#RPGaDay 2017, day 6: You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

Hi! This wasn't written on the day in question; I'm backfilling here. Because I didn't start writing these until the 16th, but I decided to give it a whirl anyway. Expect these to be a bit more brief than usual. We good? Good. Let's blog, homies.

#RPGaDay 2017, day 6: You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

Stop. 

Seriously.

Take a nap, play a video game, read a book, go for a walk; something. I've done this before, and I may even do it again - but holy crap does it take a lot out of me. GM'ing especially; I get pretty testy. On the occasions where I've GM'd 3+ days in a row, I begin to get into a real funk. 5+ days, and I'd rather get in a fight with a stranger¹ than run another game.

7+ days in a row, and I was seriously not ok.

Ok Killstring, we get it. But what if you weren't GMing? Or times when it did work?

Fine. One year in undergraduate, I had the most wild and crazy² idea for Spring Break; I wanted to dig into Grids & Violence gaming and see if I could find a way to enjoy it. 

A little background. I'm very narrative-focused by nature, and not just in gaming; my brain will impose narrative into a vacuum where there is none. And in the beginning of my gaming journey, it was very much presented to me as a binary option; you can have roleplaying, or you can have minis-based combat: pick one. And that always seemed like a false dichotomy to me.

So I endeavored to find out.

I ran a series of loosely-connected Pathfinder one-shots, every day over spring break. Luckily, the intersection of folks who go to Cancun to get blasted, and the sorts of people down for Pathfinder one-shots, seemed to be pretty small, so I had volunteers. I cooked up a loose theme - dimensional collapse, terrifying Old Ones rending the fabric of reality, unlikely heroes bound together more by location than fate - and proceeded to do violence on a grid.

...

I found out that I really liked it. 

To this day, that remains an enlightening experience to me. Thinking that I dislike something, even thinking that it's antithetical to the thing that I want to experience, isn't necessarily true. I try to keep this in mind when talking about stuff that isn't my bag (Roguelikes, OSR, and American Pop Country music are the big ones that come to mind), because it might just be a case of giving it an honest chance in the right environment.

Cool. Maybe answer the first question though?

Right! Anyway, I'd probably try to do something like that; a deep dive. A solid week isn't interesting by itself - I'm not starved for gaming - so the only real benefit for me would be really committing to something that benefits from full immersion and day-to-day continuity. Telling a BIG story, or really exploring something with sufficient conceptual or mechanical complexity to require this kind of commitment to understand. 

I feel like L5R, Anima, Imagine; these are all games that could benefit from that type of focus. Or really, truly digging into HERO system, and mastering its myriad - but ultimately knowable - methods. 

You could also just binge Invisible Sun, or go LARP in the woods for a week

Would that I could, narrator voice; would that I could.

* * *

1 - I'm from Cleveland; this was readily available to me at one time, and remains a unit of measurement. 

2 - Not really.