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| fabulous omermosseri |
i like calling on people. i like pointed questions. i like buddy cops but i hate adventuring parties. if i have more than two players i like pvp. i like pvp with two players too. i can’t remember the last time i ran a game where the party wasn’t split in some way. i like cutting back and forth between different people in different places fast and frequently. i like reading poems during games.
most of my friends have only ever played in the games i've run, with like two other die hard gamez dorks; one very fiction first osrhead type (we'll call him Sparrow) who i bounce a lot of ideas off of and another more indie trad gamer (we'll call him Ridley) who was for example really really into the megastorygame over/under.
i’m rlly spoiled!! i couldn’t ask for better people to play with. everyone really loves playing pretend together and accommodates all my endless design whims and revision. it is really rare for me to finish a game with the same version of the same system we started with.
everybody shares a great love of creating narratives and patterns retroactively or at
run-time from disparate events rather than projecting what they want to happen into the
future. this means that despite character creation being heavily randomized, there's always very heavy buy-in to their characters, and despite heavy character buy in, everybody rolls with character death as something than can happen in the fiction, and tries to make the most out of those moments when they happen. everybody at the table loves drama and tension, regardless of whether it favors them or not.
I played 3.5e from elementary and thru middle school and tried 4e too because my library had the books. in high school Sparrow and I decided we were too good for d&d and ran like every single indie game we could get our hands on and I started reading Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart
i have a really really hard time resisting anachronism so i just make it diegetic. that means almost all my settings have Jesus in them because it’s really hard for me to avoid NPCs saying jesus christ! when they’re startled
the first real game I ran was in second grade when my dad got me the 3.5e players handbook and told me that he used to play D&D with my uncle at high school. They would throw knives between each others legs and if you flinched something bad would happen in the game. one time something bad happened in real life which was that my dad got a big throwing knife stuck in his leg. he said he didn’t know that there were books and he also didn’t really know how to explain what it was you actually did in the game and I couldn’t figure it out from the books but I used the provided disc to make a bunch of half orcs and elfs on the computer
pictures are really important to me but i don’t really use them when i run. i have a collection of pictures for most of my games though and maybe the number one thing need to figure out in a game before i can run it confidently is how it looks in my brain when i’m imagining it.
I like games with a definite end goal. That means I usually run shorter games that wrap up between 6-12 sessions or so, usually like 3-4 months. Most of these games are duets and trios. I have played easily over 8 separate games with Ridley, and easily over 15 with Sparrow (I have known him since the fourth grade). Probably around 3 games with almost every one of my friends. I've run two long term games with 3+ people in my life; Sparrow has played in both. The first is ongoing and has been going for 5 years; the other wrapped up around 2. I've only run maybe 3 one shots or short games with 4+ people
I like taking a novel or movie I know my players haven’t seen and ripping it way the fuck off. I like modules and blog posts for the same reason. most of my games are bigtime collages.
colors are almost always important in my games. i like just saying that everything in a scene is blue or whatever. i like when the sun is different colors.
in person i just use sheets of paper and like dice and coins and stuff for mapping purposes; usually i have or borrow an ipad or tablet or whatever to reference rules and use generators. almost all my notes and stuff are in google docs.
my sessions tend to like 1-3 hours depending on how the vibe is going; i like to cut while the energy is still pretty high. imo its a good way to get people talking abt the game between sessions and keep momentum rolling
there’s always body stuff in my games. birth stuff and muscles stuff and bones stuff and skin stuff. also there’s always talking animals and usually the most joyful beautiful place in the world and the grimiest den of sin.
in high school I went into the woods with a bunch of guys. we brought tents, which we slept in for a few nights while we each worked on making our own shelters, then we slept in those. We let ourselves bring knives and hatchets to work with. We played a game almost the entire time that we called Intrigue; there were no rules except that each turn there was a public action and a secret action that you'd whisper to me. if you ever engaged in combat, you'd flip a coin and if you got tails, you'd die. You were trying to be king. One night this guy would whisper his secret action to me and then would run off into the woods and when he came back he’d have taken off one more piece of his clothing and i was like :0
i do most of my prep beforehand. that almost always involves a character creation doc for the players, compiling all the procedures we're gonna use, and inventing some new ones. for myself bare minimum i need a list of places, people, and objects. usually like one or two chunks from a module or post i like. i don’t usually have a world map til it becomes relevant but a region map is swaggie
as a kid i spent a year taping together huge sheets of paper from a big roll and crawling around on it drawing a big map with pencil. i still have some of the pieces. there’s names on it but i never wrote down anything else about the world. i thought abt it so hard i can still remember some stuff though. there were tunnels running under the entire thing and living icebergs in the north and a prairie where the earth moved like waves.
i’m obsessed with putting huge piles of junk in my games. sometimes it’s a pile of junk that’s actually a city, or a mountain, or a guy.
when i finally figured out how to play 3.5 (sometime in like 4th grade) was also around the time my grandmother gave me and my siblings a first or second gen iphone and i was fucking o b s e s s e d with both. i pirated every single splat book for that stupid game. i went onto giants in the playground forum and ran as many play by post games for as many people as i could. i talked like a little thesaurus and people would get really weird if they ever realized i was 10 years old and often that was the end of those games.
my friends will be happy doing almost anything in a game as long as they get to make choices and have the world respond in an interesting or unexpected way. we have a lot of slice of life type moments for that reason. i don’t believe in running out of ideas. that’s what modules and generators are for. i don’t really believe in saying “nothing happens” unless it’s obvious someone is wasting my time. that pretty much never happens bc i rlly only run games for people who i love and who love me.
from the time i first learned about games until high school i would play rpgs with my friends every single time we hung out, including most recesses that i was not being really bad at soccer. it took a really long time for me to get dice so we would usually resolve things by me thinking of a number and my friends guessing it. i lived in the country when i was little so we were usually walking around in the woods but sometimes we were in a basement or a treehouse.
i run in person whenever i can and when it’s not convenient i run on discord. people have their character sheets online and we use an online whiteboard or owlbear rodeo before it got shitty. people just roll their own dice or use random number generators.
one of my favorite sessions happened when I was around 11 and I ran a drow city where everyone was spies spying on each other and I ripped off that first Matrix interrogation mr anderson scene because my friends had not seen the movie.
there is always a furious adonis type in my games and also always a melancholy lady. usually there’s somebody doing their best to raise a kid in a ridiculous situation.
if im stuck or things are getting boring i’m a huge believer in inventing some crazy shit out of nowhere and retroactively justifying it. go big or go home!!! most of the really cool stuff in my game worlds happens this way.
if i’m running a game in person i’m gonna feed everyone who’s in my house. i won’t play music during games cause i get really confused. being high is the worst thing in the world for running or playing games but being tipsy is pretty awesome. 2-3 beers is the Zone.
I don’t usually do voices or anything. i like describing characters voices, and i do a lot of “she says X in Y way.” I like telling players what NPCs are thinking and feeling so they can make decisions about it. if there’s something they don’t know i’ll tell them “he says X but he’s hiding something. he’d freak out if pressed directly though”
i like declaring that i’m setting odds for something to happen before i roll the dice: “2-6 she calls the cops” and stuff like that.
my players often like speaking in character. i like putting them in situations where they have to argue with or persuade each other of stuff and then setting a timer till something bad happens. i love timers: “30 seconds to find somewhere to hide!” “10 seconds before she hits you!”
dreams and symbols and omens are always important. i try to do a at least one of those each session and usually i dont know what it means. doing this makes prep for the next session more fun and unexpected because usually that prep just looks like making sure all the stuff that happened in the session has a structure and a framework so that i can build on that next time. it doesn’t take very long mostly. the other way that prep looks is finding an excuse to introduce something cool that i found recently. if an omen or symbol gets ignored sometimes it’s funny for it to be really important but usually that just means it sucked and no loss if i cut it.
another one of my favorite sessions of all time happened when i was around 8 years old and i wrote a really involved card based combat system and drew little cards and it took me like two months. my best friend came over and we played and he went to a restaurant where they served bubbles that floated around the restaurant and you had to catch them in your mouth and we did not use the combat system one time.
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| lovely Anna Volkova |
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