2009 New Year's Resolutions in Review

I posted my original list of New Year's gaming resolutions towards the end of last year. Now, we get to see how I did, both for my own edification and as a part of this month's RPG Blog Carnival.

8. Pick up a copy (or two) of Fight On!
Success! I've got 1-4 now, in fact. I don't have plans to pick up the rest that are out yet, but that's mainly because I don't have any old school D&D campaigns currently in the works. Next time I run a dungeon or similar, I'll see about picking up the next batch.

7. Post a little more regularly
Failure! No matter how you measure it, I posted less this year than I did last year. Which, honestly, I'm fine with. The blog does what I want it to.

6. Train a new GM
Success! At least by the specific wording of the original resolution: I got boytoy to run a couple sessions of Swords & Wizardry. He hasn't run much since the bat incident, but we keep talking about trying Mutant Future sometime.

5. Read a few Conan stories
Failure! In the specific wording of the resolution, anyhow. I read no Conan stories this year. I did, however, read a bunch of Solomon Kane stories, and the first two original Pern series. Which is really what I wanted, just to read some more fantasy.

4. Write up a megadungeon through 3 levels
Failure! But, again, only by the specific wording. See, what happened was, I filled out level one and got a start on the maps for level two and I said to myself, I said, "Gee, I bet I could run this thing now for the gang." Which I did, with excellent success: a few solo sessions for the boyfriend, another for part of the Traveller group, and then again a couple times over the summer. I never did get around to finishing up all three levels, but I accomplished the spirit of what I set out to do.

3. Finish my Traveller Subsector
Failure! Unless by "finish my Traveller Subsector" you mean "run a Traveller campaign," in which case, again, my performance was perfectly adequate. The dang thing still isn't finished, per se, and probably won't ever be. But I scratched the Traveller itch.

2. Play in a campaign
Success! In a way I absolutely could not have imagined back when I wrote these down. Less than a week after the original post went up, Trollsmyth started recruiting for his Labyrinth Lord game, talked me into playing in it, and, well, now I play in two pretty fantastic weekly games of Labyrinth Lord, and I've just finished a character for a soon-to-start game of 7th Sea on Wave. It's awesome.

1. Run a campaign
Success! I knocked this one out with two campaigns and a couple extra one-shot sessions here and there. I ended up being less than pleased with the results of those campaigns, but I learned a fair amount, and I've got a much better idea now of what kinds of games I want to run and how to run them well.

All in all, not a bad year. Four definite successes and another three satisfactory failures sounds pretty good, from where I'm standing. Enough so, in fact, that I've been putting some thought to what I'd write on a list for this year. Stay tuned.

My Biggest Game Master Mistake

It's kind of ironic, for me, that Johnn Four picked Game Master Mistakes as the topic of this month's RPG Blog Carnival. Roleplaying Tips and Campaign Mastery are both great resources, and his GMing advice is, in general, solid. But Roleplaying Tips was also a major part of my most important game mastering mistake.

See, I've got this perfectionist streak. It's under control now, but it used to be a pretty vicious one. There was a period in high school when I would fail entire classes from simply not doing the work, and while that can't all be laid on that tendency, a big part of it was just that my idea of what would be "good enough" was so overwhelming that I didn't want to start at all. Naturally, that was about the same time I started game mastering.

So I went through this stage where I was obsessed with game mastering advice. I pored over the 3e DMG, read the "running the game" section in every roleplaying book I could get my hands on, and combed the net for articles on technique and style. That's where Roleplaying Tips comes in: at the time, it was the major source of game mastering advice on the web, at least that I could find.

And despite all that, the games I ran were terrible. The advice had nothing to do with it; though the quality varied depending on the source, on the whole it was fairly good. But I put more effort into "doing it right" than into just running a fun game. It took me a long time to figure out that it didn't matter how nicely my notes were organized if there was nothing for the players to do.