What do my games look like?
Something I read recently (I'm sorry, I don't remember what it was) reminded me of just how differently people play elfgames, even when they don't realize anyone else plays another way. Thought it might be useful for readers of my blog to know what my games look like, in order to calibrate the way you read my opinions and material.
- HOW JACK DOES IT
I've got a friend, we'll call him Jack (that's not his name), who's been running D&D 3.5e basically since the damn thing came out. It's not all he plays, but it's what he cut his teeth on. The games I ran when I first started running games looked very much like Jack's games, and Jack's games look like this:
Jack assembles a pretty involved collection of notes, including all kinds of imagined history and factions for his game world, and ideas for sessions. (Things like, "a heist at a formal dance," or "a train robbery.") Then he invites his players over to his house, where sometimes his wife prepares a snack, sometimes not, sometimes someone else brings something, sometimes not. He tries to have between 3 and 6 players, and if one of his players can't make it, he strongly considers calling the session off, and sometimes does.
The players each bring a character that they individually created before the game, with some small degree of input from other players, mostly to avoid there being redundant character classes. They expect to play these same characters for the entire campaign, and they expect the campaign to last about as long as Jack remains enthusiastic about running it, which is usually a year or two.
The players at Jack's table expect Jack to describe a scenario and then to be allowed the floor to interact with it as they see fit. This falls into a back-and-forth pretty identical to what's usually given as examples in D&D's books. The players understand well that Jack has only prepared so much material, and that if they push too far to the edges of that material, they will be forcing Jack to make things up on the spot. He's not unwilling to do this, but everyone has a sort of shared understanding that it ought to be minimized. The players want to see what he's prepared, so they're pretty on board with staying on track. They also expect that if they look to Jack during a lull or at the end of a scene, he will move things along by introducing some new action or scene.
Jack's sessions are facilitated using his laptop (for his notes), his cell phone (for his other notes, the ones he wrote away from his laptop), a collection of modular dungeon tiles, a collection of dungeon props (rock piles, barrels, etc) and miniatures from the D&D miniatures game that came out around the time of 3.5e, copies of the Player's Handbook for each player and for Jack, the 3.5e System Reference Document, and paper character sheets. And dice. He throws together battle maps quickly from components that don't have to look quite right, and doesn't use maps for many scenes, especially in cities and vehicles. He prints out world maps that he makes himself, but uses them infrequently. He often builds a bespoke minigame or complex layout ahead of time using LEGO. These, too, have a haphazard look to them that isn't strictly representational.
At Jack's table, multiple players take notes, about whatever each of them feels they should, in the moment. Some players don't track more than their item usage and stuff like that.
When I was running in-person games, I left out the LEGO builds, and I made my battle maps by quickly drawing them on wet-erase grid paper.
- HOW BART DOES IT
I have another friend, not called Bart, who runs 5e games online. My online games, which grew out of my in-person games, looked pretty similar to Bart's games.
Bart's notes are more consolidated than Jack's because he's running from modules. He runs 3 to 6 players also, but will often play with one missing and sometimes two missing. Unlike Jack, Bart will have everyone vote on an activity (often watching a movie) even if we don't play, and unlike Jack, Bart runs games every week of the year unless he can't.
Bart's players make their characters in pretty much the same way Jack's players do, and have similar expectations around them. Bart's campaigns have endings planned, because they're from modules, but they're very far off, because they're from modules. Enthusiasm will flag near the two-thirds mark, but we will press on.
Play at Bart's tables follows a similar structure to Jack's, but with a little less commitment to following the given path, because it's from a module. Since Bart didn't pour his heart and soul into it, his players don't feel obligated in the same way to fully play along. They'll goof around more, and only poke at the things they personally find interesting on first blush rather than assuming that Bart has tucked away worthwhile details behind even the least interesting elements. They do, however, still expect Bart to move things along in the same way as Jack's players do.
Bart's sessions are facilitated using his computer for notes, Discord for voice communication, for scheduling updates, and for meme sharing during play. He uses Roll20 with maps and tokens loaded in from the module he bought, and uses them whenever possible because he paid for them, and because he feels they're valuable enough to have paid for. These maps are extremely representational except in the instances where he must bring in a map that wasn't from the module. Each player is expected to find rules for their spells and such, but not expected to use any particular source. From time to time, confusion results from this, as we're using 5.5e rules but sometimes pull up 5e rules, or sometimes pull up unofficial homebrew rules. Players at Bart's games use digital character sheets mostly, and sometimes integrate them into Roll20. I use paper. The dice are digital.
Bart also puts music in his games. He has been struggling to get the Discord bots to cooperate with him on this though. I used to put music in my games, but I wouldn't do it again. It's too much work and I find it distracting. Another opening for technical difficulties to throw wrenches into the game.
At Bart's games, note-taking is not a standard practice. I take notes on notebook paper. I think one other player takes notes also.
- HOW THE GLOGGERS DO IT
From time to time, I'm lucky enough to play in a GLoG game, or a non-GLoG game, with members of Phlox's GLoG server. These games run a little differently from GM to GM, but they're always online because they have to be. I haven't had a GM yet from this server who I'd be anything less than thrilled to play with again. My hope is that they'll read this and be inspired to describe their own approaches, because they'd do better than I would.
Myself, I have run very few games in the GLoG server. When I did, they were like Bart's games, except instead of Roll20 I used Discord's built-in drawing tool Whiteboard, instead of premade maps I made my own maps (but only for exploration, not combat -- no maps for combat), and I'm pretty sure everyone was taking notes. Characters were made the same way, but not expected to see a lot of play. The sessions were inconsistently scheduled. I was a bit of a mess as a GM, but it was still fun.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I enjoy Jack's approach but I could never do it myself. He does so much work, and then often has to call off the session anyway. I appreciate however that he doesn't get too bogged down in the representational maps. His physical layouts are charmingly busted, it's a genuine joy. I think he should still get everybody together even if the game is called off, though.
Bart's approach has all the GM burden but with none of the DIY joy. I ran games this way for a while and it burned me out. I know I went on this whole preamble about how people assume they know how other people play, but if you'll allow me to speculate, I think Bart's approach is pretty much the norm for D&D these days. I can hardly express my appreciation for having an extremely regular, weekly game. This was something I myself helped cultivate, because Bart's games grew from the remnants of my online games. We've now smoothly transitioned between GMs and games and setups so many times that it boggles the mind. If any of you are reading, I appreciate you more than you know.
The GLoG people's approaches seem to be more lightweight and bespoke. I love seeing the tweaks and omissions people apply to make the game more fun for them to run. I think players can adapt a lot and GMs should feel more at ease fucking with the structure of their games, their prep, and their tools.
If and when I get back into GMing you can bet my approach will be purpose-built, strange, and lo-fi. I will incorporate as few electronic and software tools as possible, because I hate troubleshooting during play. I will use non-representational maps, and I'll use toyetic miniatures because I like bopping them into each other and stacking them on top of each other and whatnot. I'll assign note-taking duties. My prep will be nearly nonexistant.