#RPGaDay2025 - 25 Challenges

 

(Sorry about the delay... big week at work) 

One of my biggest challenges is getting time for things. This has been especially true in the last few years, as a lot of my time has been focused on becoming a teacher and finding ways to transfer my knowledge to a new generation. It might actually be due to my role as a teacher (or my fox-like love of being a trickster and revealer of secrets), but besides my general lack of time I love challenges. I love trying to work things out, and solve puzzles. I love giving people challenges and seeing how they might solve the same issues.

No two people will solve a puzzle or challenge in exactly the same way, and there lies one of the fun things about RPGs for me. I’m sure I’ve told the tale of my most frustrating game convention module, which was an L5R mystery where all the players were expected to be investigators. Sure, it’s L5R, everyone could have solved the issue in traditional samurai manner by assigning blame, cutting down peasants who said otherwise and trying to get someone with higher status to agree with our conclusions…but the “fairer” path was to actually investigate and find the truth rather than making our own. There was only one way to do this and that was to follow a predetermined path of breadcrumbs, with a specific skill and minimum degree of success required for each step. We did well at first, we had the right skills indicated in the printed module, we rolled well enough… then we got to the point where none of us had the specifically required skill, even though three pout of five of us on the table had built “investigator” characters, one of whom was a falcon clan investigatr who used the new-fangled concepts of forensics, and two of us were fox clan shugenja who either got our clues from talking to spirits or talking to animals. None of these options were written, it was an unexpected way to address a challenge and the game ground to a halt for the next hour until the conventions session elapsed. It was doubly annoying because we had paid for that session, and we had characters who should have breezed through the scenario with our unconventional approach. It was a challenge the players and characters were built for, but not the GM.

I resolved never to run a game like that “ever again”, and to always find ways to make the players the centre of the escapist experience.

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