Mid-March 2021 Updates and work in progress

I've been working on a couple of potential articles for the blog. Unfortunately, none of them is ready to be posted yet. So I figured I'd give you all a rough idea of what's on my mind, and some general updates that you might be interested in. Can't promise all of these will be published, although if you find any of them interesting, do let me know - maybe that'll motivate me to finish them faster!

My first campaign is over

I concluded my first campaign last month. It started in spring 2019, so it ran for about a year and a half. The system was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. I created my own setting, although the premise was to build it around several adventures from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It was definitely a trip. I learned a lot about my proclivities, I experimented with a lot of methods and structures, and came to some interesting conclusions. There are several posts related to it in various states of writing:

Campaign summary

This being my first campaign, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, and I made significant changes to the material I adapted, some of which I am happy with, some not so much. It may well be useful to provide a summary as a record and a set of tips for people who might be interested in doing something similar in future. I also have at least one original campaign concept I might be able to extract from it into its own product, so I'll have to see how much exactly to share.

Why I don't want to continue it in D&D 5E

The campaign ended with the main pressing issue concluded, which made it a good stopping point. Nevertheless, we all feel like there's a lot more potential to this world and to the conflicts we established within it. Unfortunately, one of the things I learned while running it was that I don't want to run D&D 5E anymore. I have a post on the subject I formulated when asking an Israeli forum about the feasibility of moving a campaign to a different system, which I can translate to English. I think it'll be more than mere D&D-bashing. (Update: here's the post!)

The D&D 5E character sheet game

I've done a bit of analytical, theoretical, even design work with the character sheet game framework. However, one glaring gap is that I have yet to apply it at length to an existing role-playing game system. Since I've played 5E and have run a whole campaign in it, and since it's very well-known, it makes for a good candidate. Reading and taking notes is a bit of a slog so far, but I hope to finish it at some point. My conclusions will probably tie into why I don't want to continue running it.

Other works in progress

In addition to items related to my recently concluded campaign, here are other things in various stages of completion:

Diceless constructive alienation

I've been active in playtesting and examining an upcoming diceless RPG, Guy Sclanders` Bounty Hunter. This has gotten me thinking about how and whether it's possible to use constructive alienation when you don't have an outside source of randomness. How do you position yourself with the players to enjoy the structure you've built, when there are no points in which the decision depends on a result that none of you can predict? How do you, as a gamemaster, work against your own biases, when there is no way to replace your arbitrary decisions with samples from a predesigned distribution? I don't have an answer yet, so this remains a draft. I've consequently gotten in touch with a group that plays a more established diceless RPG, Amber Diceless, and have started reading its rulebook, so maybe that will lead me to some insights.

More virtual reality in media

I've previously discussed my talks about virtual reality as exists in our world and in fiction. Since those talks, I've had the opportunity to watch two TV series which have featured virtual reality as a central premise: The Prisoner and The Good Place. Without spoiling too much, the former involves an artificial world built and peopled around the protagonist to get him to divulge some information, while the latter has a world constructed to provide the very best people their perfectly tailored afterlife. I have fragments of thoughts about them both, but neither have crystalized into something publishable here, yet.

Historical immersion

I've been watching Peaky Blinders as a way of getting some genre concepts for Blades in the Dark. One thing I noticed is the use of a modern soundtrack for themes and leitmotif, to immerse the audience emotionally in what's going on, even though the tracks are anachronistic to early 20th Century Birmingham. There's something to be said about a contrast between realism and immersion, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

And that's it! Hopefully I'll have a fully-fledge post for you soon.