False Start

20 months ago I started a blog with wide eyes and high hopes.

Fucking idiot.




Well lets try again. 




Let me update the ghosts that make up the reader base of this humble blog. I re-read my first post and was reminded of two things. Firstly the age old saying "A novice thinks they are an expert, whereas an expert knows they are still a novice" or something to that degree.

Secondly, and something I heard a lot growing up, "Don't bite off more than you can chew"

I am two years older than I was when I wrote my first post and although there are elements of that writing I still am proud of, ultimately it lead to nothing. I had a second post drafted titled "Weening them off" all about taking 5e players and converting them to OSRheads, but it never saw the light of day. I did however play as many games as I could fit into my schedule with friends in those past 20 months and have many good stories to laugh about, as well as many missteps that I have hopefully learned from.

But one of my biggest lessons learned was from playing in a game, funnily enough a 5e game, run by a guy who I met in the time since that first post. I had taken OSE and Hot Spring Island to the table with the hopes of converting all my players from 5e to the OSR. Although we had 4/5 sessions of fun with OSE & HSI (including a standout night of gaming where the party were lead by a race of 1920's esque hippo men on a big game hunt, searching for some strange exotic beasts living on the island, each given motorbikes for the day and then attacked by goblins riding giant raptor birds all whilst trying to outrun a stampede) ultimately the campaign fizzled out. At first I couldn't understand why. This was everything I had been working towards, everything I had spent so much time planning for, long nights reading the campaign setting, the rules set and general OSR theory. So why didn't it take off at that table? Why did my players not care for the open world experience I was trying to feed them?

I was very disheartened. I gave up. All that time and effort, for what?

And at that point I was thrown a lifeline. An angel in the form of a bald bearded man came to me. After the final session I ran of HSI I explained my frustration to him and he listened when I told him my dreams of the best campaign ever had come to naught and I had become disenchanted with the game.

"Next week I will run a game" he said kindly "to take the pressure off". And that is what he did. And it was fantastic! As a forever DM, I am sure I am not alone when I say I actually couldn't remember what it was like to play.

To be a good DM you need to occasionally play as a PC.

The game went like this:

You are on the road in a forest and daylight shines through the trees creating a pleasant atmosphere. You have a wagon full of mushrooms and need to take it to the next town over. So off we pop. Whilst travelling on the road we meet this knight. Great start. A knight! With a squire and everything! Very old England storybook fantasy. Love it. You'll never guess what happens just then. A huge Griffin flies down, grabs the knight and flies off over the tops of the forest canopy, his screams fading off into the summer sky. Crazy!

The Squire shouts at us for help and runs off into the woods after his ally, leaving the knights horse standing there eating the grass by the side of the path. The whole table sit in shock at this. First 5 minuets of the game and we already gained a free horse! Result.

"Well that was odd, anyway onto the town with our delicious mushroom filled wagon" I hear from an old friend sat across from me. Agreement all round. "Yeah, can't let the good people of non descript village go without their mushrooms. Imagine the uproar there would be".

I couldn't believe it. Everything I had been trying to teach these players in the last 4 or 5 weeks of play, everything I had read about OSR style engagement and all that I wanted from my game that I had spent so long prepping had just happened in the space of 5 minuets, in a 5e game! Players were given a choice and they instantly made a decision with confidents that had lasting consequences.

We did eventually go back to the woods, capture the Griffin, find the knight(who was already dead by this point, hence the lasting consequence)and brought his body back to the village.

It was such a simple session, and yet it was one of the best games I had ever been a part of. Why? because it was so simple. Monster attacks, what do you do? I had presented my players with so many choices in the few sessions of HSI I had run, so many locations, factions, NPCs & hooks that they had no idea what they were 'supposed' to do. Too many options to begin with and not any 'Story'. That's the vibe I got from the table. And who can blame them? All they knew was 5e adventure paths where everything is laid out in front of them and the story is pre packaged and presented in a nice order. 

'We walk away' 

That single choice made the word feel so massive. A vast expanse of endless possibilities.  

I mentioned that I had a second post in my drafts titled "weening them off" that I never finished writing and subsequently never posted. I'm glad I didn't to be honest. Part of what I writing was all these ideas I had from the OSR space, mixed with all these epic ideas I had for a campaign, whereas what I should have looked at was 'Weening myself off'. 20 months ago I wrote the aptly named 'My first post' talking about my experience with TTRPGs and re reading that post for the first time in nearly two years I realised that newer editions of the game were so entrenched in my gaming DNA that I had jumped the gun and was ready to 'Run' the most epic campaign of OSR roleplay before I had learned to walk. 

Its amazing to think of all the hours I have spent in my life prepping games. Some to great success, some less so, but what that beautiful bald headed man taught me that day was simplicity is the key and the players actions are always the story. Something as simple as "you see a knight attacked by a monster and dragged off into the woods, what do you do" is far closer to the experience I want to create than "here is this town and its run by these people and this faction want something but this other faction want something else and they hate these other people who in tern have an alliance with this other town but they are being puppeted by this guy"  etc. All of that is cool (and it will come eventually if you play for long enough) but for now I think the next time I start a new campaign it will be "On your travels you see a knight getting attacked in the woods, what do you do?"   

- YAK