How to Mudar a Game

This is the lead up to my attempt at #My30DayWorld. You can read more about My 30 Day World here, and find the kickstarter that it is tied to here. I am not affiliated with Absolute Tabletop or any of their affiliates. I have never talked to any of them. I do watch some of the youtube videos the various contributors make.

I have not blogged in a while. Last September I got back into tabletop roleplaying games on a regular basis. I was approached by a stranger to be a game master (narrator) for a 90s Marvel themed Mutants & Masterminds game using roll20. That game is closing in on five hundred hours actual play time and I love it.

I currently run two Dungeons & Dragons games as well. One is Lost Mines of Phandelver for kids which is the first time I have actually ran an adventure written by somebody else, and a mature adults only D&D game. I play in a Masks, Scion, and D&D game. The D&D game is the only one of the three I do not run that occurs on a weekly basis. This is all a lead up to talking about that adult D&D game I am running.
I was approached by a player in the Mutants & Masterminds game. She wanted to play a game with a married couple. The wife is her best friend. This player found another player to join them for a total of four. We held a pregame session to get to know each other. The husband was in and out, but his wife was there for the whole session.

We came away from the session with the decision to play in a custom world. Something similar to Middle Earth or Faerun. There were more details, but the players expressed the desire to possibly be epic heroes of legend in a world full of dungeons and dragons. We discussed the potential of there being a prophecy concerning the player characters. There would be dragon deities. The dragon deities were central to the point where weather patterns would be named after dragons. One of the players offered to write up a dragon pantheon. Another player offered to write up an Elven themed pantheon. For dungeons, there would be layers of previous societies that had fallen. Later civilizations literally built on top of the fallen ones. Before the session was over we settled on the basic idea that the party would be going into the ruins early on even if it was just somewhere near the surface. There were other details such as resurrection should be difficult, expanded downtime activities (crafting in particular), and no firearms, but the broad strokes were setting up opportunities for the player characters to be big heroes, dragons are pervasive, and underground complexes crisscross the land.

So I started work on the world. I used some software to make a map of a European inspired continent. I created the basic framework for some nations and set up an area for people to design nations and other details of their own if they wanted. I laid out the skeleton for some pantheons. The player working on the Elven pantheon got me information on three of the deities. I hammered out five big bads with the potential to end the world so I could trickle down from any of them to fit what the characters do. I found some tactical battle maps and got them set up for a week long journey with loose plans for each day. I made a map in GIMP of the town the characters would be going to. I even made a couple of simple dungeon maps in GIMP. All throughout were a mix of social, combat, and a couple of puzzle challenges.

I came into the first session full of hope. I looked forward to seeing what ideas the players might have come up with. I wanted to know what kind of cool dragons might be in this world. The player character were to meet up with their employer in a tavern. Yep, cliche, but I wanted them to meet her in person before pulling her away for a while as she is far too busy to go where she was paying them to go. The two friends played sisters that grew up with the character of the husband. The other player character was hired on as a guide.

I lost interest completely during the first session of this game. This was a combination of things.

For one, I had to rethink the campaign on the spot. The husband showed up with an evil character in a party where the others were either good or neutral. This is after it was expressed emphatically during the setup session that the players wanted to make being epic heroes one of the three pillars of the campaign. The player was not wrong in any way for electing to play an evil character in a good aligned campaign. I simply had no idea it was coming before we sat down together that session. It went against everything I was told the players wanted going into this first session. His character details were still being put in after we were supposed to start playing. The player was actually really good about it looking back. He is not playing a stupid evil character. He is not twirling his mustache. The character does have bonds to two of the other player characters. It makes sense for him to be there beyond just the money from their patron. I wish more people playing evil characters in a good campaign were like this character.

The second turn off was some of the jokes. When I have to say something after a game requesting that if rape is part of the game it is something we should never take lightly or joke about, then there is a pretty big problem. The jokes crossed my line long before we got there. I have run games for people with RPG horror stories, and the "jokes" during this game were right there with some of the worst cases I have heard. With most groups I would have had a discussion before the first session. I sometimes use X Card if running a game for strangers not because people tend to use it, but because using X Card ensures that conversation takes place and there is a visual reminder in front of everyone. Three of the four players were good friends however, and the fourth was friends with one of them so I thought they would be used to each other. I was not the only one made uncomfortable by the jokes. This should be a lesson to myself.

The third turn off was beyond the three deities and some background information on the player characters that are sisters, I got nothing else out of the players before that first session.

The fourth, and the one that killed the game for me was two sides of one issue. On one side I was trying to create a world for them, and after the setup session it felt like they did not care about the world or what I did with it. On the other side, the side I did not see at the time and the heaviest hitter in the attempted murder of this game, I was not making a world that I wanted. There really was nothing in it for me at the time.

The party never left the inn during that session. I didn't care enough to push them out the door so I ran encounters and events I had planned in case I needed them inside the tavern.

I probably would have quit  if not for the fact I adore the person that asked me to run this game. This game killed my desire to play any RPG for weeks. I kept pushing through however.

Another player was added for session two. The player that was playing the guide gave me a background story which gave me some elements to work into the story. The other players toned down the crudeness of their jokes. While the new player never made a rape joke (I did discuss this with him before he even made his character as I considered it the hard rule for the game), he was jumping up and down on that line for me. Of course, I stopped caring by this point. The player that was bothered by some of the jokes from the first session loved it. My response to it basically boiled down to, "Fuck it. Whatever."

We had a cancellation so took a week off. I took the time to start thinking about what I wanted. I still do not know what I want, but I began making changes to the world without altering anything that had been presented to the players. Somewhere between session two and three I set up a google site because it works a lot better than trying to share all of the world details in roll20 handouts. Everybody in the group can edit the google site for the game. I only put information on there scholars of the world might know. I have the basic layout for the solar system. I have an idea of how the four calendars work even if I have not written them up yet. I never did tell them much about the fallen civilizations so that was still open to whatever I wanted to do there. After asking the players stated they were comfortable with using the planes in official D&D material instead of having something custom so I touched on the relation between Tyar and the various planes. The player working on the Elven pantheon fleshed it out a bit more.

I also worked on some house rules. I swiped and reworked the revival system from Xanathar's Lost Notes to Everything Else. The one player that cared told me they liked Matt Mercer's system after I did that so we are using his rules instead. I began to shape a hunting/gathering and basic expanded crafting system based on that from City and Wild. More in depth crafting was something that was requested in the setup session. All of the player characters started play with one free tool proficiency at their request. After presenting the crafting rules I was linked to some different rules by one of the players. I can say with relative certainty that the player has read neither the rules I was working on, nor the rules they linked me to. The rules they linked were greatly expanded herbalism rules that we are definitely using. It does mean however that the alchemy rules are now very loose and open to my interpretation until I have time to focus on how to incorporate the exhaustive herbs list into a structured crafting system.

I was drunk for session three. I was not tipsy. I was straight up sloppy drunk. Surprisingly, this proved to be exactly what I needed. I was way too uptight about this game The players still had fun. I talked to them all later and they claim to not be aware of the fact that I was drunk for that session. I started to care about roleplaying again which is good because I had the first session as a player in a different game a few days later.

I went into session four caring again. Not as much as I did going into that first session, but at that point I was willing to take whatever I could get. It was good. The players had fun. I had fun. The jokes in three and four had toned down and felt natural. The session was very much what I needed.

Session five was scheduled for last night, but was canceled due to life. This does not deter me in the slightest as life always takes precedence. Well, life should always take precedence. If it does not then we need more than a break.

As I stated at the beginning. This is my preramble to starting #My30DayWorld. It strikes me as a structured way to think of the world for this game alongside the other work I am doing on the game. I could scrap this world and do something completely different. This feels like it might be the campaign that teaches me that a game or a world is salvageable. I just need to figure out what pieces to keep and build a new world on top of the bones of the old which is one of the three pillars of the setting.