Part of the reason it's been so quiet around here is that I've spent the last few months at the helm of a "Ten Blade Demigod"-like - a Discord PbP domain game in the pattern of the inimitable Phlox's Ten Blade Demigod, later followed by Locheil's Ashes to Ashes, deus ex parabola's Right for the Wrong Reasons, and Gokun's Daughters of Necessity.
They've become a staple in the corner of the GLOG I run in, and have a nearly gravitational pull on that corner, thanks to their 20+ player scale, long runtimes, and fractal complexity. Each player is put at the head of a territory/Discord channel and run through seasons of solo-PbP adventure and large-scale politicking and development.
And yet, apart from scattered and impossible to find Discord conversations, I don't think any of those GMs have talked about their experience running TBD-likes. I invite them to. For my part, I have run two - the promptly-disintegrated Seeing From Outside and the current Who Decides Such Things.
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| Odilon Redon, Apparition |
Some players have described them as essentially a best of all worlds:
- all the individual agency of a solo game
- but with other players to interact with
- the timescale and individual focus for neotrad OC personal moments look at my weird guy thinking
- while inside an OSR sandbox ecosystem
though from the GM side it looks, possibly, like the inverse:
- all the siloed player separation of a solo game
- but with thinly spread focus and NPC cast
- A story where everyone gets two lines of dialogue
- and a sandbox stripped to the bones by a locust swarm of half a dozen meandering groups
These are structural problems - write a shortlist of NPCs per domain for the players of those domains to crash into over and over, and instead of the big pre-written hexcrawl I defaulted to, build something more malleable. To the best of my knowledge, much of Acmori was randomly generated, and Daughters of Necessity doesn't have most of its adventure sites until the moment a player says "I want to go find a place where I can find a freaky demon sword", incentivizing the players to pre-announce their desired destinations by providing omens and free hirelings in exchange.
Between Seeing From Outside and Who Decides Such Things I hadn't figured this out, and instead threw myself into hexcrawl prep and rules tinkering, neither of which were the right direction.
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| this is a great post to use "some pictures I kind of have lying around" phobso |
The potentially unresolvable issue is a vibe problem. Firstly, "work expands to fill the time given to do it" - it is a constant expenditure of effort spent either running the game or intentionally not running the game while knowing people are waiting on you. When there are messages, I sit and watch a little red 1 or 2 or 6 stare at me from my Discord client. When there are no messages, I wonder if I've done something to drive people away.
Synchronous play has an emotional rise and fall. Before the session you grab your prep and go "wow :) gaming soon". You start and the group falls into a groove - when you have yourself in the Mindset a lot of choices become automatic. Then you end and go "wow :) gaming next week" and then, probably, spend a little bit going "wow :) I sure messed that one up". Play by post doesn't provide any of this. There is no groove - you enter the game for a few minutes when it's convenient, then disappear to wait for the relevant player to return. Every choice becomes laborious - conscious decisions with agonizing limitless time to dither. The feeling is, more than anything, like "wow :) I sure messed that one up" unwinding forever.
But the structure of the game is beautiful! I want (or perhaps, want to want) to run a domain game - the breadth and depth available with this many players, over this much time, is limitless. The opportunities for exploring settings and changing them, for getting right into the folds of the brain of someone's PC, feel unmatched, at least from my perspective of a player in Daughters and observer of Ashes to Ashes.
I don't plan to stop running Who Decides Such Things yet - I'm too stubborn. Though, when it comes to its close, I don't plan to run another. Instead, I think I will take TBD-derived systems, domains, and starting treasures for use in games with a standard format and party... and take a break from running this setting for a minute.
G. R. Michael here: the six months I spent running R4WR were fun in brief sections and agonizing for most of the time, and I consider the campaign one of my greatest failures as a DM.
ReplyDeleteExpectation mismatch between players who wanted to compete in PVP versus those who wanted to explore Arel (a country in my setting that had not previously appeared "on screen") ultimately brought the whole thing to a flaming catastrophe. Almost none of the material that I had spent months preparing was ultimately of any use. I had not spent nearly enough time reconfiguring the rules to support country-scale troop movements or logistics (amusingly, Sam Sorenson's Cataphracts, which is the current craze, is totally devoted to those two things). Also I was losing my mind and my job at the time I was running the game, neither of which I have recovered.
Still, the idea is intoxicating. I have many more ideas for domain games and two large projects just kind of hanging around in the background; I think I have discussed them with you on the web before. Someone really needs to write a grand guide for prospective domain game DMs so I can use it.