Game Wish 16: Old and New

This week's Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die

In the gaming you are doing lately, what do you miss from earlier games? What works so much better you never looked back? Three examples?

I've moved from GMing and playing in long-running campaigns to a mix of one-shot convention-style games and PBeMs/PBMBs, so that's a big change in gaming style!

Like many people, I started RPGing in long-running games. Over the years I played in an ADnD game and GMed a GURPS game both of which ran for more than 5 years. The GURPS game actually ran to a conclusion, which is rare, the DnD game and a later Runequest game eventually fizzled out when players dropped out.

Then I got into on-line games, initially those run on the message boards of the now-defunct Compuserve RPGAMES forum. Compared with my previous face-to-face gaming, it's quite a different world. The games run at a much slower pace (a single evening's tabletop gaming would take several weeks to play out on-line), but you can compensate for this by playing multiple games in parallel. At one point I was playing in six, as well as running one of my own. Following the demise of RPGAMES (documented here) I've continued on-line gaming on Dreamlyrics and The Phoenyx.

More recently still, I've started going to conventions, both the big organised ones like Gen Con UK, Dragonmeet, Stabcon and the Dudley Bug Ball, and small private 'mini-cons' run by people from the ex-RPGAMES community. At these I've played in a wide variety of one-shot games in different systems.

From earlier games, I miss the long-term character development and really epic quests that you can do in a long-running campaign. For example, in the GURPS Kalyr campaign I ran, I sent the players on a quest taking them to every corner of my game world, interacting with every nation, culture and race in the world. Similarly the Runequest game saw my character Javin develop from a callow youth with a grudge against the Lunar Empire to a significant force (in a completely different body, just to confuse the Lunars). I do miss having a regular game group, even if we didn't actually game that regularly due to scheduling problems.

The one thing I don't miss at all are the interminable ADnD combats that used to take up two-thirds of each session!

Moving on, I find the slower pace of on-line gaming gives more time for in-depth characterisation; you can think more about the character's motivations and back-story when you're not holding up the action. I couldn't imagine describing a character's very surreal dreams in a face-to-face game, as I did several times in the first on-line game I played in, a GURPS Cyberpunk epic. I also like having a permanent record of the game, right down to the in-game dialogue. The RPGAMES/Dreamlyrics community has some superb writers!

I've played some very good games at conventions too; there are some wonderful GMs on the convention circuit, and many of them rerun and tweak their scenarios until they're perfect. I'm lucky living in the UK with it's more compact geography here, which means there are many conventions a year within easy travelling distance of most parts of the country. It's strange RPing with complete strangers, although you do tend to run into the same people at successive cons. As for the private weekend-long 'mini-cons' organised by people I first met through on-line gaming, I now know many of them well enough that it's as good as playing with a regular group. One good point is exposure to a wide variety of systems - at one point this year I had played ten consecutive games at various cons in ten completely different systems. I guess I'm not one to be fazed with learning a new system as I play; I'll even sign up to a game without knowing what system it's going to be run under!

My best memories of organised cons are of two very different In Nomine games, one at Gen Con UK 2000 run by Jo Ramsey, who has written for In Nomine, and one run at StabCon earlier this year by Mark Baker. The first featured Demon PCs based on the characters from the TV Sitcom "Drop the Dead Donkey" thrown into a plot loosely based on "The Omen", featuring Tony Blair and a gunfight at a village fete in Devon. The second, an much darker Angelic game set in Naples, Italy was filled with some very powerful imagery that had me dreaming about the game that night!

While I'd like to be part of a regular (weekly or bi-weekly as opposed to three or four times a year) group, I don't think I want to go back to 5-year epic campaigns again; there are just too many games I'd like to play or run to want to sink a large chunk of gaming time into just one. Having tasted variety, I would prefer shorter 6-month campaigns and try and get the best of both worlds. Time will tell.