Listless

3 Comments
30 Jun, 2006
Personal, RPGs

I’ve been feeling a bit listless lately: Partly it’s my lack of significant progress in things I’ve been working on, and partly it seems to be romanticizing about those things I don’t really have time for.

It’s been a few months since my own D&D campaign was put on hold and I’m eager to get back to it, but I know that will be somewhat futile — I haven’t really done significant work in revising the things I want to revise, and I know I am ultimately going to be unhappy with what I’m working with. It just doesn’t fit with how I want things to work and how I envision things working in my mind.

Of course the nagging element to this entire line of thought is wanting to try out other games, specifically some of the ones Chris suggested– I’m already feeling like a lot of time has passed between the impromptu end to my campaign and now– How much longer would suggesting other games to play make it? Can I even convince the guys in the group to try something out completely new? This is probably the biggest obstacle here since my own response to new games is — “More stuff to learn?”

And of course, if we end up really liking these other games, will we even want to return to my old campaign, or, more importantly, will I ever be satisfied with it if I end up liking these indie-RPGs more? It seems like everything turns into a big project.

http://www.cineris.org/blog/2006/06/30/listless/

3 Responses

  1. Chris
    July 16, 2006 at 6:13 pm

    Can I even convince the guys in the group to try something out completely new?

    You know, if you have to “convince”, then it’s not going to turn out well. Either the people are interested in trying it out, or not.

    Every story I’ve heard of folks who try to push through resistance almost always results in one or more people trying to sabotage anything new, then trying to blame the results of their actions on the new game- “See, I told you it wouldn’t be any fun…”

    If a couple of folks hear about any of the games, and are actively interested in trying them- those are the folks you should try it with.

    All that aside, “more rules to learn?!?” isn’t really much of a thing- most of the games are really simple to learn, often being something you can explain in about 10 minutes.

    The “hard” part, is simply remembering to use the rules that are actually in those games, and not the ones you have ingrained as habit. As long as you pay attention to that, the shift isn’t incredibly difficult.

  2. Cineris
    July 16, 2006 at 10:54 pm

    Right — I can see the pitfalls of pushing something on people and then getting frustrated when they don’t like it.

    And, again, right — The rules are pretty simple to grasp, particularly The Pool. I mean, one page of rules? That’s crazy. My “More stuff to learn?” response is predicated (as would everyone else’s in my group) on expecting something similar to D&D’s ruleset.

    “Convincing” in this sense would be more along the lines of,

    “I would like to start up a game again, but we won’t be using the D&D rules. Here is the rulesheet.”

    Hopefully they would be sold by that point.

    One of the things I do have concerns about (since I am planning on suggesting the Pool) is negotiating the issues of setting. I would like to run it within my own campaign world as that’s what I’m most familiar with, but it strikes me that it might be better to run The Pool in a setting we are all familiar with, such as maybe Star Wars or another popular setting.

  3. Chris
    July 17, 2006 at 9:53 am

    Yeah, sell it on a fun setting. The Pool’s rules don’t do much to excite people, at least until they actually start using the narration trading bits. I’d probably say, “I’m thinking of running a one-shot of Star Wars (or Pirates, or whatever everyone is excited by) on this day, why don’t y’all drop in?”

    By making it a one-shot, the pressure and gamer fear gets cut down- people build up weird and high expectations when they expect to play for months on end.

    Second, don’t send them the rules, explain the rules that day. It’s like 5 minutes of effort. If they don’t -get- it after 3 dice rolls, it’s because they don’t -want- to get it, and that will tell you something else also.

    This also prevents the “I’m afraid of new things, therefore I will nit pick it to death before trying it” sort of thing which you can find innumerable examples of on the Forge forums.

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