RPGaDay 2024 (Day 19 and 20)

Day 19 - Sensational Session

In 30-odd years of tabletop gaming, I've had some phenomenal sessions, and some absolute horrors.

Let's try to dig back a bit, to one of the first RPG conventions I attended. It was the Macquarie University RPG convention back in 1997, at least I think that's when it was. The 90s are a bit of a blur for me, but I do distinctly remember this session. It was a Shadowrun game, there was a massive map in the middle of the room, it was called "Does it hurt when I do this?"... so yeah, peak 90s.

The idea behind the game was that we were playing a trauma team, moving across that giant map in the centre of the room. There were at least 2 GMs that we knew of. the game was in a lecture hall, and there ws an antechamber behind the room that we couldn't see into. The GM who was in our room wore a headset, and as the game moved on, they started communicating with someone else, who was that second GM in the antechamber... it was about halfway through the session when we realised there was a third GM in another room and an entirely separate team of players. The shadowy antagonists that were doing things in the background that didn't make a whole lot of sense to us were actually this other group of players.

At the time it totally blew my mind that you could have two groups of players interacting with each other through a team of GMs... I hadn't entered the world of massive-scale LARPing at that stage, where games might have 200 players with 15 or more coordinating GMs... but it still sticks in my memory as an event that we weren't expected to "win" and suddenly the tension was raised as the truth was revealed to us.

A whole heap of my game ideas since then can probably be traced back to that session.

Day 20 - Amazing Adventure

I really don't use prewritten adventures, but that doesn'r mean I haven't had some great sessions of adventure storytelling. What I really enjoy is setting up open worlds for my players to explore through their characters, and letting them reveal the adventure as they go.

I don't like knowing exactly where the adventure will go, preferring to explore the world and reveal the adventure with them. I've previously mentioned the idea of story vignettes as a method to drive open world exploration toward more interesting adventure narratives.