It's a Deja Vu Reboot All Over Again Once More

Okay, time to do some game talk.

It's been a while and I've done quite a bit of gaming in the year and a half I've been gone from here.

I started running Masks of Nyarlathotep a newly reprinted campaign for Call of Cthulhu that my wife bought for me for Christmas, but the campaign has stuttered a bit this time through, with players dropping out before I can kill their characters or drive them mad. Oh well. The advantage of running the game in a Game Store is that there is always an audience, and that audience has recently been knocking on my door asking if they can join in. Naturally I say "Hell yes!" I'll be starting a thread for this game and the observations that arise from it from now on.

The monthly Delta Green campaign sessions are as popular as ever, over-subscribed now with eight players sometimes at a sitting. I enjoy running for this group very much. Their buy-in is atypically fervent and they are a total joy to GM. This game will soon be kicking into higher gear and I will be threading this game in it's own subject too. I have a lot of thinking to do when it comes to D20 Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green.

The recent (read: end of last year) launch of the Savage Worlds Space 1889 setting and my love affair with all things Savage Worlds has resulted in my convening not one but two separate parallel campaigns, each being an iteration of the Red Sands campaign from the eponymous setting book. I'll be threading these games both together and individually for pontification purposes.

I've also begun playing Solomon Kane, another Savage Worlds-derived game setting (though in this case one that is self-contained and that requires no additional purchase of a Savage Worlds rulebook). It looks to be a very interesting way of presenting a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure/horror game and I love the rulebook.

My attendance at this year's RetCon was a success, with all four of my games subscribed to the right level. I ran a Realms of Cthulhu scenario set mostly in the Peruvian Rainforest, A Deadlands:Reloaded game set in Great North Woods, A Space 1889 scenario set in the Martian desert at the juncture of the English and German fields of influence and a Call of Cthulhu session late on Saturday night which was a shortened version of A Cracked and Crooked Manse. It was a great success and greatly simplified by the decision to this year go with an all-Savage Worlds program (with the exception of the Call of Cthulhu session).

There were some failures to aviate.

Notably, my friend of many years decided that he no longer wished to play Call of Cthulhu since he did forensic paperwork for a living and was not keen on doing it in an RPG for relaxation, and an attempt to start the D20 Conan campaign Trial of Blood fell flat. That was sad because I was hoping the milieu would appeal to my friend so we could game together again, but it was a total non-starter.

Then there was the Paranoia game I tooled up to run only to find that no-one who had said they wanted to play was actually prepared to turn up. Fiasco! drew no players at all in three weeks of advertizing the session.

And a Dresden Files RPG campaign I was hosting every other Friday, and for which I was taking vacation time to be able to do so, eventually resulted in an evening where I and one other were the only people to show up after a dozen sessions.

Lessons learned:

Dresden Files has taught me to be absolutely without compunction when it comes to giving away a players seat if they haven't RSVP'd for the game (all the store's available slots are booked using Meetups). My campaigns sometimes feature a floating cast list these days but I don't get messed around by losers.

Paranoia taught me that people talk a lot on the web but often don't follow through, even if you know them personally. Don't spend money on rulebooks unless you have at least three "I'll be there's".

Conan taught me that sometimes it is just that the right mix of people isn't there and motivated to play. Two of those who did show interest found they didn't like my style and rather than say so simply faded from sight.

But all this has also shown me that the facts of life are that there are four to eight times as many people who want to play a given game than are willing to sit the other side of the screen and run the bugger. The GM in my neck of the woods who is willing to bide their time will end up beating them off with a stick when word gets around (and if he is any good).

My problem now is time. I don't have enough, otherwise I'd be playing in at least two more games (One Ring and Eclipse Phase) and running even more, like Deadlands:Reloaded, and Slipstream, and Sundered Skies, and The Laundry, and Amber, and Traveller, and Dresden Files - which I dislike the complexity of but feel there's a great game in there struggling to get out - and that doesn't even mention the board games

On The Percieved Difficulty of Game Rules, and the Resulting Real Difficulty of Scaring Up Players

Used to be I could scare up a game with a six-page rulebook of densely packed type with no problem. Avalon Hill and SPI, the two manufacturers of complex simpulation-oriented games in my collection, wrote rules that worked for the most part, with much fewer "grey areas" requiring in-game on-the-fly fixing than today's games offer, and they did so in a way that enabled the players of those games to get down to the nitty gritty without worrying about knowing the rules by heart, by using a format called "The Case System" (more on that in another post).

Today, however, there is a perception that any non-RPG with a text-only rulebook of more than two pages is "too hard", and getting players for such games is next-to impossible.

I think this attitude springs from the preponderance of RPGs with their by-necessity laxer rulesets that are open to wide interpretation, and the rise of the computer gaming industry, which offers the singular advantage that you don't need to learn any rules, just pick them up as you play by intuition. Gamers also seem to feel that the game should bend to player expectations rather than the player should learn to play the game. There is something to be said for that approach, but consider what would be lost if we brought the same viewpoint to chess. The whole point of the game would be lost.

The manufacturers of games have gone the TV route on this one too, "dumbing-down" their games for the percieved audience (which apparently has the attention span of a speed-addled gnat with ADD), resulting in games where the challenge is relatively low and the complexity of play is all-but non-existant. That isn't really important in and of itself because I can always just not buy or play those games, but it also makes todays gamer less inclined to stretch themselves.

Games I once had no trouble at all getting people to play now are all-but impossible to fill out. Circus Maximus, Civilization, Dune, Conquistador, Kingmaker were all AH games I had to schedule multiple sessions of just to accomodate the people who wanted to play. Now, I can't get enough players to make the games work properly.

I joined a web-based community that exists for the sole purpose of getting people together for games. In recent weeks I have polled the membership as to their interest in the following:

Game Title	Game Type	Comment	Response
Civilization	Avalon Hill Boardgame	Plays itself for the most part	No Takers
Zombies!!!	Board Game	Trivially Easy (< 1 page of rules)	Two takers, was looking for 5 to 11
Red Dwarf	RPG	SF played for laughs	Cricket Noise
Empire of the Petal Throne	RPG	Emphasis on Role Playing in an alien culture	No Takers
Traveller	RPG	Space Opera	No Interest whatsoever
Call of Cthulhu	RPG	Gothic Horror	No Interest, but already have one game in rotation

If I can't scare up a game of Civilization, a game that really does play the fiddly bits on automatic pilot leaving the big picture decisions to the players, what earthly chance do I have of ever playing another game of Star Soldier or Azhanti High Lightning, games of considerable complexity and high levels of simulation?

What is doubly irritating is that people are willing enough to talk about how they want to play this or that game, then become evasive when actually asked to sit down at the board/table/whatever. People argue bitterly on the 'net about various facets of this game or that, sometimes becoming very heated on the subject, but actually suggest playing the game in question and the conversation dries up.

I'm going back to an earlier method people used before the internet became a fact of life: cards pinned to the corckboard in the game store. You don't get responses to them either but at least no-one fights with you.

Yet Another Game Blog?

Well, the fact is that I have been a keen player of serious board games, wargames and RPGs since the mid 70s and I have a lot to say about them (sometimes). I'm clogging a couple of boards up with my dribble on this subject and the tiome has come for a change of direction.

Will anyone else be interested in what I say? I don't know and I don't care very much. This is really for my own satisfaction. Over the next few weeks I'll be talking, when the mood takes me, about games I'm playing, have played or want to play.

Sometimes I may talk about the people who play them too, but that won't be the primary focus as it usually leads to ranting and there're plenty of other places to do that more constructively.

Sometimes I'll talk about actual games I've played, either to constructively analyse the flow of the play and the ease of the rules, sometimes just to vent about the other people sitting around the table .