Wow are things slower than slow around here!

People who know me in the net might have noticed my prolongated absence these last few weeks (or have they been months?)

Lots of stuff happening in real life slowing this end of my activity spectrum. A large chunk of it is my mom's cancer diagnostic and the preparation for the treatments (surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy) that are to start in a few short weeks.

While my DnD playing has just about stopped (my regular group has been tougher to gather), my love of board games has been rekindled.

I have also had the pleasure to be invited as a regular player to a game of Star Wars RPG by Franky (one of ChattyDM's buddies) and had the pleasure to be invited at their table during a "Geek Out Day".

"Geek Out Day" came not too long about I learned about my mother's condition and was a very welcome event - I absolutely loved the games I played (Chinatown got to be on my "to buy" list) and especially the company I was with. The movie was cool as well. Can't thank you guys enough!

Since then, I've been toying with the idea of doing some sort of "Geek Out Fridays" - I have a lot of friends who like board games and we all have lots of board games. Maybe that'll be something to blog about :P

My soon-to-be-wife, in a successful attempt to cheer me up, planned a surprise "geekout" last Friday and invited all of regular group of friends to play board games - of my choosing, none the less!

I had to let go of my planned evening of Dragon Age and instead had tremendous fun playing "Citadelles" and "Le Cercle". Many thanks to my buddies and to my fiancée for the amazing evening!

I've also had a request directly from Simon - the boy for whom I DMed more than a year ago - for another session of DnD. He asked me if they would play the same characters and if they would get to level 2.

For this blog, it means : be ready to hear my thoughts about board games and some more Dungeon Master prepping (letting go of the training scenario I discussed earlier). All of this sporadically, of course

I have had feeling that the players my group were not enjoying themselves as much as usual during my last few games.

I felt we had a good start with my retooling of the Kobold Keep scenario. I felt most players genuinely enjoyed themselves, despite my shortcomings as a new DM.

Every session after that felt a bit less than the one before and I desperately tried to grab my player's attention by (at least trying to be) varying game styles and appealing to their various play tastes.

The more "custom fit" I felt a piece of adventure was aimed to please a certain type, the less it actually did.

In fact, after the "Kobold Keep" scenario (which I already had DMed twice before), the best game we had was one I barely had any preparation for!

I had gigantic red flags when a few PC threatened to simply dump the storyline to go do something else... I might've failed to read the signs properly.

The PCs personalities were not jiving with the rest of the group, so I put their lack of interest in the storyline to be an effect of said personality.

I ended up with 3 players wanting to change their PCs - 2 of these were my 2 best role players: those on whom I secretly relied to carry the story forward.

One of these role players - who had so far shown an amazing lack of interest in the game so far - didn't feel ready to roll a new PC yet.

"Fine", I thought - lets us give her time to come up with a PC she really cares about so she can participate in bringing "magic" to the game, as I was accustomed to.

The last game I DMed contained a few fatal mistakes:

1. Excruciating long combat (3 effing hours!)
2. I was too tired (after the combat was done, we took a break... and I fell asleep. So there was no proper ending to the session)

So the game - ended up feeling rather pointless.

Last time we played after that was pretty cool and fun - everyone had new characters, every one knew their powers and how to use them, energy was high, people were creative.... and I wasn't the DM.

This game was supposed to be a one shot, but I had to ask if my players wanted to continue the old game or just let it go.

My question was met with an eloquent silence.

"Guys", I said, "if you don't like the game, I much prefer to know it now". See, I don't want to DM if they're not enjoying it.

I mean, I love to DM and I feel I can do much better than I did provided I stop over preparing and if I can help my story-driven players find a hook they like (and a PC they care enough about to try and actually learn how to use).

But I also love to play and, quite frankly, Steve is an awesome DM.

What came out of our little discussion is Steve proposing we do "tag-team" DMing - a style I was actually quite accustomed to "back in the days".

Basically, we share the overall plot and switch DMing duties after every "episode". We each have a few "signature" NPCs which the other DM cannot mess with. Everything else is fair game.

I love that idea (of course) and no one really opposed it. (Whether that was in response to the look of disappointment that was surely on my face, only time will tell. Or someone. Later in time).

So, basically, my game is pretty much defunct and I only have one player actually interested in knowing where the story goes.

I might DM it for that player - with open invite to other interested players.

For the time being, I go from "meta DM" to "meta player". (And happily so - I might feel melancholic from my loss in DMhood, but there really ain't any hard feelings. Only soft ones.)

If I get enough time to resume programming duties on GameTable, I might do online one shots. Shout out in the comments if you'd like to try it out some time.

What I learned

Don't over prepare

I perform best when I improvise. Having too much prepared stuff (like a pre-made adventure, like Spellgard), I obsess about "getting it right" and clamp up my creative muscles.

Shut the eff up

The "meta" side of me enjoys watching the "featurettes" of a blu-ray movie. I love to see "how its made", how some scenes were actually improvised and different from what was planned.

Turns out that's not something to share with players. While I might enjoy how much I screwed up that planned encounter and saved the scene by doing something different or how this clever plot twist everyone went "oooh, clever!" is actually something I just made up on the verge of panicking, it can actually ruin the suspension of disbelief for some players.

Say yes

I already knew that, but I didn't know it enough. I shouldn't hesitate to dump *anything* that was prepared to follow a path the players show interest with. For me, I fell that going all "improv" is the way to solve this issue.

Don't waste too much time to introduce the cool

All I had time to play was filler stuff to get to level 2 to play Spellgard - which, ironically perhaps, I didn't get to play.

My plan was to allow the players to find their own motivation to get there and I failed to provide compelling reasons to get there with all the filler material.

I still feel I made an interesting job of packaging it all together in something that made sense, but probably too little too late.

In the future, I would try to avoid wasting too much time setting up the cool and just go into it.