RPGaDay 2024 (Day 17 and 18)

Day 17 - An Engaging RPG Community

Back in the day, "The Forge" had some great discussion and theorising, and that shifted across to "Story Games". However, those two forums had a lot of insularity, and very much an "in-crowd" mentality that included a bunch of inner-circle high profile designers, and a horde of outer designers who often felt like watchers while the cool kids did their thing. It was often a case that the hot new project might be the flavour of the month just released by one of those inner circle designers, who riddled their books with the favoured terminology, and regardless of how good their games actually were everyone praised them in the hope of getting the courtier's favour and becoming the next inner circle member...

...jaded, yes. But that's how I felt at the time, and after a while a lot of other folks started seeing it too.

Now, in recent months, I have become an admin for the TTRPG Design Community on Facebook.

As one of a few admins, we're really trying to keep this community focused on the games and generating positive discussion about gaming ideas, design theory, and trying to help each other out. I've also joined a few Discord servers about game design, but most of these tend to be more based around a specific person or company, and critiquing the designs that they're producing.

Day 18 - A memorable moment of play

I'm sure I've mentioned many memorable moments of play over the years, so let's focus on a more recent memorable moment.

In my high school gaming club, we managed to get D&D running as a "school sport". I'd love to say more about how that ended...maybe one day. For the moment though, we had an exploratory campaign running with multiple groups roaming around the one setting. They were discovering things, piecing together clues and gradually uncovering a mysterious calamity that had transformed and cursed the world.

Eventually a bunch of players wanted to face the "big bad" of the setting, and I knew they weren't ready for it, but since they really wanted to, I let them.

The down side... we were playing D&D... in half hour blocks at lunch times.

It was a long term thing... the whole battle ended up lasting about seven weeks of real time, three lunch times (30mins x 3) each week ... so that's 10.5 hours total. I've seen worse in home campaigns where a single fight might last two six-hour sessions or more. 

The kids had no hope, but they were having fun so I dragged things along.

In the end they knew that there was no way they could win, and hatched a plan.

It ended up with mutually assured destruction, the old "portable hole in a bag of holding" trick that destabilises reality for a 1 mile radius. If they were willing to sacrifice their characters for the good of the ongoing game, then that was awesome. It's the kind of moment that I look for in games, and it was the kind of learning experience that I hope the kids would get a kick out of... they did.

Things are on hiatus with the gaming club for the moment...but hopefully some progress will be coming forward in that front soon.