Been a while, hasn't it?
I could regale you with tales of getting married and moving to a Scottish island and trying my hand at rearing livestock and potatoes and such, but this is an RPG blog so I will write about something far less interesting.
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| Do not allow him to distract you. |
Open Table antics
Post-COVID lockdown I took a long hiatus from RPG-related stuff to focus on my non-imaginary life, but over the past couple of years the hooks have started to sink in and draw me back. I ran a few games: a solo Delta Green scenario with my wife, some online Mothership one-shots, and finally an online multi-session run of Wolves Upon the Coast with friends which eventually fizzled due to scheduling issues. All of them were great fun, and then the sickness was upon me once more - I started having ideas.
Enter, the Open Table.
For those unaware, an open table is a regularly scheduled session slot where players sign up in advance. A persistent group is not needed and players can join as and when they're available/feel like playing. The structure lends itself well to 'West Marches'-style play, where parties declare an objective in advance and then return to a safe haven at the end of each session, with time passing in real time between sessions.
I recruited players to a heavily house-ruled Old School Essentials game through a combination of physical posters and posts in local Facebook groups (sadly the island I live on uses Facebook as a primary form of advertising, information sharing, and general communication). The game has been running for almost 3 months and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and observations written out, as much for my own reference as for providing advice to others thinking of running such things.
TL;DR - it has been an excellent experience and I don't know why I didn't run these before.
The Aims
The Players
Total signed-up players: ~20, some signed-up via email and some have joined the WhatsApp group used for game discussion and session planning.
Total players who have joined sessions: 13, 10 of whom have attended multiple sessions, 7 of whom I would class as 'regulars'.
Most of the sign-ups and regular attendees are women. Most are either totally new to or have minimal experience of tabletop RPGs. Player age ranges between teenage to middle-aged, most falling in the mid 20s - mid 30s.
The players have all entered the game with a high degree of trust in me as the Referee - I have been extremely careful to preserve this, mainly by always explaining my rulings and reasonings and inviting feedback. All players have expressed an enjoyment of the game up to press - all contribute snacks and £1 per session towards the hire of the room that we use, and I cover the remainder. Several character deaths have occurred and have all been taken in good humour, I believe as a result of this trust holding.
Players have generally acted in a fiction-first way and displayed impressive creativity when interacting with the game, using items, abilities and their wits in clever ways to confront and solve problems before them (my particular favourite was a player who, when confronted with a wide crack in the floor of a room, dropped a torch into the chamber below and affixed a mirror to the end of a 10' pole as an improvised reflector to illuminate dark areas further away). A few have expressed a more mechanics-first attitude, and have queried things like monster HP and abilities in mechanical terms, and have asked to perform general search/perception actions rather than directly interacting with scenarios before them - this has generally been minor and I have encouraged the fiction-first approach embraced by most players, largely through continual requests for task & intent statements.
The group has been very interested in learning more about things in the world, performing research in downtime, asking questions of NPCs regarding the local area and history, interpreting text sources found within the game, and remembering snippets of previous rumours and information gathered to help inform their decisions going forwards.
Several players have embraced faction dynamics, leading the party in performing a (largely) bloodless coup against a previous employer and taking over their organisation, and assassinating the leader of an opposing faction with the aid of a treacherous underling who was willing to make peace with them.
Some players have occasionally gotten distracted during sessions, but the majority have been laser-focused. The distraction hasn't caused issues yet, but I'm keeping an eye on it - if players are ending up on a waitlist while an active player isn't giving the game their full attention then I'll take steps on this.
The party wildly oscillates between cautious planning & a 'fuck it we ball' mindset, and I can't tell which mood will prevail at any one time. Both have been extremely enjoyable, the former lending itself to clever plans which either work out as intended or lead to shenanigans, and the latter having about a 50/50 split between glorious victory and grim fighting withdrawals (both producing excellent war stories).
No player has expressed an interest in learning the rules of the game (OSE). I have presented it in largely a black-box style, where they have character sheets to record information but I will tell them the rolls to make in a given situation. This was not my intention, but it has thus-far worked - see the comment about the high degree of player trust - and I am keen to try it in future games. Players have been quite happy to self-police their own encumbrance limits and draw out their own maps (I break out a dry-wipe board for specific combat positioning).
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| No distractions! |
The Game
Old-School Essentials Classic with house rules ripped from OSE Advanced, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Wolves Upon the Coast, and AD&D 1E. The rules are quite simple, and as mentioned above, run in a black-box style - this was unintentional as I assumed the players would show an interest in learning the game systems, but it has been an incredibly liberating experience as it ensures the players are interacting with the game fiction as directly as possible while I handle the (simple) mechanical load. Combat is where the vast majority of rolls occur and the players have embraced their characters' fictional positioning - they know that flanking and ganging up on enemies is a good way to win, but don't seem to care about the specific +2 modifier for each melee combatant outnumbering the other.
I'm running a megadungeon sandbox and the players have only just entered the dungeon itself - I added a ruined town with some small starter factions and points of interest and they absolutely ate this up, with the first two months being almost completely occupied by exploring different ruins and engaging with the faction dynamics. I'm hoping this bodes well for exploring the dungeon.
I've been gradually introducing elements of the game as we go. Hirelings have become a key element of the game since their introduction, which I didn't expect. The players have been happy to trade treasure and XP for increased survivability in fights. This has also let me be more explicit with telegraphing - nothing gets their attention like exploding a hireling into red mist. Several party members are starting to dabble in magic-item creation, which will be interesting to see going forwards.
There have been a few 'dud' sessions where the party has either not gained any treasure (they spent their time interacting with a strange machine, partially powered up an ancient golem and spent ages asking it questions), suffered near TPKs (don't run into a goblin den and let them encircle you), or combined the two (exploring the dungeon and heading through a secret door into a Minotaur arena, and having to make a fighting retreat with casualties). These have been embraced as part of the game, either because they're happy to spend time digging into the mysteries of the game (questioning the robot), they realise they made a mistake (charging in without a plan), or because they recognise that sometimes you just have bad luck (the Minotaur). In the latter cases they know that I've acted as impartially and fairly as possible, so their response has been to take stock of the situation and prepare for the next round. We also use rules covering Feats of Exploration, and giving fallen PCs a funeral allows you to divide up their XP, which helps to reward exploration and takes the sting out of coming back to town with empty pockets.
The out-of-game WhatsApp group has worked well for organising sessions, but I'd prefer something with threading abilities to delineate things like downtime activities, planning discussions etc.. I play in several Discord servers but I find the platform horrible for useful discussion and information organisation. I currently use a Google Site for recording session reports, player character rosters, discovered lore etc. I'll need to look into this further, but may just have to stick with the current setup as it's where people currently are.
Prep is incredibly easy - I used the Two Week Megadungeon method to knock out several levels of the dungeon, and with a quick message from the party telling me what they're aiming to do in their next delve I can make sure that everything is set up and ready. The dungeon basically runs itself, faction aims drive their expansion and contraction in different areas based on their interactions with the party, and re-stocking zones is a matter of rolling on a few tables. Combined with a simple ruleset this means that my mental load is massively reduced, and running weekly sessions floating between Thursday-Saturday has felt like almost no effort at all.
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| The Minotaur, before things went really wrong. |
General Thoughts
I've loved every second of running this, and hope to continue it for as long as possible. I think I've met the initial objective of creating a fun and welcoming game to introduce newbies, with a focus on the fiction of the game.
I genuinely think my Referee-ing skills have improved. I still need to work on making NPCs more distinctive, but running a game seems to be second nature at this point. Having the mental processes mapped out to make and record rulings for spot situations has helped massively.
I was surprised at how many of the players were brand new to the hobby, but having thought on it I imagine most folk who play RPGs will have found a group that they game with regularly. The new players have been some of the most creative and fun of the lot, and I hope I'm setting them up in good stead to play in other games in the future.
Recruitment has hit a bit of a wall recently - I'm hoping to broaden the pool of players a bit more, or at least get some of the sign-ups who haven't attended a session to come along to one.
Having a discrete objective for each session helps keep things focused - I'm looking forward to opening up play into a hexcrawl as the characters progress.
Running the game as a black-box, despite it being unintentional, has been a real eye-opener, in a good way. The game has ended up almost being a not-quite Kriegspiel, and I'm definitely keen to try running something more explicitly that way. Death to the system, long live the game.
