Gaming Phases

[pawsplay]

Pawsplay's phase 4 inspired me to expand on my previous post.

I would say that the importance of RPGs has actually increased over time despite taking an increasingly back-seat role in my life. Some people paint, others write, others knit, others build... I do all of those through RPGs. If I get an urge to draw a map, I do it and I have an audience. If I want to write a legend, I do it. If I want to design a multi-tiered battlefield out of lumber, people love it. As commitments take more free time away from me, the ability to express my other passions has become more important and RPGs are a vehicle by which any passion can have a home.

I'd say that is my current phase. When I was younger I spent a lot of time focusing on what wasn't present or wasn't allowed. Now I focus more on how I can facilitate things my players or I want to show up.

I relate. I'm quite the renaissance geek at this point... LARPing, studying medieval fencing manuals, playing and writing RPGs, building computers, cooking. And of course, the kids are really where it's at. Playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii with little kids is the bomb.

But at root, I'm probably more hardcore about RPGs than I have been since I was 8.

 

[Jared Rascher]

I've recently been trending into a different phase as well.

When I was younger, I must say, I had a similar experience. Getting to game almost every day and for hours and hours on the weekend, especially in the summer, let to me using weather charts and trying to use armor versus weapon rules and all sorts of other minutia.

Back in those days, I almost never use published adventures, because I was too specific in what I wanted in my adventures. From time to time, I would run them as one shots, but usually only to try out a system I wasn't currently running for a night or so.

I moved into a phase where I didn't game at all for a few years when I was with my ex-wife and we were getting established, having our daughter and the like. When we split up, I realized one of the things I really missed was RPGs.

Getting back in, I ran a game that was suppose to be every other week, but because we had a lot of schedules to juggle, it often turned into a monthly game. I created all of my own adventures for that, as well, and tried to present the world as open as possible for people to run with their own hooks.

Then I started running at a the LFGS, which led to a more stable schedule, but upon letting people "pick their own adventure," we ended up with the whole party off on a quest for one person's character and that player dropping the game. I didn't want to GM myself into a corner like that again, so I started running Adventure Paths.

I was fairly happy with this until recently. The second AP I was running, when the group got to the 4th adventure and the player characters were 9th level, I realized how much I missed customizing adventures to the characters, and I realized that I wasn't going to be happy just tweaking the existing adventure. In fact, I felt like I would be somehow "lying" to the players if I changed the AP too much.

So in my current phase, I'm looking for a game that is both open to PCs determining the path, and simple enough with the rules that it's not too hard for me to adapt threats based on what path they wander down. I've got a group playing DC Adventures and another that I'm about to start in Savage Worlds playing in the Hellfrost setting.

I realized that as a GM, I really missed the full on creative aspect of creating the whole adventure, and I missed the feeling that I could let the PCs go off on a tangent that I hadn't foreseen if they really wanted to follow that course of action. I don't know how well it will work, but I'm really missing it in my GM career, so I'm trying to follow my muse and hoping it will work.

 

[Hussar]

Oh hell yeah.

I LOVE different gaming styles. Gimme some sandbox sometimes, give me plotsy sometimes, gimme monte haul over the top Feng Shui action sometimes, give me down and dirty sometimes, gimme conceptual narrative sometimes and sometimes, gimme a little bit of everything all at once.

Variety is truly the spice of life. Or put it this way, in the past two years, we've played the following:

1. Savage Worlds - SF game with high action and drug induced zombies.
2. Sufficiently Advanced - high brow narrative game set in a post-human setting. Very, very narrative.
3. Sufficiently Advanced (again) - Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Zany game involving saving a volcano from the sacrifice. Or something like that.
4. 4e D&D - Dungeon Crawling madness with rotating DM's and episodic adventures.

And I'm probably forgetting a few things in there too.

Heck, I've got the bug again and I'm rebuilding the World's Largest Dungeon for 4e as a massive, sprawling dungeon-crawl sandbox game with about as much pre-defined plot as the average episode of Three's Company.

 

[ThirdWizard]

My eras:

• Make Believe My first forays into roleplaying involved me or one of my brothers setting up an elaborate world with toys in one of the bedrooms. They would then act as the referee, while we brought in one toy which we would then play with, interacting with what the other guy said happened when we tried things. It was rudimentary, but a lot of fun, and we had no idea we were roleplaying!
• Sandbox on Rails My first actual D&D gamse were a painstakingly loving affair between myself and the homebrew campaign world, in which I detailed every year of its thousands of years history, ever inch of its giant landscapes, and all the political intrigues and diversions. Then, when game started, I promptly didn't use the myriad of detail I made that I could have turned into a grand sandbox and instead pushed the PCs along the tracks. We had fun, of course. We were young and foolish.
• Story Driven Then, I went on to university after a few years not playing D&D. There I fell in love with plots and intrigue for the players to interact with. It wasn't on rails, but it wasn't a sandbox, and the main driving forces in the game wasn't combat but were the PCs and the unfolding story around them. I wanted a grittier, deadlier, more realistic world at this point, and I liked complex critical hit tables and tracked arrows and food rations.
• Grinder Then of course was a 180 degree style totally devoid of most social interaction or back story where the PCs were little more than an elite killing group who would destroy everything in their path. If it breathed, and it didn't give them a quest, it died. That didn't last long. It was a nice diversion, but I don't think it was creative enough. That phase passed fairly quickly after only a couple of years.
• Sandbox I had played Planescape before in high school, but with more experience, I opened it up for a true sandbox game, where the PCs made their own way. Most plot lines in that game were totally the brainchildren of players. There was an overarching plotline, but they were free to ignore it at any time, and often did, and they could approach it from any of a dozen directions at any time. Pretty much every game I ran after that was an open playing field, or at least as open as I could make it given time constraints. I went back to a more simulationist bent, though I wasn't interested in the minutia as much as previous.
• Sandbox with Abstract Rules I think I've at this point fallen disenamored with simulationist leanings toward more narrivistic options. I still like the open play concept of the sandbox, without putting constraints on players, but as I read more and more different RPGs, I find myself being enthralled by abstract mechanics. I'm looking at ways to blend the two ideas as I find myself moving away from D&D toward other systems that suit my style better.

 

[diaglo]

i'm still in my OD&D(1974) phase. i found a sweet spot. 30+ years and still growing stronger.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I suppose I could divide my time up based on when I stopped playing strictly by the book and started making judgment calls and houserules. Specific houserules could constitute an era. Certainly, my pre-vitality/wound games were very different from those in the vp/wp "era".

Or perhaps base it on when I started consciously incorporating external influences, my pre- and post-Battlestar Galactica eras. Much richer and more naturalistic storytelling these days.

Perhaps by gaming group. My big group (10 PCs) vs. small group (3 PCs) era. Now I won't run a session of my regular game unless everyone's there; used to be I'd run an entire campaign without ever having everyone in the room at once.

Or perhaps my pre- and post-Call of Cthulhu eras. Changed my outlook on plot and on the necessity of rules.



All that said, I'm still trying to perfect what I started out in the beginning: telling a good story.

 

[faria2159]

this magazine is very helpful

 

[Haltherrion]

Good stuff.

Phase 3: College
In college, the gaming you want, you can't get, and the gaming you get, you don't want. I got talked into playing AD&D again for the time in years. I got rooked into dysfunctional Vampire games. Several campaigns died flaky deaths.

That’s funny; for me college was my best gaming. It was the right mix of frequency and engaged players. But I was usually there ref. Mostly D&D, some Traveler.

Phase 4: Enlightenment
Somewhere along the way, I began to wonder if I had actually outgrown RPGs. I sold all but a few out-of-print games, and even some of those. I went over a year without any tabletop RPGs, played some Everquest, and focused my attention on alcohol and sex. Then one day, I realized how tedious it was being in a long-term relationship with someone with a nominal interest in RPGs, but who seemingly despised actual play. Once that relationship ended, I returned. Ever since then, I'm in a weekly game whenever I can get it. I'll play almost anything that isn't horrible. I love funny dice. I paint miniatures. I still love GURPS and Talislanta, but I enjoy tinkering with funky systems, too. I don't mind playing in a one-shot. Games are fun! I look forward to gaming with my kids.

WOW was my distraction from tabletop RPGs and for a time a really enjoyed it. Plusses: game as much as you want (and I did it daily), much more fun combats, lots of fun dressing up my characters in new gear. Minuses: no real RP, repetitive play, etc. I still miss it at times. Fortunately, they have taken the game far away from what I enjoyed about it so it is easy to not go back. I dread someone getting a MMORG right that pulls me back in, though. It’s a huge time sink…

 

[kitsune9]

Here's my gaming phases as I remember them just for D&D (all its variants):

1. First starting out -- dungeon crawls and random encounters.
2. High school -- dungeon crawls set in FR
3. College -- graphic horror descriptions added to published adventures
4. After college to present -- PG 13 railroad style adventures (either published or I wrote). Meticulous planning. I consider a ratio of 1 hour prep for 1 hour play a win/win for me.