Grace from the Phloxserver recently wrote about some of the DM procedures that friends of theirs use while running games. It's a great piece of writing, and got me thinking about how I do prep and writing for RPGs these days.
My own output as a DM can be very firmly divided into pre and post OSR contact, because once I started hanging out in Phlox's server I largely stopped running the 5e game that I was doing before that. That's not because I thought it wasn't worthwhile or interesting; two of my regular players split up, and the scheduling and politics became a lot more complicated. This happened to coincide with me starting to blog, which is where I put my creative energy after the game wound down.
When I used to run 5e, I would run a session maybe once a month, sometimes once every two months, because that's what suited me and my friends. I mostly hang out with artists in London, and the people I ran for were not RPG people - they were coming to the campaign as first-timers. This meant that a lot of the work I was doing as a DM was running through basic concepts like skill checks and initiative order, and it took my players a while to get to grips with all of that. It also was very significantly not what they were interested in.
What my players enjoyed about the hobby was imagining themselves as other people. I did individual session zeroes with each of them to run through building a 5e character, and this took like 2 hours a person, because they were curious and fascinated and had none of the basic grounding that we take for granted with other people who hang out in these scenes. This was good fun - discussing why a rogue is not a ranger, and why a warlock is not a wizard. It was fun to realise that a lot of these distinctions were not interesting or meaningful at all to people looking at them from outside. But my players adored imagining themselves as fantasy heroes. This meant that they got really really invested in their characters - I warned them that adventuring is dangerous and that people die in these games all the time, but I still don't think they really believed that I would do that (they were wrong about that, but they never got unlucky when it mattered, so they never found this out).
Once all my players had their guys ready, I spent prep time making set pieces for them from scratch. This was sort of proto-Barony, but it was also very much the usual 5e implied setting. For a session, I would typically design a smallish dungeon or location, and a few encounters in its immediate area, and I would try to make sure that each session suggested another location or two. Because we only played once every month or two, I felt like it was important to have each session be relatively self contained. I would elide travel between significant locations almost completely, although I did use roadfreak tables and encounter rolls to give the world some vibrancy.
We would run through the dungeon and locations in between 5 and 6 hours. We would all meet in a cafe (or one of our apartments) at 10am, make coffee, buy breakfast, and sit down until it was done. This is about the limit of what I can run without crashing out - luckily my DMing stamina was slightly higher than their player stamina, so by the end of a session they would usually be exhausted and exhilarated.
I would run them through a small dungeon, and then I would softly signpost a set of decisions for the players, around clues discovered, people spoken to, events they were aware of, etc. - once they were done RPing together about what to do and where they wanted to focus for the next session, I would have the new set piece that I needed to design over a the upcoming month or so. We never had issues with players not showing up, and this model sustained us pretty well until the player breakup, and my landing into the glog discord scene.
Post landing in Phlox's server, I no longer really run games, which is a shame and something I would like to work on changing. I do, however, write and think a lot more about RPG stuff than I ever did running the 5e campaign. It's fair to say that RPG writing has become a third thing that I now consider part of my creative practice, next to fiction writing and painting.
I approach RPG writing very similarly to fiction - I start with rough images, and let them sit in my head until I can see clearly whether they have any legs to them. If they do, I draft up a post, and usually write posts all in one go, while the image is fresh. I generally find mechanics and linkages in the post suggest themselves in the process of writing; only rarely do I think up things like mechanics and stat blocks in advance. Sometimes (always wonderful) a series of fresh images will cohere in the writing of the post, and they can be incorporated as they arrive. I find that this is usually the best content.
Then, once the post is written up (long posts can be three or four writing 'sessions' long), I leave it for a day, give it a read over, insert any links and images I think might support it, and post. I try really hard not to worry at all about the relative quality of posts, and to be light and breezy about posting, whether it's a couple of paragraphs or 10k words of dungeon. This is important to me, because I have a brain that tried hard to make nothing light and breezy, and that can be paralysing.
I have realised that I really enjoy writing in this mode, totally detached from running games. This is a sort of anathema or perversion to a lot of people in the scene, but I find that there is a great pleasure in writing systems, and in knowing where in an assemblage of mechanics, text, images, poetry, etc. you can get away with things; where you can hang embellishment; where you can get intricate with subsystems; where you need or don't need description, etc. For me writing is very often about balance (maybe also pace) - how to balance a sentence, how to balance a paragraph or a novella, how to assess (or more often how to feel out) what a sentence can support, where it becomes overloaded or obviously insufficient. The process of writing RPG content is very similar, except that you have more tools and textures to draw from (systems, stats, procedures) when mixing your scenes. I spend a lot of time in the books and magazines writing world, and all of this strikes me as a really distinct type of practice and expression.
I didn't start writing this post thinking I would get into these distinctions! I was struck during the writing what a specific and pleasurable thing it is to write for systems. I would love to do some more DMing online sometime soon.
Like Grace, I hope that the glogger DMs, whose games I have loved playing in so much, will be inspired to write a bit about how they run things.
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