The Gaming Den

Here's the deal. I'm finishing up some credits at school, and my professor approved of my proposal for a final project in a creative writing and memoir course. The basis of the project I'll be doing is that I wanted to collect stories and opinions about table-top games and construct some helpful guidelines or suggestions for new players and MCs, with some colorful illustrations thrown in because why not.

Essentially, I was going to take specific sessions that I remember with a great deal of accuracy, transcribe them into a digestible couple of pages, pull some lessons about what made those games successful and what might have made them fail, and provide the reader with personal insights about the hobby and how they might find it enjoyable and what to avoid for their games.

Now, to maintain some level of objectivity and to keep myself from going on lengthy, pointless diatribes, I wanted to rely on other veterans of the hobby to give me their ideas about what makes a good game good and what makes a bad game bad. This isn't meant to be a specific indictment of mechanics or systems, more a collection of theories or notions about the hobby in general. I want to make our almost vehemently divided and nebulous worldwide role-playing community and our myriad ideas about our shared hobby somewhat cogent and useful for newcomers to the table. I know that no one is ever going to agree 100% on how a game should be run, so a collection of entertaining stories of your personal favorite or most hated campaigns or sessions is essentially what I'm after.

So if you had a terrific 4E game because there was something about the way the MC handled it or the way that the players meshed together, or if you had a terrible Shadowrun game because the MC railroaded the players and no one knew what they were doing, then I want to hear about it. Or, if you have very strong feelings about the purpose and direction your games take, and you can articulate why your games matter and what makes them good for your players, then I want to hear those too.

If you guys want, when I'm done with this in a week, I'll put up what I've made and let you all ream me.

I have a couple I'll try to type up for you. In mean time, there are a number of good ones already in In the Trenches. PhoneLobster's 2E woes are especially memorable.

uh shit I wrote up a huge amount of my group's sessions before maybe I can find them to post

I'll remove your story from my final submission if you don't want me to use it, MGuy.

Anyway, if anyone cares (I know no one does,) here's what I handed in. A lot of nonsense, really. I like the doodle, that's about it.

I didn't have a lot of time to acquire anecdotes that fit my theme, or were lighthearted enough to mesh with my literary leanings, so I only used one very obvious example of poor gamecraft presented by MGuy and some thoughts a friend of mine had being a new player.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id ... cZqdnuMxGs