into the hexcrawl can be used by either. I try to maintain separation between the two groups, and they're both happy to stick with that. Immediately before I started writing session reports for the Saturday group, I advanced them six months in the timeline because we hadn't played in a while, and I like to keep the two groups pretty close together on the timeline. This is because it's really hard to run an interesting game for the group in the past, because nothing important can happen to them or the other group will have heard about it.
The prep for these games is pretty heavy. I have a little black notebook which I keep all my notes in; mostly monster HP. The Tuesday group also has Nissa's player, who keeps the notes and draws the maps. For the actual preparation work, I do anything "urgent" that the players are about to touch in a substantial way, then anything that they touched in the last session and weren't satisfied by, then anything that strikes my fancy. I like the prep, and especially drawing maps. Maps go in a 5mm grid maths book; I have some a3 paper that I used to hole punch and put in my binder, but the problem with that is that the hole punch sometimes goes through pieces of dungeon structure and also it rips out over time, so I generally don't do that anymore. Keys are in google docs, and when I have time I print them and put them in the old binder, but since I'm not at uni at the moment I can't access those printers, and I don't know if the place I'm working at would appreciate me using the office printer for this.
Overall, I'm very satisfied with these current games. I have some other stuff I'd like to run in future (Eureka's Murder at the Belle Nuit, a sequel to Discretionary Team INDIGO, maybe Flying Circus again, and the Flying Circus lady's upcoming game Torchship) but I'm very happy in my little D&D game right now. There's of course a couple of games I didn't mention, but this post is long enough. Thank you all sincerely for reading my ramblings. I hope you know that if you've ever played in one of my games, I still think about you and your character, and I hope you're doing well.