Slush Pile - Barkeep, Troika, Procedures, Adventures
I'm currently running a campaign of Barkeep on the Borderlands from Prismatic Wasteland. Lately we've had our twelfth (is this really a written word 'twelfth' WTF?) session and it seems at least two other are coming. From people's comments on the internet I thought it would be like up to eight sessions but nope, my players are lingerers and everything takes like enormous amounts of time. And even though we didn't finish the campaign yet I already have a few comments, and also the rest of the SLUSH PILE.
Choosing Troika! was questionable?
I quite like that I decided to run Barkeep on the Borderlands with Troika! I just wish I didn't just let my players get only Troika! backgrounds and run it. Maybe I should've let them get both Troika! and Barkeep backgrounds so they'd be more connected. Right now it feels like my players quest to find any way out of Barkeep plane of existence is both the engine of the game and the thing that keeps them always on the outside. Also Troika is weird with Stamina and healing but I guess every HP-based system is like this. But I like how every bad roll against even small beast can bring down one character down to 2 Stamina in one hit.
Procedures Make Me Sad
I think I mentioned it already in the comments of one of my play reports. The procedures are a pain to me. Each turn I get to roll 1d6 and the result tells me whether an hour passed, everybody drank their drinks or there is an interesting stuff happening. I understand what it serves - you are drunk, party is going, you don't feel the passage of time. Sometimes you drink a beer in ten minutes and go dancing, another time you nurse your shots for an hour. Sometimes you get to a place, think "we've been here for hours" and ot has been twenty minutes, other times you step somewhere, look around, and it has been two hours. The procedure serves this purpose well.
But I don't like it. I, as a GM, don't like to feel out of control. And with the procedure I am a part of this as well. I can excuse it as much as I like but in the end I too am just as surprised at when the time passed/drinks were drunk as everyone else. Also it means a lot of setbacks will go unused, because I rolled 2 drinkings and 1 time pass and nothing interesting happened during the walk from one bar to another. Which makes logical and thematic sense. But fucking annoys me, haha.
For the moment of one session I forgot about the rule (ekhem, procedure) and just pulled a setback and every turn. So much wacky stuff happened during that time! But also no drinking and no time passed.
There was a time when Procedure Fever ran through OSR blogosphere. I've been there when it was spreading. I liked it at first. The thoughts of 'when the thing triggers so that it flows more organically' or 'how to implement this so players remember it and don't have to check the rules each time' were really wonderful. But in the end I am more of a storyteller than accountant. Counting turns, encumbrances, rations and donkey capacity-to-feed ratios sucks the fun OUT of my game instead of bringing it in. And procedures tend to be part of that. So unless they are dirty fast and dirty simple they will probably be too much of a burden for me.
I'm not used to prewritten adventures and I probably won't be
Sometimes to my ears and eyes get these glimpses of the world beyond, of the world of current DnD. And it stumbles me how foreign things can be in our land of RPGs. Because I have started playing games with improvised adventures. Sometimes even improvised mechanics from the ground up. We played games for the fun of the fiction, not one person in my neighborhood nor anyone I knew had a complete game at home until I was on highschool. Everything was 'authorial' up to this point because we were kids in countries recently released from colonising boot of Matushka Rossiya so there was no money, only lingering corruption and poverty.
Aside of generational trauma I also received Do It Yourself mindset so we made our own games and adventures. I DIYed my mechanics until I was fifteen. I DIYed my adventures until I was probably twenty-two or something. And now I read echoes of people who are afraid of not running prewritten adventures. Echoes of people addicted to corporate product. And not only among DnDers. When I peek at communities dedicated to other games I rarely see people talking about plots and tropes, usually it is about adventures, most often old adventures or new iterations of old adventures. Go look at Traveller hangout places - old adventures like Pirates of Drinax. Go peek at Cthulhufolk - old adventures like Horror at Orient Express (shoutout to my mates at dice.camp who bash it relentlessly).
On one hand I understand that being able to talk to other nerds about common experiences of tricking Imperial Navy or finding the cosmic secrets lurking in a train are valuable as cultural touchstones and communal bulding blocks on the other hand... I'm a child if DIY when it comes to my RPG games. And I won't have those, sadly.
My main gripe with prewritten adventures is how much work they still require of me as a GM in the end. When I have my own adventure that is probably five to six sentences on a paper sheet I build around I can work it into whatever. When I have a ten pages of a first chapter of a game and my players inevitably say "I pick his pocket" and all the premise of being lawful citizens enrolled into army to fight Chaos somewhere far goes away during page one I can either play the game that emerged at the table or need a fuckload of preparation in order to fold this event into whatever prewritten adventure demands. And you know what? The adventure would need to be truly amazing for me to bend like that.
And I know sandboxes exist, and I use them, and I like them. City of Doskvol is amazing but in the end the "adventure" is something we came up at the table based on fictional events and our ideas at the table. The city is the thing that grounds us into the themes, tropes and atmosphere.
And this is probably why I won't buy adventures in the future. And I won't write them. Because the mastering style required for it is alien to me. I'm so sorry it is like this but in the end give me two prompts and a vibe from 2400 and I will make it into dynamic engaging game but give me any DnD 5e adventure book and watch me wilt and stumble as I try to make sense.
And it folds with previous point - give me procedurally generated dungeon like A Rasp of Sand and even that makes me uneasy.
That was fun. I need to gather my thoughts for more slushpile posts, there are some halfbaked ideas floating in there.