What I Want To Be Playing

Honestly, I’ve been playing a lot less (though not as little as this blog might seem to reflect). Some of that is because of big public events, while some of it is because of very personal ones.

Tone

On a more specific topic related to this blog: I haven’t been that interested in dystopian, grimdark worlds or horror for a bit. Instead, I want to go back to some form of heroism, in the sense of motivation, not powers or survivability). I spent some time thinking to get clear about what I want in my games right now:

1. Characters who are motivated by something more than selfish greed. They can be nuanced and flawed (see Han Solo), but their arcs are more than getting powerful by getting rich. Maybe they want to protect or save someone, or maybe even their community. Perhaps they want to discover something important knowledge for a broader benefit.
2. A world where things can improve by way of the character’s actions. This improvement isn’t guaranteed, and indeed it might even be highly local (saving the village, not the whole universe), but in general there’s at least a sense of hope rather than bleakness.

Games like Call of Cthulhu ostensibly have characters that can have heroic motivations. Many scenarios focus on investigators trying to push back the end of the world by a few decades or centuries at the cost of their own sanity or lives. The problem is that second one: even in the best case, the world isn’t actually saved. Nothing we puny humans do will actually matter, and the universe is at best indifferent to us and, at worst, actively hostile.

Other games like old editions of D&D (and its retroclones) often focus on treasure hunting and greedy adventurers, such as with “gold for XP”. Maybe the world can get better, but the player characters aren’t necessarily interested in that.

Games

So what have I been playing?

• Scraps by Cezar Capacle. It’s inspired by Ironsworn (and therefore descended from Apocalypse World in some ways), but it is explicitly nonviolent in almost an extreme degree. The description calls it “a feel-good game about sharing [and] about harmony with nature.” I expect to have a writeup here before the end of the year.
• Worldbuilding, trying to create a setting inspired by the ancient Near East for OD&D. I’ve been binging material (books and documentaries) on the Akkadian and Babylonian Empires, the history of the Levant, and the Greek Dark Ages. When the Tome of Worldbuilding arrives, hopefully in January, this will kick into a higher gear.
• “World of Warcraft”. Sometimes it’s okay to play a non-tabletop game.

What’s Next?

The games don’t necessarily have to be roleplaying games per se, but they should support a narrative. That is to say, a narrative skirmish game like 5 Parsecs From Home can work, although I would rather play it in a mode where they have some higher calling than just ne’er-do-wells in space. (At the moment, science fiction isn’t calling me, but that comes and goes. There’s a fantasy version of that game anyway.) So could other games tied into some sort of campaign structure, preferably with at least some kind of leader characters.

Actually, war games interest me a great deal right now, although (as with The Doomed and 5PH previously) I will almost certainly play them online due to physical constraints. For a bit, I’d thought about actual OD&D (by way of Fantasy Medieval Campaigns), including Chainmail (as in the “Chain of Command” section of FMC), but now I lean towards either going back to Swords & Wizardry with its mass combat rules or putting some narrative structure around a more traditional wargaming ruleset, like One Page Rules (among several options).

Hopefully the holidays will give me the space and time to do some of this.