Free RPG Day!
Jun. 24th, 2024 08:56 am This weekend, I blew off some responsibilities in order to take part in Free RPG Day.
My friend![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tallgeese alerted me to the fact that there was a big event at Tower Games over in Minneapolis. I noticed on the events page that someone was running a Thirsty Sword Lesbians one-shot. I should probably be sick of TSL since I took my responsibility for running a game at ConFABulous so seriously that I ran not one, but TWO practice sessions. But, two things. First, I was interested to see how someone else might construct a one-shot and, secondly, there's just so many scenarios you can play with this system that it's not like it's ho-hum, same old, same old.
I had never been to Tower Games before. It's a nifty little store that is super easy to get to (at least for me) because you basically get off 35W right at the exit that used to be "mine" when I lived in Uptown, (36-38th Avenue.) Then it's a short hop down Nicolet and you're there. I was worried about parking, but I got there early enough that I was able to park on the street on the same block as the store, even. Tower Games is set-up like a lot of gaming stores seem to be where there's a front area with all the merchandise and then, once you go through this narrow hallway, it opens up into a backroom that's set-up for gaming. For this event, they had long, skinny tables--sort of like the kind you might find in a bar?--with basically a set of barstools around each. They managed to cram SIX tables into this space, which, I think would normally have otherwise seemed decently spacious, but felt really crowded during the event. At one point, in fact, our GM got kind of overwhelmed by the ambient noise and lost her train of thought! So, given that I think she's a regular there, I think the place was unusually packed. I did hear someone say when I was coming in that they had NEVER seen this many people at the store at once before.
Our GM, Emily. was wearing a mask and so I asked her if she would be more comfortable if I did. I had brought one with me--like it was literally on my wrist, but I had planned on reading the room and gauge how I felt about it (it wasn't nearly as crowded when I first came in). But, even though she said it was up to me, I followed her lead and put mine on. What was amazing to me is that once at least one other person had one on, everyone else around the table masked up. Most of us were clearly ready and willing to, which... the cockles of my heart were warmed, let's just say. One of the players clearly felt badly about not having one, so I asked her if she wanted one as I had extra unopened KN-95s in my car. She said yes and so I ran off before the game got underway and gave her one. We might have been the only table that was 100% masked.
But, unlike a lot of other spaces, there were just generally lots of other masks all around the room. I don't always love my fellow nerds, but this was nice.
Our table was also almost entirely women, though we had one brave guy probably my age join us. (I think we were the oldest two players--he might even have only been in his 40s, and I'm 56.) We all chose to play she/her lesbians, only one she/they lesbian, which was my character.
The scenario that Emily had prepared for us was PIRATES!
I'm not going to go into all the details of the one-shot because I know that can be boring, but I do want to talk about it a little. Emily made the interesting choice of letting us develop our own characters. I go back and forth about this in a one-shot, if only because it can really take away a lot of the gaming time. In one of my test runs, in fact, it took and hour and a half of the three hours we had blocked off to play. But, some people are, in fact, there to see how the game WORKS. Like, they signed up for this one-shot because they want a quick intro to the mechanics of the game. Part of that is developing characters and choosing to have players make their own on the spot does give the GM a chance to familiarize players with their playbooks/character sheets--which has to get done, even if you use pre-generated characters. So, this is a big part of why I feel like both choices are valid. I just tend, myself, to favor those who want to get to the Thirsty and the Sword part of playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
I chose a playbook that I actually find LEAST attractive as GM in part because I wanted to explore this character type/get to know it better by playing it. Thirsty Sword Lesbians had a ton of different playbooks you can choose from a lot of which sort of/kind of map to D&D character types. Like, there is a Trickster playbook which is sort of like a rogue (though arguments could be made that Scoundrel better maps to rogue, though maybe that person is more like a bard...) and a Beast that is sort of like a barbarian, etc., etc. There are two magic-user types, the wizard analog, which is Spooky Witch and the druid analog, Nature Witch. I picked Nature Witch because, speaking of mechanics, I find some of the things about that playbook to be kind of... not dumb, that's unfair. But, as a GM, I find them hard to figure out how to work into a scenario so that players who do want to be this type of person can DO those things. Like, there's a very clunky mechanic in Nature Witch where you are supposed to attempt to complete four "trials" from a list. And the list is random AF. "Kiss someone dangerous," "Lose something important to you," "Ride a magical beast," etc.
Okay, a little side rant, I find this kind of disrupting as a GM. Like, Nature Witches are often just doing things in the game that seem like left turns because they are trying to check off their ticky boxes in order to gain experience points or whatever is the prize for having completed their list. So, when I homebrewed my cyberpunk game I wrote a list of trials to chose from that would ACTUALLY ADVANCE MY DAMN PLOT and move people around the board, as it were. Like, before I thought to do this, I found my test game's Nature Witch just leading everyone fully away from anything remotely connected--which is fine in a longer campaign, I'd imagine, but kind of nuts if you assume people want to sort of have a conclusion to the story you promised. (And yeah, I know most one shots turn into three or four session games, but I'll have you know both one-shots I ran at ConFABulous got to a resolution in 3 hours! And, Emily also wrapped our story up in 2!)
But, so I actually tried to see if there were trials I could do that would fit with a pirate scenario. I managed to get two out of my four completed, but that felt satisfying enough. I don't know. I will say that enjoyed this game playing as a Nature Witch, so that was a success.
I also took full advantage of the TSL / Powered by the Apocalypse gaming culture wherein players have a lot more agency than your average D&D player. The other players elected my character to be the Captain of our pirate ship and, so I asked them what they all thought their jobs were, and first mate/XO, gunner (for the Beast, naturally), and cook all got snapped up fast, but our Spooky Witch character was at a loss, so I just declared (like you can in PbtA games) that because I'm a Nature Witch and spacy like that, I kind of just found our ship? It ran aground in whatever cove I normally holed up in and so I just took it over, like you do. A crew was still on it, however, but they were ghosts, and so we needed a Spooky Witch to be our ghost wrangler. Our ship is basically haunted all the time, maybe isn't even really sea worthy (magic might be involved), but we don't let that stop us. This DELIGHTED our Spooky Witch. The GM was also really happy because that was a whole extra layer of flavor that she could weave in.
So, it was a fun game. We kind of resisted the plot unintentionally, it turned out. None of us wanted to trust the pirate queen's girlfriend, because when the GM asked me how I might have known this person I immediately declared them an ex and so the whole rest of the crew was disinclined to want to help. But, it was clear where the bread crumbs were leading and we got the two back together in time for a nice finale.
It was a FANTASTIC way to spend two hours, plus I got a swag bag to take home. There weren't any games in the bag that I was particularly interested, but they were fun to look through before they made their way to my little free library.
Anyway, that was my weekend. YARRR! You?
My friend
tallgeese alerted me to the fact that there was a big event at Tower Games over in Minneapolis. I noticed on the events page that someone was running a Thirsty Sword Lesbians one-shot. I should probably be sick of TSL since I took my responsibility for running a game at ConFABulous so seriously that I ran not one, but TWO practice sessions. But, two things. First, I was interested to see how someone else might construct a one-shot and, secondly, there's just so many scenarios you can play with this system that it's not like it's ho-hum, same old, same old. I had never been to Tower Games before. It's a nifty little store that is super easy to get to (at least for me) because you basically get off 35W right at the exit that used to be "mine" when I lived in Uptown, (36-38th Avenue.) Then it's a short hop down Nicolet and you're there. I was worried about parking, but I got there early enough that I was able to park on the street on the same block as the store, even. Tower Games is set-up like a lot of gaming stores seem to be where there's a front area with all the merchandise and then, once you go through this narrow hallway, it opens up into a backroom that's set-up for gaming. For this event, they had long, skinny tables--sort of like the kind you might find in a bar?--with basically a set of barstools around each. They managed to cram SIX tables into this space, which, I think would normally have otherwise seemed decently spacious, but felt really crowded during the event. At one point, in fact, our GM got kind of overwhelmed by the ambient noise and lost her train of thought! So, given that I think she's a regular there, I think the place was unusually packed. I did hear someone say when I was coming in that they had NEVER seen this many people at the store at once before.
Our GM, Emily. was wearing a mask and so I asked her if she would be more comfortable if I did. I had brought one with me--like it was literally on my wrist, but I had planned on reading the room and gauge how I felt about it (it wasn't nearly as crowded when I first came in). But, even though she said it was up to me, I followed her lead and put mine on. What was amazing to me is that once at least one other person had one on, everyone else around the table masked up. Most of us were clearly ready and willing to, which... the cockles of my heart were warmed, let's just say. One of the players clearly felt badly about not having one, so I asked her if she wanted one as I had extra unopened KN-95s in my car. She said yes and so I ran off before the game got underway and gave her one. We might have been the only table that was 100% masked.
But, unlike a lot of other spaces, there were just generally lots of other masks all around the room. I don't always love my fellow nerds, but this was nice.
Our table was also almost entirely women, though we had one brave guy probably my age join us. (I think we were the oldest two players--he might even have only been in his 40s, and I'm 56.) We all chose to play she/her lesbians, only one she/they lesbian, which was my character.
The scenario that Emily had prepared for us was PIRATES!
I'm not going to go into all the details of the one-shot because I know that can be boring, but I do want to talk about it a little. Emily made the interesting choice of letting us develop our own characters. I go back and forth about this in a one-shot, if only because it can really take away a lot of the gaming time. In one of my test runs, in fact, it took and hour and a half of the three hours we had blocked off to play. But, some people are, in fact, there to see how the game WORKS. Like, they signed up for this one-shot because they want a quick intro to the mechanics of the game. Part of that is developing characters and choosing to have players make their own on the spot does give the GM a chance to familiarize players with their playbooks/character sheets--which has to get done, even if you use pre-generated characters. So, this is a big part of why I feel like both choices are valid. I just tend, myself, to favor those who want to get to the Thirsty and the Sword part of playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
I chose a playbook that I actually find LEAST attractive as GM in part because I wanted to explore this character type/get to know it better by playing it. Thirsty Sword Lesbians had a ton of different playbooks you can choose from a lot of which sort of/kind of map to D&D character types. Like, there is a Trickster playbook which is sort of like a rogue (though arguments could be made that Scoundrel better maps to rogue, though maybe that person is more like a bard...) and a Beast that is sort of like a barbarian, etc., etc. There are two magic-user types, the wizard analog, which is Spooky Witch and the druid analog, Nature Witch. I picked Nature Witch because, speaking of mechanics, I find some of the things about that playbook to be kind of... not dumb, that's unfair. But, as a GM, I find them hard to figure out how to work into a scenario so that players who do want to be this type of person can DO those things. Like, there's a very clunky mechanic in Nature Witch where you are supposed to attempt to complete four "trials" from a list. And the list is random AF. "Kiss someone dangerous," "Lose something important to you," "Ride a magical beast," etc.
Okay, a little side rant, I find this kind of disrupting as a GM. Like, Nature Witches are often just doing things in the game that seem like left turns because they are trying to check off their ticky boxes in order to gain experience points or whatever is the prize for having completed their list. So, when I homebrewed my cyberpunk game I wrote a list of trials to chose from that would ACTUALLY ADVANCE MY DAMN PLOT and move people around the board, as it were. Like, before I thought to do this, I found my test game's Nature Witch just leading everyone fully away from anything remotely connected--which is fine in a longer campaign, I'd imagine, but kind of nuts if you assume people want to sort of have a conclusion to the story you promised. (And yeah, I know most one shots turn into three or four session games, but I'll have you know both one-shots I ran at ConFABulous got to a resolution in 3 hours! And, Emily also wrapped our story up in 2!)
But, so I actually tried to see if there were trials I could do that would fit with a pirate scenario. I managed to get two out of my four completed, but that felt satisfying enough. I don't know. I will say that enjoyed this game playing as a Nature Witch, so that was a success.
I also took full advantage of the TSL / Powered by the Apocalypse gaming culture wherein players have a lot more agency than your average D&D player. The other players elected my character to be the Captain of our pirate ship and, so I asked them what they all thought their jobs were, and first mate/XO, gunner (for the Beast, naturally), and cook all got snapped up fast, but our Spooky Witch character was at a loss, so I just declared (like you can in PbtA games) that because I'm a Nature Witch and spacy like that, I kind of just found our ship? It ran aground in whatever cove I normally holed up in and so I just took it over, like you do. A crew was still on it, however, but they were ghosts, and so we needed a Spooky Witch to be our ghost wrangler. Our ship is basically haunted all the time, maybe isn't even really sea worthy (magic might be involved), but we don't let that stop us. This DELIGHTED our Spooky Witch. The GM was also really happy because that was a whole extra layer of flavor that she could weave in.
So, it was a fun game. We kind of resisted the plot unintentionally, it turned out. None of us wanted to trust the pirate queen's girlfriend, because when the GM asked me how I might have known this person I immediately declared them an ex and so the whole rest of the crew was disinclined to want to help. But, it was clear where the bread crumbs were leading and we got the two back together in time for a nice finale.
It was a FANTASTIC way to spend two hours, plus I got a swag bag to take home. There weren't any games in the bag that I was particularly interested, but they were fun to look through before they made their way to my little free library.
Anyway, that was my weekend. YARRR! You?