So here I am with no column, so what should we discuss? Well, since I love to talk about me, we’ll start there.
A few months ago, October to be more exact I was to run a game at my local con, and I blew it big time. The game was a riff on The Usual Suspects. I spent some time building the game. I updated the rules, made custom character sheets, printed up some pretty maps, and absolutely choked in all of my execution. I stuttered, I choked, I made stupid mistakes, and they were all me. I had gotten out of the habit of running games. Those “muscles” in my brain had atrophied and I felt like I was eleven years old and running my first game all over again.
Of course the first thing I did, I think the first thing we all do, is to subconsciously blame others. I had bad table placement, the players were tired from a full day, but at the end of it I knew it was all me. I forgot the basics, I got caught up in the minutiae and completely missed the point.
Many of us spend a lot of time on the boards and in our virtual communities. I have livejournal, twitter, myspace, facebook, and so many other digital personae that I sometimes barely have time to update them at all. Without my laptops, my phone, and my incessant and constant connections I feel lost and bored. I have also said many times that were it not for the modern word processor I would never have the patience to write. A typewriter is simply to slow, too linear, and too painfully analog for me to work with. Maybe it is a character flaw, and maybe it is why I am not a great writer, but it is true and I know it.
I was also running Cyberpunk 2020, which was a mistake. First of all let me say that 2020 was, and is one of the best RPGs ever written out of the box. It has very few rabbit holes, and very few serious problems with the system. The game is complete in one book, and it runs very well just as written. Since I played it incessantly and developed for it for almost six years, I know it forwards and backwards. As the system matured, I was lucky enough to write many of the expanded rules and fiddled with the bits that annoyed me. Actually, I had fiddled with the game so much over the years that the version I run is very different from the published version. I had committed one of my own cardinal sins. I had created a game that only the GM knew the rules, only the GM could know the rules. It sets the players up for failure every time. It is a very adversarial idea and when I realized I had done it, the thought was like a boot to the head.
I kicked myself for about a month. It is one thing to tell other people, in a column, how they can better run their games. It is quite another to realize that you have fallen into a rut and made those same mistakes. I guess it may be an object lesson in just how easy it is to make those same mistakes no matter how long you have been playing.
So anyway, after I spent a few days feeling down about it. I started thinking about what I could do to keep it from happening again. Getting back to basics is never really a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it may be the whole thing.
I had a very good friend who used to run the prettiest games I have ever seen. His maps, character sheets, and all of the various accoutrements of his game were flawless. I spent years trying to make my own games look even half as good. It was a losing battle. I have never had the skill set necessary to compete on that front. I can make some pretty cool character sheets in Word. I can do props and ambience when it is necessary too. All of that is great, if the basics are there. None of them are any substitute for running a great game. It is the single biggest question. On RPG.net, on those other RPG forums, on newsgroups, anywhere people talk about running games.
When I started playing RPGs we didn’t have computers, or character sheets, or even really good cheap calculators. We had pencils, paper, and if you were lucky you might have had a decent typewriter. I think this is one of the things that sticks with me. The technology is cool, but it doesn’t replace anything about being a good GM. It doesn’t even teach you anything about how to be a GM. Running an RPG is essentially an analog proposition. So I think that the best way to start is with some analog basics. A pencil, and some index cards. It can be a mechanical pencil, I mean I’m not a Luddite.
When I started playing we used index cards for everything. We used to use them for equipment lists, characters sheets, dungeon maps, basically everything. So when I first decided to run a game it was index cards that were my tool of choice. It was a couple of years before I switched to regular paper; coincidentally, it was a stupid mistake with index cards that lead to my first real collaborative breakthrough as a GM.
I was running a game at school. I was in seventh grade and we played every morning before school. I was rushing to class, late, and I dropped my index cards. I picked them up quickly and made it to class, but when I was putting them back in order I made a lot of new connections in my head. Ideas came to me because I looked at the cards, and the information differently. Playing gin with my grandfather a few days after that, I decided to shuffle the cards occasionally. Several years later Roger Von Oech published the Creative Whack Pack. It’s a neat tool for thinking in new ways about problems and ideas.
So this month I can only urge you to not make my mistakes. Don’t let the tools get in the way of the craftsmanship, and don’t let the widgets in the way of the ideas.
