Knowing what you did wrong is just as valuable as knowing what you did right, if not more so. How else will you learn what to fix or avoid in the future?
People always be posting their hot takes and session reports and intricate worldbuilding (but nobody reads those). It’s a deluge of things going right without many examples of things going wrong (or why). All y’all inspire with your creativity and wit; but sometimes discourage when I can’t seem to get a game off the ground. I know what you’re thinking: comparison is the thief of joy, envy-green is not my color, and what I need to do iS jUsT pLaY gAmEs.
All true, and all things I’m working on, but my point is this: what I so often see and try to learn from are examples of survivorship bias. We get the blogosphere equivalent of armoring the bomber fuselage – or since we are talking elfgames, chainmail bikinis – rather than the wings or Conan’s mighty thews.
So here I am, putting my money where my mouth is. Join me in donning lab coats and snapping on latex gloves for Part One of a dissection of my most-recent abortive attempt at running a RPG campaign.
NOTE: This went on for longer than I anticipated when I sat down to start writing, so I am breaking this up into two parts. The second will cover choices made in designing the campaign setup and then go into what went wrong and why.
I. Hobby In Context
To set the stage: I am in that late 20’s – early 30’s limbo where my friends and I have career-ish movements, are married or on the matrimonial track, and have a couple shekels to rub together such that we can afford things on occasion. We aren’t in school anymore, when we had lots of time, fewer responsibilities, and little money. Which is to say: we are all busy, live all over the country, and all have hobbies or relationships (frequently both) cutting into prime RPG time. We meet up when we can but usually stay in touch via Discord and playing PC games together. Arc Raiders has been a blast, by the by.
I’ve not run or played in an in-person RPG session in quite some time, though I’ve been a player in TheRetiredAdventurer’s Imperium Maledictum campaign over at the purple OSR Discord for nearly two years now (and loving it; he’s an awesome GM my fellow players totally rock). I’ve learned a lot – key takeaway being how to run a RPG campaign over Discord that doesn’t suck ass.
My past attempts at RPG-via-Discord all ended in failure for reasons either technical or personal; some outside my control and others firmly within it. Perhaps more debriefs will follow. However, by July of this year, I was itching to give it another shot.
II. An Idea Emerges
From a conversation, naturally. A friend of mine (big WoW Classic enjoyer) and I were chopping it up on a summer afternoon while I streamed for him my playthrough of the Orc campaign of Warcraft II. Deep cut, I am indeed aware. The topic of discussion drifted to the map and lore differences between Warcraft II, III, and ultimately, the balance of power at the launch of World of Warcraft. There was the usual amount of early retconning between Warcraft I and II as the lore and setting of Warcraft solidified, of course, but by Warcraft III: Rein of Chaos, “Warcraft” as its own distinctive thing had emerged.
There were tie-in novels and comic book series, a scrapped (though developmentally influential) adventure game, and even a d20 Warcraft RPG published not long after Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos dropped but before the release of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. More on that in a moment.
During the development of Warcraft III, another, larger project was in the works: World of Warcraft. Reading about the genesis of the most popular MMO ever is interesting in and of itself. However, where it matters here is how different the state of the world (of Warcraft – I can’t help myself) at launch was from: 1) how it was initially envisioned post-ROC but pre-TFT; and 2) the end of TFT.
My friend and I waxed poetic about these differences – what could have been, how the original vision would change the game, why Gnomes were even included, whether Night Elves should have been their own faction, and so on. I was struck by the flickering spark of inspiration: why don’t we explore this original vision in the only way an OSR-head knows how: creating and running a bespoke heartbreaker hack of B/X.
III. Distrusting the Process
I very much wanted to avoid smothering that spark of inspiration with my natural inclination for scope creep. The game needed tinder; not a three-foot-tall tipi stack of split logs that would make a Boy Scout shed a single, manly, tear of approval. That could come later were the embers kept hot, to stretch this campfire-themed metaphor.
In the meantime, I came up with what I wanted out of this game:
1. To prep and run a RPG, with player buy-in, and is enjoyable for my players as well as me as GM.2. To recruit players from IRL friends who either had been my “core” RPG group, had some amount of previous RPG experience, or were otherwise-interested novices.
3. To have it set in the World of Warcraft-That-Never-Was; hewing closely to early-development WoW and the lore of Warcraft III: ROC and TFT.
5. To run everything over Discord video chat, Google Drive, and Miro as a digital tabletop when necessary.
Let’s break this down. The first point is the most important and from which the others stem. What I mean by this is, “I want to actually setup a RPG that people actually are interested in and to actually play it,” is an assumption that must be challenged but seldom is. Designing a game, worldbuilding for a game, prepping a game, running a game, and playing a game are all different aspects of this hobby and also entire hobbies individually. My first impulse is to always think an exciting new campaign concept will be enjoyable in each aspect; harder to make it happen in practice.
Which is why the remaining four points all loop back to point #1 – are they compatible with that primary goal? Do they facilitate prep, play, and player buy-in, or are they desires best suited to a different campaign concept (or even limited to a sole aspect, such as worldbuilding for worldbuilding’s sake)?
My thought, at least as it pertained to me, was yes. I wanted to run a game because I missed GMing, I wanted to play with my friends to spend time with them, I wanted to run it in Warcraft because this campaign concept was fun to think about, I wanted to use a classic D&D variant to introduce my friends to the OSR, and I wanted to use Discord/Drive/Miro because they are simple and I am familiar with them.
As for the players’ side of things, it seemed to me like a yes, too. Most of the RPG veterans I knew would generally be down to play so long as it worked for their schedule. Of both the friends who had some RPG experience and the friends who had none, most were either huge WoW nerds or had passing familiarity with the setting. The Warcraft milieu was a familiar backdrop for the folks who would be unfamiliar with RPGs in general or with the playstyle of classic/OSR D&D in particular. Which was basically everyone except me – nobody involved knew anything about the OSR save for yours truly. While there would undoubtedly be growing pains at first, the rules light nature of OSR systems would keep the game fiction-forward and running smoothly once things got moving. On the logistics side, I didn’t want to use a VTT to avoid stacking a new software platform (making an account and all that jazz) atop learning the rules just to play. Everyone has Discord, everyone has Google Drive, and Miro is easy to understand.
You can see how this boils down to:
1. I want to run a RPG.
2. To run a RPG, I need players.
3. To get players, I need buy-in and to reduce friction.
4. To get buy-in, I need a concept that resonates with potential players.
5. To reduce friction, I need to remove barriers to participating in the game.
Keeping in mind that time spent playing a tabletop RPG is in competition with work, friends, family, and other hobbies, I knew I needed a good pitch to generate interest in playing and make it easy to play. I had that, and had a sense of what I would need to do/avoid doing to make the game easy to play. The next bit to figure out was what I would use for rules and what the scope of the campaign would be – super important to inform what kind of prep would be needed for setup.
Tune in next week for Part II!
