So, in an unexpected turn of events, I’m planning hard. I have ADHD and, therefore, often hyperfocus on a new project comes all at once and totally consumes me. We’ve decided to play Mage: The Ascension after our campaign finishes.
Right now, I am devouring and regurgitating all of the lore and mechanics in a battered second edition handbook that I haven’t made a character with since I left uni in the early 2000s, and I’m loving it. It’s Wednesday, and I only just remembered I have to write articles and get stuff ready for a holiday on Friday.
Thing is. If you’d have asked me Sunday morning how I felt about all this, I’d be assessing very differently. I thought we were gonna play a long form Call Of Cthulhu game. I’d mentally prepared to finish our current Vampire game, putting down the World of Darkness for a while and pick up a new world to explore on Saturday night, with different ideas and challenges. I’d sort of hovered over buying the big prop box for Masks Of Nyarlathotep with all the stuff inside – saved it on my browser and everything. I’ve been wanting to run in since I was 14ish and I’m 40 this year.
And then my partners mentioned they’ve been talking to the group, and most of them want to play Mage. I was totally blindsided. I’d talked about Mage and advocated for it as a game but never pitched anything specific, compared to sitting in my kitchen as people left for a game and talking about finally running an in-person Cthulhu game. What was I to do?
Well, I did the only thing I could do: I decided to let the people decide. I figured I don’t hate Mage, I just didn’t have any ideas. So I clearly presented the group with six options (TWO Cthulhu, one Mage, three other systems), and after some negotiation, Mage was picked. But in that negotiation, I’d had chance to express why I thought it wasn’t a good fit. And in doing so, I realised I could make it work.
I started to see a path. I still don’t have a damn clue really, but I’m excited to try. Hell, it could be a total flop. But I have faith in my players and myself to either enjoy it or watch it burn and pick ourselves up and try something else. So why am I telling you this? Well I’ve obviously left some stuff out, but I think it teaches us some interesting lessons about stuff I had kind of not seen before when it comes to planning and creating. And given I rarely get to talk about the process of actually starting games (I really need to stop running 3-5 year-long campaigns…) I thought I’d examine this so you too can maybe see a new way of thinking. Or just laugh at how I put myself through stuff.
The Old Adage
Repeat after me, you’ve seen it before. ‘No roleplay is better than bad roleplay’.
Now this is true on the face of it. We know that our time is precious and if we aren’t having fun or running something is turning to hell, the self-care response is to cancel it. I’ve only ever really done this twice in my life and both campaigns got cut short – I still brought them to natural conclusions but the group dynamic or system were not helping and it needed to stop. But the interesting thing here is I’d made an assumption that because Mage wasn’t what I wanted to be playing right now is that I couldn’t somehow make it good. And for a while I was a bit bitter.
“Fine” I thought “You want Mage, I’ll give you Mage, this is going to be the deepest and most abstract campaign we’ve ever done, with trips like you’ve never seen stuff you might struggle to comprehend and it’s gonna be..” and there I stopped because I realised that was a HELL of a pitch. Maybe that’s what my group wanted. Hades, maybe it was what I..wanted? Is it possible that ‘bad roleplay’ might actually be better than ‘no roleplay’? Then I realised that I wasn’t really doing that. I’d put ‘not quite what I wanted’ into the same basket as ‘bad’. The old adage didn’t even apply. I’d just used it because things weren’t perfectly what I wanted. What a fool I was.
A New Adage
Perhaps we ought to also say ‘Sharing is better than perfection’. I’d been looking for my perfect RP experience – the best thing I could think of in that moment to play. And I was getting disappointed that it wasn’t going to be that.
But you know what? Maybe Cthulhu wouldn’t have worked out as well as I thought.
Maybe my quest for perfection was going to end in tragedy anyway. So playing Mage might be an imperfect solution to me, but it’s not a ‘bad’ one. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking for that perfect experience. Just one I and others will enjoy. With that, I set a new goal for myself. I wasn’t looking to run a perfect game of Mage. I was looking for a certain type of experience. And maybe I could bring some of that experience through.
Doing The Thing I Told Myself Not To Do
Look, I’m a proponent of not using one system for everything. It riles me up when people say things like ‘I want to play a game like Cyberpunk Edgerunners, has anyone got a 5e conversion?’ I want to bash my head against the keyboard and scream. “BY THE NAME OF MIKE PONDSMITH, I CURSE THEE!”. So the idea of trying to run what I wanted out of a Cthulhu game in Mage would have made me feel icky.
But I have talked about genre and creating mood for a long time. So I went to think about what it was I wanted from a cthulhu game. I came up with five themes and ideas that weren’t about specifics of the campaign I wasn’t running but about what appealed to me and laid them out. What I wanted to look at were as follows:
The Idea of Ancient mysteries, thing with a long history.
Mortal believers, the people who have given themselves to the dark, what sort of person is that?
Examinations of inequality, especially along class, gender and racial lines.
Human Protagonists, ones to whom life is easy to lose. And their relationships with each other in the quiet moments.
Things that are decidedly beyond humanity by contrast and maybe offer freedom from the inequality… but at a price.
And I knew. I knew I could run these themes in Mage. Hell, some of these things are central to the game. We’d be looking at them through a different lens to the 1920’s. We wouldn’t be dealing with iconic parts of the mythos. But some of this would stand easily. I’d boiled down what I wanted and found even if it looked a little different, I’d still find a way to love it. I might not need to run the overwhelming Mage thing. I could find the middle ground.
I think my point is this. We can find a way to play that suits everyone if we are prepared to bend. We can do that without sacrificing ourselves and just running stuff we don’t want to run. But we need to be open to the possibility that our quest for a perfect game is getting in the way of greatness. As I write my third player document for this campaign, I hope this story helps you find that greatness in your gaming. Until next time.
Creative Commons art credit: Call of Cthulhu by DMaresla and Cyberpunk Edgerunners by Jevi93.
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