Public Play Chronicles 01: Introduction

A lot can happen in six years when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games.

The one general constant is that I am still running public open play games. I think having such a thing available is very important. I never got a chance to go into much of my own gaming history on the blog, so this seems as good a time as any.

Back in 2012, I had been completely out of things with regards to RPG's for quite some time. It had been a beloved hobby in high school that tapered off in college as people moved away and it became harder to find players or games to get involved with. Eventually, I tapered off with everything except for keeping up with White Wolf's (at the time) New World of Darkness (again, at the time). I've always had a fondness for White Wolf as a game company and if nothing else their books, to me, has always had a presentation that makes them enjoyable just to read and experience if nothing else.

My one outlet for any sort of roleplaying at this time had been in free-form based forum roleplaying. This is maybe more comparable to collaborative writing since there are no real rules to govern things like conflicts or to determine the random outcome of things. However, the storytelling aspect of tabletop roleplaying games was always one of the biggest appeals to me so there was some overlap there. By chance, one of the guys I chatted with the most through this community had just started being involved with D&D Encounters for 4e in his area. Once he learned of my own gaming history, he pushed hard for me to give 4e a shot.

I was reluctant for a lot of reasons. I had never been fond of 3e/3.5 (perhaps a story for another time) and that dislike had moved me far away from D&D as a whole. My last few in-person experiences during college had been pretty bad. Combative personalities, people blowing off games without notice, etc. and so forth. To a degree, I was skeptical that meeting up with random people at a game store would be a viable thing. But to his credit, he kept on me about it and then eventually took the initiative to do the research and discover a local game shop was signed up for the Encounters program. So I went, it was fun and I dove back into the world of D&D.

4e gets a lot of crap online. Just as much in its time as now, I'd wager. Truthfully, I prefer games that are story-focused and lighter mechanically. One might argue that 4e is the antithesis of such ideals, but to be honest I found it more favorable than 3.5 ever was. Say what you will, but the actual core combat of 4e was a very well put together miniature wargame. Everything else was some simple rules that mostly got out of the way. In the games I played in and ran, we never had much problem roleplaying as much as we wanted. Some of it, likely, came down to the presentation. Skill Challenges were an often harped on thing, but I think they could have been presented a lot better. Going rigidly by the book, it might seem quite railroad-y to offer what skills can be rolled and just track successes.

To me, I always saw them as cool montage moments. I'd set up the narrative of what was going on then ask how each character was trying to contribute to the situation. If they were creative enough to come up with using a skill the module didn't account for, as long as it made narrative sense I let it apply. At the time I had not yet made the jump to the wonderful world of the OSR, but that mentality of rulings over rules could play just as well in a modern game. It is what it is, I suppose. If I have learned nothing at all getting back into the hobby over the last six years, it's that in the end the system doesn't matter. Whether you like a game, love it, despise it with all the passion you can muster, with the right group of players you can have a fun time and those things kind of fall into the background.

So I enjoyed 4e. I'd even play it again if there was a group that had the desire to play it. After a while, I started wondering what other games were out there. I've always juggled interest in and appreciated a wide variety of games because I think each one can give you new perspectives on how to tell or experience a story. I had always kept up with White Wolf and then more recently Onyx Path. My initial searching about led me, by random chance, to Labyrinth Lord. I got really enamored with this game. With the Advanced Edition Companion, it pretty much played like my earliest games of D&D which we played with a weird gathering of books (2e DMG, 1e PHB, and the Fiend Folio) while also ignoring rules here and there that didn't make sense or seemed too complicated. Or, if nothing else, how I remembered those games feeling.

This led to discovering the OSR movement and by some lucky timing the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. DCC got me excited about fantasy roleplaying in a way no other game has ever done to this date. It was just everything. Initially, the striking art. The focus on Appendix N literature appealed to the English Literature degree in me. Mechanically, it hewed to the lighter side of things (referencing a table is not mechanical weight in my book). Magic was something that was very powerful, but also dark and dangerous. The funnel was both a fun and comical idea that really did a great job setting the tone. Finally, by nature of the funnel and the focus on the random, I always felt like the game pushes on this idea of emergent gameplay.

DCC isn't a game where you show up at Level 1 already with a small novella of backstory about all the great things your character has done and is destined to do. You're a nobody tending the field when things begin. You'd be Joe NPC in any normal D&D campaign. But through your actions, and a little bit of luck, that Level 0 nobody becomes something great. And, to me, it's in that transition as you pass on beyond Level 0 that something really special happens. I have regrettably ran DCC far more than playing it, but speaking for my few times as a player I have always felt much more attached and proud of the accomplishments of not only my character but the party as a whole. Much more so than I ever have about one of my perfectly composed Pathfinder of 5e characters. Just like the literature it tries to draw from, normal people from humble beginnings rise to become heroes truly worthy of legend. For my tastes, that is just awesome.

DCC is definitely my one true love when it comes to the Fantasy genre. I've found a lot of things I enjoy since then, but they never manage to surpass it. But, of course, there are other genres and other games. Recently, I've been really enamored with the Cypher System and that's definitely something I want to talk about down the road.

In the end, all of this was a rather long story to say that I think public open gaming is important because it provides an opportunity to experience the hobby. Whether that's new interested potential gamers or lapsed players looking to get back into things, open gaming facilitates growing the hobby. Had I not gone to that D&D Encounters Game Day, I'm not sure I would have refound my love of roleplaying. Home/Private games have their own benefits (and challenges) just the same. I guess I could say that ultimately I feel like it's a goal of mine to make sure there is some easy avenue for people to get into and grow the hobby, so if I can facilitate that then all the better.

But as I said, a lot can happen in six years.

That idea of sharing the hobby through public gaming has carried me through a lot of stuff; not all of it very positive. Tracking forward from the height of 4e and running D&D Encounters while starting to introduce DCC to people, I can sort of break down my gaming into three distinct phases.

It all starts, regrettably, with a rather unfortunate situation...

The Blank of Six Years

It has been a long time.

My last post was in a long-ago November of 2012. In that regard, I think I've failed as far as what I hoped to do in keeping up with it.

Between finals for my classes in grad school and mounting frustrations with the most recent season of D&D Encounters at the time, I had to start slimming down my focus to what was really important. For good or ill, the increased length of each Encounter session for the season caused the summaries to be at least double, if not more, the usual amount of writing involved to recap everything to the degree I found acceptable.

This mixed with our run of rather regular attendance shattering apart into insanity made it very difficult to piece together any form of a coherent ongoing story. Ultimately, that time was better spent on my classes and as I rolled into my final semester of grad school in the Spring, staring down my Exit Portfolio, I simply lost touch with working on any content for here.

So much has changed for me in the RPG hobby and I imagine a good part of my postings in the near future will be devoted to chronicling all the lost time. Obviously, I tapered off with writing up Play Reports on the games I had been running. It seemed that with each passing season of Encounters it became harder and harder to tell even the vaguest semblance of a story with the frequent dropping in and out of players. At best, I mostly would have been writing what was already available in the module, so in that respect, it seemed a pointless effort without the color added by character actions.

I'm not sure if, going forward, how much I will write play reports; I suppose that rests upon catching that spark of inspiration. However, I do want to continue this blog for musing/original content on all the various RPG's I take an interest in along with the hobby in general; if nothing else. Thus, my personal goal is to at least post something once a week; every two weeks at worst.

As a postscript to where I was when I abandoned posting here, I did manage to wrap up my final semester and obtained a Masters in Library Science; which is an achievement I'm pretty proud of. Of course, being an RPG blog what's more important to anyone stumbling by is likely the actual RPG-related stuff. So I figure there is no better way to jump-start things here again than to talk about what I've been up to for the last few years in the realm of RPG's.

The next few entries I post will all fall along that line giving a sweeping recap of where my interests have been, what games I have played/ran, so on and so forth.