I don’t watch Critical Role.
I don’t play or run games remotely.
I don’t stream my game sessions.
I don’t do Adventurers League.
I haven’t run a game for kids in over 10 years.
I rarely play tabletop role-playing games with women.
WAIT ! – Don’t leave just yet.
Let me tell you why I don’t do it.
Until seven years ago, I still ran a normal, traditional campaign, and we played once a month, like clockwork. I called it Cthulhu Gypsies, and it was set in Turkish-occupied Romania around 1840-45. It had quite a complex story, loosely based on HBO’s stellar Carnivàle. There were several overlapping plots, and a flourish of NPCs. The players had to take plentiful notes during and after every session. Player characters were detailed, each with their own secret goals and beliefs. This campaign ran uninterrupted from early 2007 up until late 2013. Roughly, seventy-five game sessions. A decent campaign.
Then the game became more sporadic and much more difficult to run because of real-life issues. The three players were rarely available. Game night was moved from Saturday to Sunday... and then to Wednesday between 6 and 9. Eventually, I pulled the plug. I began working on something else entirely: a good old First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with seven players instead of three. This way, if one, two, or even three guys cancel at the last minute, the session is still a go. Each game is a standalone scenario. “Here’s what you have to accomplish today. Here are the possible rewards. What do you do?”
Plus, I tend to trigger the big fight scene within the first half of the game. The players are more alert, and we actually have enough time to finish the big fight – which was not always the case.
The seven PCs (recently bumped to ten) are rather simple and straightforward. None have a five-page background like the investigators in Cthulhu Gypsies. Brother Thomas is an orphan. He was practically raised in the temple of Boccob. He searches for arcane secrets and eldritch knowledge – like any good cleric of Boccob, the god of knowledge and arcane secrets. Brother Tom’s uncle was a powerful wizard. That’s it. That’s his whole background. And it’s enough. After all, we only play twice a year. Players just need a simple baseline they can remember. The rest is role-played live at the table. Such characters would seem depthless and two-dimensional in a TV show – but which TV show only airs two episodes a year?
My point is: we’ve adapted. Complex storylines and monthly game sessions were not feasible anymore because of careers, wives, children, and so forth. We had to move on to standalone scenarios and occasional gaming events. It’s okay. Role-playing games are very versatile and customizable. The game has to adapt to its players’ circumstances, not the other way around.
When I was 14, we literally played every weekday for an hour, and at least ten hours every weekend. That’s sixty hours of D&D per month, and over seven hundred hours per year. Now, we hardly play two or three games a year; fifteen hours of D&D as opposed to seven hundred hours. Obviously, they cannot be the same game.
If you’re lucky enough to play on a weekly basis, or twice a month, or even once a month – go right ahead: enrich your PCs’ backgrounds, think about character motivations, secret objectives, and continent-spanning story arcs.
In my current campaign, these are unnecessary.
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I was in an all-boys school when I first started playing D&D. My real “first game” actually happened at summer camp: it wasn’t much, and we had to roll a pair of quarters for everything, since we didn’t even have dice. But I really got into it at school. No girls for the first 3-4 years. An institutionalized sausage fest.
In the late eighties, we did play a long campaign with two very cool girls – our DM’s own sister, Julie, and Julie’s roommate. Then, all through the nineties, we didn’t come across any female players. Today of course, we could find them easily enough, but our reasons for playing are different now: we do it as a way to remember the good old days. Same guys, same old games. We’re done trying new stuff – realism, diceless, dice pools, you name it.
If a woman walks up to me at the FLGS and says, “If you ever need an additional player...” I’m not saying I won’t include her in the lineup at some point. But first, I’ll ask, what kind of tabletop RPG is she looking for? In my campaign, we don’t have time for one character’s five-page-long backstory. Remember Brother Thomas’ background? Orphan. Temple. Wizard uncle. The End. And yet, we’ve been playing since 2014. Twenty game sessions – and mayhem ensued several times. We cut to the chase, and roll a lot of dice, because that’s what we’re here for. It’s never boring, even with such simple, bare-bones backstories all around. It’s that kind of game. As I said earlier: customized to the players’ circumstances.
This is also why I don’t do Adventurers League. I have a large circle of potential players at my disposal, and I know each one pretty well. I know which one’s crazy, which one’s a good manager, and which one’s an actor. I can run my two games a year without having to recruit outside that circle. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for organized play, and one day I shall try my hand at it, when I’m rich enough to attend Gary Con or Origins. But right now, I can’t. It’s too big a commitment. I prefer writing this blog on the side. It’s my humble contribution. You’re welcome.
Adventurers League needs to be fair for all. That means rules. Lots of fixed, absolute, unambiguous rules. In some situations, I make up rules on the fly – but since the players are also my old friends, they won’t argue. Almost all of them gave up DMing years ago. I suppose they’re just grateful I didn’t. And if they do argue, I can always say, “Suck it up, Marco. This ain’t World of Warcraft. You’re a guest here, not a client.”
Another friend’s wife once asked us, “At what age will you finally quit role-playing games?” She is a behavioral psychologist, so she was genuinely curious about this. “Why would we ever give up such a great hobby?” was my reply. Indeed, when poker was invented somewhere along the Mississippi, I’m sure somebody’s wife asked the exact same question. Almost two hundred years later, people still play poker. There are hundred-year-old players out there, and I bet they kick some serious butt.
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It’s been fifteen years since I last ran a game for kids. Two 11-year-old boys, plus one of the boys’ mom. It’s not a good memory. Kids are definitely not used to the slow pace of tabletop role-playing games. Their entire toolkit comes from video games. So they kill the innkeeper, kill the other patrons, collect all of their belongings, and move on to the next tavern. Then, militia shows up, and they kill the militiamen, too. Half an hour later, two paladins track them down, and one of the kids asks, “Why do you keep punishing us?” I say, “I’m not here to punish or reward. It is a real world, a real city with an entire society inside its walls. You tell me what you do, and I tell you what the rest of the city folk do.”
No Thank You, Evil is for the young ones. Like seven, eight, nine and ten. Then, testosterone happens, and it all goes sideways.
You know. Murder hoboes.
I’ve been there. My friends and I did that. We actually did it for several years, if you count Stormbringer – a game where one could easily become much more powerful if one sacrificed sentient people in demonic rituals. As in: slaughtering innocents, aye. And we listened to Slayer’s Reign in Blood and Metallica’s Kill ’Em All while we did it.
It took us quite a while to realize how stupid it was. Testosterone is way stronger than IQ. I simply cannot go through that whole process again with a bunch of pre-teens. I don’t have the time nor the mental fortitude. Believe it or not, it’s already difficult enough with experienced players. You’re never just a DM. You’re also an event planner, a shrink, a coach, etc.
So, why would I try to push tabletop role-playing games on my nephew and his friends? My parents didn’t try to make my brother and I love Zorro or the Lone Ranger: they let us fiddle around with our Kenner action figures, and I’m grateful for it. I myself am not a parent, but why try to impose what we loved on the next generation? They’ve got their own stuff to appreciate, like Super Saiyans and Mega Charizard X.
Here’s one important thing I have learned about kids today. If they want to learn how to do something, they’ll learn it on their own, because YouTube tutorials. My nephew learned how to play Dragon Mania Legends on his own, as well as Animal Jam, Pokémon, and several other games. He learned PowerPoint all by himself, and Adobe Premiere Pro. If he and his friends ever become interested in D&D, I’ll go visit sometime, and they’ll already be playing and already be level four. I’m not worried, like, at all. They’ve learned much more complex things all on their own.
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I don’t stream my games because I don’t have the necessary equipment. It’s that simple. Plus, I only run two or three games every year – which wouldn’t make for a very popular channel. I actually blog more often than I play, so I’ll keep blogging for the time being. It’s a text-based stream of sorts.
I don’t watch Critical Role because I like the public, the Acq Inc audience. There is an additional character at the table. I love it. The audience’s reactions to the players’ comments, decisions, and dice rolls. The audience yelling, “Green Flames!” or “Blood! Blood! Blood!” It’s awesome. When you don’t have that, it’s just not the same.
I love Matt Mercer. I’ll never forget that time when he played Boo the space hamster, flying “the bat out of Hell.” That was a D&D moment for the ages. And with a cheering audience. Fantastic.
I also watched the game session Mercer played with Stephen Colbert, and it was amazing. But I prefer Acquisitions Incorporated. They are my people.
That leaves us with remote gaming.
I don’t do it, because I don’t have WiFi. I only have Internet on my phone, with a monthly limit of 2 Gig. Watching one Black Magic Craft video devours about 5% of that. Imagine the damage if I spent six hours on Roll20 or Discord. It’s a no-go.
My own games are designed for in-person, large-group gaming. I regularly put 200 hours of work in the terrain I build – and that’s for one, I repeat, one 5-hour game session. All I ask in return is to see the looks on my friends’ faces when I set the whole thing up, see them move their minis around the terrain, hear them discuss strategy, and see them throw their hands up in the air when someone rolls a 20... or a 1. That’s it. You don’t invest 200 hours to build scenery that your players only see in a tiny window at the lower left corner of their computer screen.
This year, the “big” game probably won’t happen. Local game stores haven’t reopened their tables yet – not for MTG, and certainly not for large-group D&D. I won’t be running my usual crazy birthday game next month, with seven excited, unmasked players: it’ll have to wait. I’m okay with that. I don’t have any FOMO. The cool terrain shall remain in a sealed box throughout next winter, and we’ll see if it can happen in 2021. Meanwhile, I may run a couple smaller games with three players max, like that quirky scenario I ran last December, The Lich and the Elephant (you can read all about it if you scroll down 4 posts). One such game is scheduled for August 1st, and we should be able to play outside, in a gazebo. Fingers crossed. If it’s my only game this year – so be it. I certainly won’t be the only one with no 2020 birthday bash to speak of.
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There you have it. I’m not a monster. I’m just playing with my old buddies, and they happen to be guys – all of them. I don’t have the mental energy for kids or organized play. I’ve got neither the equipment to stream nor the WiFi to play remotely. And I prefer Acq Inc to CR or Dice, Camera, Action.
Large, epic, noisy, in-person game sessions will happen again on the other side of this pandemic. New PAX Acquisitions Incorporated episodes will be recorded in front of packed theaters. A little patience is all we need.