Who's got your attention at the table?
All right, luvvies? It's been a while since I wrote you one of these. I took December's issue off, and used that time to have a think about what I could do a bit differently here.
running order
prologue: new newsletter format
soliloquy: who's telling this story? cooperative game-mastering and divided attention
asides: where to find me after I delete Twitter, what's new with Merely Roleplayers, what I'm making and enjoying, #pinspiration
fin: what's your perfect convention game?
So far I've been using the newsletter as mainly a progress update - what I'm releasing each month and what I'm working on behind the scenes. Which is all very well if you're already interested in what I'm making, but not so amazing for reaching new potential listeners, readers and creative friends. And it's important to do that right now, since a billionaire had several successive tantrums and poisoned one of our biggest communal wells.
This newsletter currently has about 20 subscribers. That's a nice number, but I'd obviously like to expand the circle a bit more. So I'm going to try to offer more original thinking here, rather than just the basic business updates. I'm going to keep it monthly - second Friday of each month, just like before - but the large part of each issue will now be a kind of essay, exploring an idea or observation about story, about games, about drama, or anything else relevant to what I do. The latest Merely Roleplayers releases and things like that will still be here too, but I'll keep them to bullet points.
I also want to break down the border more between me and you. If you hit reply on this email, you can email me. While this group of us is still small, I can cope with fielding replies. So if you have thoughts about the new format or you have ideas about what you want to read in future issues, hit reply and let me know!
soliloquy: who's telling this story?
At Dragonmeet in December, I played a game of galactic (2nd edition) by riley rethal with a group of five other players, none of whom I'd met before. I've played galactic before with Merely Roleplayers, and played a few other games in the same style, but with this group I noticed something I've never noticed before about cooperative roleplaying games.
What brings me back to Dragonmeet every year is that it's a convention organised around playing games. You can buy games there, of course, and dice and other related bits. There are panel discussions to attend. And like any con, it's a chance to can see and catch up with people you usually interact with online. But unlike, say, Tabletop Gaming Live, Dragonmeet dedicates a lot of its space and organisational resources to actually playing games.
There are games you can sign up to ahead of time. Those tend to fill up fairly fast. There are free gaming tables, where you can grab a few friends to try out a game you just bought. And sitting in between is Indie Games on the Hour (aka iGOTH), where you can rock up on the hour without booking ahead and see if anyone's offering to run something you like the sound of. It fills a niche for people who missed the sign-ups for the scheduled games and don't know enough people at the con to pull together a group for the free tables.
(I learned more this year about which strands of Dragonmeet are 'official'/run by the con organisers themselves, and which are separately organised little cons-within-cons, but that's for another time.)
I was a volunteer game master for the final shift at iGOTH 2022, and pitched galactic, a cooperatively game-mastered Star Wars-inspired roleplaying game; and Jeff Stormer's Mission: Accomplished!, an RPG/party game about super-spies trying to survive a corporate debrief. My thinking was that party games and cooperatively GMed games would be good fits for the casual—curated vibe of iGOTH. Anyway, a motley assortment of five players nodded yes to galactic and off we went.
aside the first: I'm deleting my Twitter accounts
just as soon as I can be sure I don't have any ongoing conversations there that I can't continue somewhere else. That includes both @merelymj and @merelyroleplay.
If you used to keep up with me there, I hope you follow me and Merely Roleplayers to Tumblr (merelymatt/merelyroleplayers), Instagram (merelymatt/merelyroleplayers) or Mastodon (@merelymatt@unstraight.club). Find me and let's grump about billionaires together.
soliloquy continues
So galactic is a game in the Belonging Outside Belonging tradition, which means there are setting elements or 'pillars' that get passed around the players; you play your character and also act on behalf of whatever setting element you're holding. Everyone shares responsibility for establishing what's true about the setting generally, and about the situation the characters are in specifically.
Pretty soon after we were done with idle dreaming and into the action, I spotted that one of the players was having trouble keeping track of what was going on. iGOTH games only last a couple of hours, which has to include setup, so we were ripping along at a rate of knots, creating a story full of incident, with the situation constantly in motion and flux. And whenever the spotlight passed to this player, they would start responding to the situation as it had been several minutes ago.
"Can I go confront the Dark Nova in the cockpit now?" they'd ask.
"We just trapped the Dark Nova in the engine room," another player would remind them.
"How are we going to work out which ship we should steal?" they'd ask.
"We already stole the fastest ship," another player would reply, "and now we're breaking orbit, heading for our rendezvous on the dark side of the moon."
And like I say, we were moving things along at a clip, and the room we were playing in was noisy, so it was understandable. And everyone else at the table was chipping in to keep this player up to date. It was fine, not a problem.
But here's the thing I noticed:
This player wasn't missing everything. When I established a detail or an event, that seemed to sink in. It was only the other players' contributions they kept missing.
As the person who'd pitched the game and played it before, I was the authority on the rules, but in terms of the storytelling, I shouldn't have had any more authority than anyone else at the table. But because I was facilitating, this player - consciously or unconsciously - seemed to be treating me as the GM.
aside the second: the world's a stage—& we're all Merely Roleplayers
Now playing in the Main House: Vigil: All Aboard
A siren call at the Witching Hour takes Gwynned, Jess, Calistarius and Harper on a perilous rescue mission far from Sherrydown.
Backstage: Backstory | Calistarius character creation
Coming next in the Studio: Falling Cadence, a softboiled noir mystery starring Vikki, Ellie, Helen and Alexander Pankhurst
soliloquy continues
I've read plenty, and been in plenty of conversations, about the differences between individually GMed games like Dungeons & Dragons and cooperatively GMed ones like galactic, and about the adjustments players have to make to their mindset before cooperative GMing really clicks. Mainly about getting comfortable being responsible for more than just the actions of one character, and with making decisions that affect other players' experience.
But I haven't seen much about this particular thing. The mindset shift around when to pay attention, and who to pay attention to.
In a D&D combat, especially at higher levels, players can afford to turn inward a little when it's not their turn. You could even say it's encouraged as part of the play culture at some tables. It's good manners both:
to step out of the spotlight when it's not your turn
to do your strategising and any rule-referencing when it's not your turn, so you don't hold things up for others when your turn does come around
That's not to say D&D encourages players to ignore each other's contributions and only pay attention to the Dungeon Master, not exactly; in combat, you do need to stay aware of what the other party members are doing in case it invalidates your plan for your turn. But it's selective. The DM's voice is the one you know should snap you back to the action.
So I can imagine that if that's the play culture you're used to, getting used to cooperatively GMed games must be hard! Everything anyone says at the table is equally significant for your shared understanding of the setting and situation. There isn't really any point in a cooperatively GMed game where it's safe to turn inward and contemplate your own playbook or pillar, reference the rules, or consider your plan for the next time you have the spotlight. You'll miss things. You have to be constantly paying attention, and as the word "paying" suggests, there is a cost to that in mental resources.
aside the third: create—consume
Writing: primarily I Need A Miracle, the podcast drama project formerly known as In Your Benevolence. I drafted ten short monologues in lockdown in mid-2020, and I'm now in the process of expanding them into slightly more substantial episodes, and planting clearer, more interesting connections between them to build up the world. Dead Weight, my cyberpunk Upstairs, Downstairs audiodrama, is also still bubbling on the back burner, ready for a burst of energy when Miracle is more complete.
Reading: Leviathan Falls (The Expanse series finale) by James SA Corey (hardback); Madly, Deeply: The diaries of Alun Rickman (audiobook)
Listening: The Dark Is Rising (BBC World Service/Complicité), Give Me Away (Gideon Media), I Am In Eskew (David Ward), Andor original score (Nicholas Britell)
soliloquy concludes
Having dwelled on this for a month or so since Dragonmeet, I think I've actually changed my mind about cooperatively GMed games being a good fit for a quick pick-up-and-play setting like iGOTH. Much as I love this style of game, I think that because they rely on consensus-building and not on a single point of authority, they're better played at a more relaxed pace, where new events and details can be reinforced and agreed through repetition and discussion.
So don't expect to find me offering galactic at iGOTH this year. I will be offering Mission: Accomplished! again, though. As for the second option? I've got most of a year to decide what could work.
aside the last: accessorise—advertise
These seemed appropriate to the topic: D&D alongside Star Wars!
Left: a large enamel pin of a 20-sided die wearing a hooded cloak, with crossed daggers below. This one was a gift, back when I was playing a rogue in my first D&D game.
Right: a cartoony enamel pin of the Millennium Falcon, with a banner across it reading "Hunk o' junk". I bought this in a craft shop in Stirling, Scotland that gave shelf space to a range of different craftspeople.
fin: readers—writers
Thanks for reading to the end! You've paid attention to me; now let's hear from you. If you're at an event and you get the chance to jump into a roleplaying game for a couple of hours, potentially with strangers, what sort of game would you be hoping to play? What would make the experience enjoyable for you? If you've had a really enjoyable convention game experience, what made it awesome? Tell me in an email (just hit reply) or tag your answer on the socials with #FoggyOutline.