This is a very long, very rambly tale of how I feel about RPG's and some introspection on my relationship to them. I've hidden this one behind a jump break based solely on its length.
Years and years ago, long before wargames and figure painting were even a glimmer in my eye, I found a copy of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition in a Barnes and Noble in Florida while visiting my Grandparents on a family trip. My mom always had a "you're never wasting money buying books" blanket policy and I think in her mind, if it came from a book store it was a book. Whether it was a novel, manga or apparently a stack of roleplaying rules, a book is a book. I remember pouring through the starter box and making characters and even trying to teach my grandmother what RPG's were.
I wrapped my head around the concepts and the rules but all of my experiences at this point were with video games and the idea of a "game master" was a little lost on little middle schooler me. My best friend and I would make characters and fight goblins and level up and more or less just grind mechanics. This never lasted long but as a concept I've always known about RPGs in my "hobby career"
As years go by and budgets dwindle and interests change, my focus shifted, understandably so, to the fighting combat and wargame experience. As I grew into the hobby and spent my time at the shop I flirted with rpg's and dabbled here and there. I tried the pathfinder starter set, I bought all the 40k rpgs. Some of my best friends were experienced DM's and were out there crafting worlds and building stories and talking with such enthusiasm that I kept trying to claw my way in to that world and bouncing off it straight back into board games and wargames.
A few years ago, just before covid I was approached by a friend to try the Call of Cthulu RPG. He ran an intro game based loosely off the starter box, which then spun into another adventure and another until the frog was boiled and were cruising down the Orient Express a year later as part of the (frankly incredible) Horror on the Orient Express boxed set. At the time I thought maybe part of what I've been bouncing off of this tangential hobby is that for me there's a disconnect between combat and role play. I've found that many of the systems I'd tried are so dense when it comes to combat that there's a mechanical black hole that gets sprinkled with the occasional role play element. Call of Cthulu presented to me as a 70/30 split the other way with the conversations being the bulk of the game with combat taking more of a back seat.
This experience, with what I would consider the best GM I've had the luxury of playing with opened me back up to trying RPG's again. It felt like discovering the hobby all over again. I realized I'd never truly experienced what the genre has to offer and my wife and I signed up for two sessions of RPG gaming at the first Origins Convention we attended a few years ago. We signed up for a Pathfinder one-shot and a Pirateborg game. We went eager to try something new and for me specifically I went to finally figure out what I was missing.
To say my expectations were high is probably an understatement. We sat in to the pirate borg game and I left thinking "this is far too abstract." Everything was to chance including the story. The DM was demoing a pack of cards for running games, that would randomize contents of rooms, monsters, story beats. It felt disjointed and lacking in cohesion.
Now the Pathfinder game, to be frank, was one of the worst experiences I've had in the rpg space. We signed up for an entry level, learn to play event. The event was marketed as no experience needed and we were told we could pick from pre generated characters. We arrived to discover this was a pathfinder society event and that we were the only two at our table of 8 or so players who had not only never played but also we were the only ones who hadn't brought our own characters. The DM was dealing with some chronic pain issues and self medicating with edibles and believe me it made an impact on the game. We were offered no assistance in the game and we felt that it was an unpleasant experience for us but also that we were a burden on the other players. I could go on but the reality is it turned me so off RPG's we basically agreed to move on from that side of the hobby entirely.
A few years later and I've made a new friend who plays the whole gamut of table games. One of his vices is also RPGS. While playing a computer game he offered to run an intro scenario for Call of Cthulu and one for Pathfinder and if our little group enjoyed either we could spin into something more serious.
While working our way through these I sort of rediscovered Quinn's Quest, a youtube channel about RPG's hosted by one of the former Shut up and Sit Down hosts, who's work I've always enjoyed. I slowly worked my way through all of his reviews and found myself enamoured with Mothership. A quick online shopping cart later and I found myself with the Deluxe Mothership starter set.
It has probably been close to 20 years since I've really "ran a game." Maybe closer to 10 if talk about the false starts of the Star Wars RPG, or World of Darkness (one session of each). Mothership though does something I had never considered before though. See in a game like DND, the material tells you what paragraph to read when your players enter a room. It offers a story to tell and tells you, the DM to be the person to tell that story and your players to be actors in that tale. I'm not going to wax lyrical about the OSR approach right now but I will say I didn't really "get" it until now.
Mothership offers a few zine style manuals for mechanics, and the deluxe box includes a few more zine style adventures. On a skim, these seem a little bare bones but without diving enough into them I didn't think much of it. I got a copy of the one shot adventure "The Haunting of Ypsilon-14" with basically just the plan of seeing what it was. Until I became obsessed with trying to run it.
I don't like eggs all that much. The things that other people like about them, to me, is the worst part. You hear people talk about liking a nice runny yolk or really enjoying that eggy flavor but to me, eggs are a tax you pay for all the other delicious foods breakfast offers. I love breakfast food. I love Biscuits and Gravy, sausage and bacon, pancakes and waffles. I even enjoy an omelette with some regularity. I need it to be full of cheese and toppings, maybe even smothered in something like sausage gravy or chili. When all that "eggy flavor" is hidden behind other ingredients, I love a good omelette.
I have long been struggling trying to find, "what I'm missing" when it comes to RPGS. I've bought systems trying to find the mechanical gravy that covers up the egg taste that plagues the experience. I view RPG's, like breakfast to be a balance of ingredients. You need the perfect blend of sweet and savory, of roleplay and combat, of mechanics and story. A mediocre breakfast is made better when shared with the right company.
Somewhere in the talks with the friend running Call of Cthulu (I bounced right off the Pathfinder starter and the group didn't even finish the scenario) It hit me like a freight train. Maybe the issue is that its fine to not really like eggs myself, but what if I cook them for other people?
I started this post some time before running my Mothership one shot and as I'm writing it now, we're currently between sessions 1 and 2 with a full group excited to finish the story. I'm incredibly proud of how that session when. I told the guys, this might be a disaster and when we wrapped on the night I was beyond excited, telling them "I can't wait to show you what's written for this because I'm so proud of the improvisation I've done." It was a completely different experience, one that I enjoyed just so much more. In my usual fare I've ordered a game called Mausritter and another called Mythic Bastionland.
I say all this to say, I'm hooked on it again. It's given me more appreciation for what others have done for me as well as more confirmation about just how bad that pathfinder session was. I mostly penned this post to wrap my head around my thoughts on it but thought I'd share my findings with the class.
I don't think it'll affect the blog much besides this rambling intro, though as always it presents a bit of a distraction from the usual "Wargame" content. As a brief update, the AHPC starts soon and I'm still cleaning up the desk before then. I've got a couple more mini projects to put the finishing touches on to wrap the year. Thanks for reading.
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