LostKnightsRPG.org

i've been thinking about htis for a while, but it really hit home when i was on vacation: i spend way too much time on games. about as much as some people spend on their jobs. now granted, some of the time i spend is at work, but i could be using that time for homework or something else constructive. so, what i'm thinking, is that i'm going to keep playing and running, but i'm going to change my approach.

1. magic game responsibility is turned over to others. have fun. i'll still make quests, and play, but no more spending hours at a time working on it.

2. vamp will still go in summers, final knights is still on, but nothing else for wod is planned in the forseeable future.

3. after you beat the d&d game, i'm done running it. it goes on hiatus to make room for the summer gaming stuff, and then if someone else wants to take over into epic, go for it, but i don't have the time/energy required to design ever more complex levels/monsters every week.

4. symphony of stars is still on, but the game will be from a more rp perspective. don't expect dungeons and intricate monsters. expect a story.

5. i will play magic on tuesday, another game on saturday (maybe 2, depending on the timing), and that's it. nothin' else. and saturdays may get shorter. and fewer people.

6. chris' game is totally still on. i'm rather jazzed about it actually, something that i dont have to spend tons of time on, but can still have fun with.

7. i will still manage the site somewhat, but steven is your main man for everything. give him your love.

8. i would like to see other activities increase, maybe an occassional movie night or something. do i sound burnt out? cuz i am...

anyway, i just realized i want to do more with my life than i am, and i have to cut back somewhere. my mind is inactive, roleplaying is habit now rather than something that makes me think. so i need to find other things that donate to my overall life quality. like i said, nothing is just up and disappearing, and i still plan on doing stuff. i just want to cut the time spent on gaming when not actually gaming (prep, rules mods, etc), to cut back on time spent playing a little, and reduce my overall responsibility level.

hugs and kisses,
wcj

I want to get started participating in some rather non-traditional activities (for our group at least), and would love to have other people join me in them. I am going to start going to Rocks OKC the rock climbing silo in Bricktown. I am also thinking about learning to horseback ride. Finally, like I wanted to start a year ago and just never did I want to take up archery. Let me know if any of these things interest people at all, might be fun to get out in the sun and do things that are physical in nature.

well the archery thing sounds cool... hope my fingers can handle it though... biting off the skin makes it hard to develop calluses...

which reminds me... who is going to the faire in Norman coming up??

It sounds like you are experiencing the burnout everyone else in the group has been showing signs of for a while now. Many of stopped entirely, if not limiting their gaming to the summer game - showing little enjoyment there. Years of continuous gaming with games being dropped, never getting going, and ending in utter boredom I'm sure contribute. Every time someone mentions a game, many of us quickly rush to make characters. Then these games never get going (my Marvel game, for instance).

Not only do some of us have lives (not me, but I'm sure someone does. Josh maybe?). I haven't enjoyed many games we've played. Liked Cheyne's D&D game and Gid's OKC Vamps, but even during those
I was bored and annoyed. At this point, I'm not sure if people just need time off, or we are growing out of it. we gettin too old for this?

Glad you are looking forward to my game. Wish Gid's game was alive on the boards to look at. We figured out some neat ways to do things, now I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.

I'm watching UFC 8 right now. A fat guy was just choked out. Good times.

You cant be too old for gaming since you are younger than me much less someone like Gygax (RIP)...

as far as burnout I can see signs of it myself, like when people are playing and get aggrevated more often than burst out laughing... I think the summer game will allow a change of pace since people make only as much effort as they want and that lets people feel more comfortable with their experience and allows more enjoyment...

I am really looking forward to the 4th ed game because they supposedly kept the combat and non-combat seperate when designing the game so everyone could equally play a part in both, also to make it easier for GMs to have social interactions apply to game mechanics so combat is not as necessary for character advancement... ie dungeon crawl not required...

thael:
i think 4th ed still has the same combat style and dungeons and stuff. but i think it will lend itself to not using them as much as 3.5 requires. and i do agree, i think people are just going through the motions. that's why i'm making this announcement. better to do something else than repeat the same boring shit over and over. better to change and grow than stay static.

and honestly i think that gaming will improve when it isn't the focus of life, and when people have new experiences to bring to it. much like a relationship, if you just live up someone else's ass all the time, you eventually get bored when you have nothing new to interact over or discover.

Chris:
i think people have grown out of it a little. and people are busy. and they (myself included) don't always have the right mindset for gaming and making something cool. however, i think it's also that people need new stuff to stimulate them, as i said above. and i think that RP has become to much like a job, which is shitty. you shouldn't grind out eeps with your spare time. if you aren't enjoying yourself, you shouldn't be doing stuff.

as far as your problems, i think part of it was confusion (you were thrust into a new set of rules and expectations that had been developed over years of our gaming), part of it was personal life (new situations, lots of worries and other stuff on your mind), and part was just not liking the stories all the time.

really i think that growing out of gaming has alot to do with just not... i don't know... wanting to put in the work? I mean, it takes alot more to be entertained at our age. when we were younger we could be fine with dragon/castle/princess or some other simple plot, and the systems didn't really matter. now, to make a good game, we need bachelor's degree's in history or sociology, a slew of books, and even then we can't always make things entertaining. it takes time and effort, and if you don't put that in, the games end up shitty. but finding the will to do that, when there are so many more distractions... its just hard. it's fine (well, not really, but not as bad as it is at this age) to spend 20+ hours a week in game prep when you are 15, but when you have work/family/school/bills/exercise/hobbies to worry about, that gets prettty bad.

so yeah, i think that a few games done right, fewer game period, and more time spent doing non-gaming activities would be really, really good for me and everyone else.

the other problem i see, is that i run too many games. i've gotten stale, everyone knows it, but there just hasn't been anyone else to pick up the slack. you are happy making chris, btw. but when you play under the same gm for years, of course you will get bored with plot, tired of the play style, and generally fed up. which is where many are at.

Paul:
yes.

I for one am glad that you are taking action based on your sentiment. If you are burnt out then you're burnt out, no reason to make it worse by succumbing to unending obligations. Burnout makes for bad games and bored players. I find that these days I want nothing more than an involved role playing game. I think part of that is that I'm dead bored with what my life has become. I spent far too many hours trolling the internet and researching non-school related things.

I've worried for a while that as the main (only) GM in the group you would have undue levels of stress and eventually want to scale things back. I understand that since I've left some other people have started to run games. I've found that actually playing can totally refresh a GM to the point that they are ready to run again. It IS a burden and it IS a lot of work, but that doesn't make it unenjoyable.

I recall that some time ago you mentioned that you wanted to take your gaming to the next level, that it was a life hobby for you and that you felt that you could gain more from it if you wanted to. I found this quite an interesting proposition, and I hope that it either already has or will in the future become what you hoped it would.

As far as 'getting to old for this shit', I wonder. My father still games. My brother games. Gary Gygax (a space alien) gamed until the day he dies. I heard he was buried with his notes and his gaming group will never know what was on the other side of the door. (completely made up, but probable.)

Cheyne, I have enjoyed your games tremendously. I hope that you are able to take a break for a while, and actually get to play more.

I agree though, more non-gaming would be good. I'll definitely join harness for pony riding lessons. BTW I *may* be in town for your travesty, I'll try to show up. It's clown suits and longswords, right? (J/K, and mazeltov.)

so yes. gather. watch movies. eat pizza. drink beer. forget the bad times, worship the good times, and before long you'll be designing dungeons like never before.

speaking of which, some of my most interesting dnd dungeons were made in the face of absolute boredom. aka here, after I got back by about four weeks. I still need to forward them to you cheyne, but if you'd rather I could just post them on teh boards.

Oh, and if some of you wish to view depravity the likes of which mankind has never seen, to remind yourself of the precious things you DO have, I recommend 4chan. hehehe.

http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html

btw this is totally NSFW.

here is a sample of the wonderful things that 4chan can encourage you with!



be warned: it's the anatomical asshole of the internet.

anyways, break good, actually playing good, hanging out good.

I miss you guys. I really do. wish you were here for at least 72 hours but not more than 94.

rydi wrote:now, to make a good game, we need bachelor's degree's in history or sociology, a slew of books, and even then we can't always make things entertaining.

This is a good part of why I don't have much interest in running anything. Also, when it comes down to it, I need more real roleplaying experience before I try to tackle actually running anything engaging.

I recall that some time ago you mentioned that you wanted to take your gaming to the next level, that it was a life hobby for you and that you felt that you could gain more from it if you wanted to. I found this quite an interesting proposition, and I hope that it either already has or will in the future become what you hoped it would.

this hasn't changed. but i think that what i am proposing is actually a vehicle to getting there. sometimes, to move forward you have to step back.

wow, that sounded cliche...

This is a good part of why I don't have much interest in running anything. Also, when it comes down to it, I need more real roleplaying experience before I try to tackle actually running anything engaging.

i can understand, but you get some of the necessary xp by actually doing stuff. one of the better ways is to sub for someone else. but yeah, i can understand not wanting to start out sucking and wanting to get more xp playing.

Avilister wrote:

rydi wrote:now, to make a good game, we need bachelor's degree's in history or sociology, a slew of books, and even then we can't always make things entertaining.

This is a good part of why I don't have much interest in running anything. Also, when it comes down to it, I need more real roleplaying experience before I try to tackle actually running anything engaging.

Honestly, I find that, though being a good player helps run a game, running games is the best way to get good at running games. There are huge parts of running a good game that are really transparent and don't usually occur to players. I recommend running a game to anyone that likes to play. Even if it's going to be simplistic, railroading, and generally not a 'great' game. I've also never been 'completely ready' to run a game before the first game session. And I think a game does not have to be a totally novel gaming experience to be engaging and fun. I personally enjoy 'in genre' games quite a bit. Resisting the temptation to tinker with a game system and to put the players up against things they've never seen is really hard for me, but I find that if I can keep my tinkering to a minimum, the game can be really really fun anyway. Besides, these games were designed to be run by people that knew little or anything outside of the source books. I agree wholeheartedly with cheyne's statement insofar as those qualifications certainly add volumes to the quality of a game.

I wound up in a discussion about 'what makes a good game' with one of my gamer friends here. My position boiled down to a simple formula.

Pick a game
Learn the game
Find something within the game that you want to explore
Build a sandbox setting
Add plot
Add players
Improvise

Granted, 'build a sandbox setting' is a bit more work than it sounds, but it's actually one of my favorite parts of a game. I find myself developing game concepts and filing away notes rather frequently. I much prefer to play and run in 'mutable' settings, in which the player characters can freely interact with their environment, and I have some idea of how their environment will react to them.

A myriad of complexities in a setting, such as using 'total wod' as opposed to 'basic cam' adds depth by default, but it can easily congest a game.

Meh, /end rant.

i agree with everything gideon just said.

also, that is an interesting question, what makes a good game?

not just from a gm angle, but overall... i mean there have been good games that just died for no reason, shitty games that go forever, and games that took on epic proportions that were eventually weighed down by their own girth, both good and bad. what made them work, last, and most importantly what made the good games good?

How can optimal experience be created in a role-playing game in order to facilitate flow?

There is my phd dissertation.

you are going to hell.

I think that the vast majority of games I have found to be good, either running or playing, depending on simply being caught up in the game. I feel like the original starforge was both my best and my worst game ever. I sat down with Jarrod a few years ago and we hashed through what was good about the game and what was bad.

Without belaboring the embarassingly bad aspects, I would summarize our determinations as simply as I can, here.

The story was evolving, and the players were centric to it. Though in many games, the players are not the movers and shakers that they were in SF, the plot should at certain levels depend on their decisions.

I kept a rapid pace in the game. This was at times retarded.

The players never knew what to expect. Also sometimes bad.

I was able to have the world react to the players. This was good.

So, without going into the epic that was SF, where "I close the star behind me" became a catchphrase, I would suggest that whether a game is good or bad, it can be fun and involving. I think it also depends on the players. I have always felt that knowing your players and knowing what they want to explore in a game was very important, and often overlooked. In the days of dnd 1st ed, the GM was god, and you did wtf your gm said. Those days seem long gone. The GM is still respected if for no other reason than the fact that his job is hard, but at least in my experience the GM has to accomodate the players interests, because there's always FF to play and MMOs that will meaninglessly cater to a players circumstances.

I have found that some of the games that have fizzled within our group in recent memory fizzled for one of two general reasons. It seems that either there's a time/attendance conflict, or a loss of interest, primarily on the part of the GM.

I think one of my greatest successes of late was the Dragons Rising feng shui game. Cheyne played I think a one shot or two shot attendance, thael played quite a bit, paul, and chris.

I really enjoyed running this game, and I did so partially by making it an entertaining game to run. I built animated NPCs, such as old ben, and I spiced up the old telling style, and had mixed success with radically off beat methods.

I'm not sure if the players felt the same way about it, but I felt that the opening first few sessions were just great. I did a wrap around, starting with the last fight, and then flashed back to the introduction to the story, and then we played up until the last fight and concluded it. It was cheesy and loads of fun. Later we tried a flashback, that was intended to be epic and a fun diversion but wound up 3 sessions long and everyone got bored with crunching the host of the golden challenge.

What I think made the game was the feel of it. Everyone knows that I disallow even original publisher variations to feng shui, and staunchly refuse to change the original 1st ed book. So the game was not fun because of a novel mechanism, I felt like it was fun for the feel of it. I went of an easily understandable, classic HK action film feel. We fought absurd enemies in even more absurd circumstances, and had some great fights. The 30ft tall golden cockroach was pure win.

So, where did I go right with that game? I think it came down to having everyone make really animated characters. And then supplying them with animated NPCs to interact with. An little accent goes a long way. What could have been better? Hard to say. Attendance dropped off and eventually the game tanked. Then I left the country.

So how about OKC Nights? That was a tough game to run. I think it was fun, but the game sessions wound up dragging out the story. It was tough to manage. I think the good parts were the detail, and the politics. Also, interacting with a well known setting was really good. Again, vivid characters helped a ton. Also the player character centric plots were vital to keeping the game going.

As far as bad is concerned? Plot doors for one. I've always found my games in which I describe nothing and no one to be bad. Inconsistency. I think from the direction of the GM that is the ultimate killer, especially for my games. I usually have my first couple game sessions planned out weeks in advance, and then I eventually either get behind on my planning and background or I lose some of my interest, and suddenly want to explore a new direction with the game. My dnd game here lasted all of one and a half game sessions, but I had the next five planned out. Which is to say that I have learned from my mistakes. I even caught myself starting to change the direction of the story, and returned it to a reasonable course.

Also, a great deal of what makes or breaks a game is the players. If people are disinterested to start with, then it takes a miracle or better to interest them. Playing for the sake of playing is generally a bad plan. I'd like to have players involved in the development and planning of a game from start to finish, even if it takes some of the surprise out of it. I've always found that player I bounce ideas off of tends to be very dedicated to the game.

Back to the GM side, equal opportunity gaming. I am guilty of playing favorites in the past, especially starforge, and it was difficult in OKCN to give everyone the attention they deserved. So, equal amounts of attention to players. Either none or a lot, but nobody should be ignored.

But back again to the players, if they don't show up then there is no game. A burnt out GM running a group of burnt out players may as well be a committee.

in closing, I would quote my father, who counseled me for weeks on end before I started running my first game. he said that first and foremost, everyone should be having fun.

So, people of the internet! go forth! write games! run them! and have fun. Because I have a zillion tests coming up and I want to eat some botulism before then.

hmm.

i find it difficult to self analyze, at least in game running. hard to get an outside perspective.

i started running in game stores, and just having a game at all kept things going there. but they werent' particularly grand.

cycle of the ages, the first one, went well, but had problems. balancing player needs, dealing with the problems the system presented, and power creep were all issues that led to player dissatisfaction. i think what made it work for as long as it did was that players felt they had a real place/role, and felt special. and the story was quirky and entertaining, and made people laugh, even when it was serious. i think humor in games is really important, and not to be ignored.

i think the second cycle of ages game went ok, but i just missed the mark on what i was going for. i wanted small and large unit tactics in a game that lets a single warrior kill an army in a series of infinte cleave attempts. bad, bad idea. basically all i and the players could do was pay lip service to the themes, and that made it bad. and that game was also a testament to the whole "some assembly required" thing. i didn't put in enough work sometimes, and it showed. i think it is important to set goals that are achievable. goal setting is super important, but make sure you can handle it. if you can't plan out an entire multiverse and army comprising trillions of entities... well, maybe you should shoot a little lower, have a nice tale of rescue the princess, tarrasques in the cornfield, or somesuch.

Knights has had its ups and downs. it started out strong, and there is nothing that illustrates the attraction and entertainment value of novelty like the first couple of games of a LARP. but keeping it going was a struggle. first summer was good, and i was fresh and had good ideas. then i added other gm's, and it went down. i started turning too much over to them, and not only did my storytelling and stories degrade, but cohesion went out the window and players were confused by conflicting rulings. i feel the summer game is a constant battle between delegating responsibility, and taking personal control, and it is still not resolved. though i do think that i need to err more on the side of personal control to create more coherency in the plot. the game has also been educational in that it has shown me a decent amount about managing groups. finally, i think it shows how important world building is to a game. many times i found that i needed more locations/npc's than i had prepared, and that my game suffered for it. in a game that big, people need to have the world independent of the gms or themselves, so that they can handle it and manipulate it.

one of my most successful games i had was the lost souls game for marvel. with it i was able to really get into stuff. the combat was fun, but not overly technical, and the cards with little superheroes didn't distract from the feel of the game in the way refering to tables and rolling dice normally would. but like that wraith game you described a while back that your father was in gideon, i think people got too attached, me included. this game taught me that certain games are suited to certain themes/purposes/playstyles. marvel is all about with fulfillment, and escapism. nice, and you can learn from it, and it's fun, but it is dangerous and overly tempting. and as the colapse of the game showed, if you really get into the character, and emotionally invested, the events become very important and real. and if your coping mechanisms aren't good in real life, they won't be for your character... and then everyone gets mad, and everything goes to hell. while jason was a problem there at the end, haley was just as upset over in character, non-combat stuff (her character had a crush on an npc that i was interacting with, leading to real-life feelings of betrayal), zach felt at odds with his character throughout, paul spent a great deal of his time fantasizing and living in the game, and for my part... i don't know. i was overly attached, and wanted to be the character. it didn't impact my life, but i felt it was still a bit much and that my emotions were going in the wrong direction. this game taught me alot. it also showed me the value of shared responsibility in a game. if everyone cares, and everyone is responsible, it can create an incredible, engaging game. haven't been able to fully replicate that, but i've found it helps (though fewer players make it better. we started with a core of 3-4, and moved up, which made for a very strong, interdependent gaming group, and fostered trust, teamwork, and commitment).

the endless tower has been a dungeon crawl. i'm learning from it, but really it just isn't the same type of game as the others. it is more like (puposefully so i should add) playing a video game or warhammer quest. it still has shown me things about party balance, teamwork, player tendencies and such. but really its just hacktastic fun. it also has shown me that things can become a grind and too much of a good thing is in fact too much. and the value of change. that too.

what makes a good game? well, i think, like you said, it requires good players and a good gm. it requires commitment from everyone, preperation (PREPERATION!) and change/growth as time passes. i think it requires either total emersion (not always a good/safe thing) and a healthy dose of new energy, either in the form of new players, new experiences, or new additions to the game itself. i think novelty is powerful, but should be used sparingly as a tool in itself (growth good, fascination w/novelty bad) as it can't hold out over the long run.

meh. not sure what else. i need food and to get ready for class.