Yesterday, I ran a one-shot for a new group of mine. They’re colleagues of my partner who also happen to love Dungeons & Dragons. After a couple of weeks of setting up, we played this Ready or Not/Die Hard inspired one-shot. They were mercenaries hired to save the hostages of a gang of bank robbers. It played smoothly, lasted the right amount of time, and, overall, was great.
A good session is like fertilizer to my mind. Usually, I wake up the next day with thoughts and insights about the session itself and randomly related topics.
This morning, as I was washing the dishes, I went back thinking on how well the session played out. It happened thanks to a number of factors:
- I was confident and eager to play in person after a couple of months of online only gaming;
- I had prepped properly and knew the situations around the dungeon well enough to improvise;
- I had solid references to help me set the tone (namely, Die Hard and Ready or Not); and
- the players had gathered the previous day to write their character sheets together and define the interpersonal relationship of their party of adventurers (this probably helped the most).
All of these piled up to help me and the players enjoy a good session. But nothing was granted, wasn’t it? I could come unprepared or in a bad mood, and be not entertaining. They could come unprepared or in a bad mood. I could forget vital details, deliver the plot in a confusing form, or simply have bad ideas for the session.
We have mediocre to boring sessions all the time. We run into better GMs and worse GMs. We play with committed people and, sometimes, with distracted ones. TTRPGs are not an exact science. They’re an art, and contrary to most arts nowadays, they’re resistant to being standardized. They’re an inefficient use of our spare time.
They’s why I believe they’re so great and we love them.
Most artistic media are designed with professionalism and standardization in mind. This is needed when you ask a medium to make lots of money and sustain an entire industry. Industries like standardized products, because they make for standardized prices, and professionalism, because it helps make more products and sell them for higher prices. Customers like to know that what they’re spending their money on has a certain level of quality.
Would you like to go to the cinema to watch a blockbuster movie, only to realize in the middle of it that’s is full of poorly placed cuts and unfinished CGI? Would you buy a book if it was full of typos and plot holes (like my posts, ohohoh)? Would you spend money on a video game full of bugs?
And yet, we still play TTRPGs, even though there are many chances that we will play mediocre games. Sure, the industry tries its best to standardize the TTRPG medium, to offer that seal of quality: that’s what published adventures and settings serve for. You buy a product, you run it by the book, you are guaranteed to have a top-notch experience by the might of your money.
Except that only rarely people play modules by the book. And even if they do, there is only so much casualty a module can cover you from. What if players diverge? What if the GM is not always brilliant in the delivery, or if they make a mistake? TTRPGs always find a way to avoid perfection.
And we love them for this. In a world where media get increasingly more professional and cheaper at the same time, the intrinsic value of a good piece of medium decreases. We take it for granted.
TTRPGs don’t let themselves be taken for granted. Want a good session? Work for it. The GM expands their box of tools; the players get more inventive and collaborative. It’s an endless quest for getting better, while knowing that perfection can never be truly achieved. You will always sneeze in the middle of the evil guy’s monologue, and “ruin” the mood (you will actually have a laugh with the players, and go on).
Players value a confident GM as much as GMs value brave players. It’s a mutual effort at collaborative storytelling, more an art than a science, error prone, spiky, sometimes boring, yet always worth the try. The worst it can happen, you will bored for a couple of hours along with your friends. And getting bored is a great way to get more creative the next time. I always learn more from boring sessions than from exciting ones.
That was it. I can go back to turning 27 now. So, I’m 27, I had a great session yesterday, and I love TTRPGs. That’s more than enough on the topic.
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