For the last little while, my desire to run a game again has been slowly rising. I have to assume it’s due to watching a lot of videos on YouTube and listening to podcasts on running games (GMing and DMing), and paying attention to discussion in various forums and discord channels.
I ran a playtest during December 2020 for The Haunted Mine, but otherwise I haven’t run a game for other players since 2019, when my son was born. Obviously, the time sink of being a parent and enjoying those first few years was my main focus, and during the pandemic I’ve also been supplementing that with writing time, reading rulebooks for various different games that I backed on Kickstarter years ago but never actually sat down to peruse, and plugging in to the creator community for Dungeons and Dragons and related games.
I think my main problem is that I enjoy running games in person a lot more than running them on a virtual tabletop, and that it takes a while to set those up sometimes whereas I can run a lot in person on the fly – after twenty years in this hobby it’s very easy to improvise a whole session, but that’s a bit harder to do online it seems.
If anyone has any tips on that, I’m all ears.
Second to that is I don’t know what I want to run. I know that a lot of that would be formed by a session zero and what players want from a game, but I’d also like to throw some of my ideas out into the world. I’d love to be able to run a Planescape or Spelljammer game, or throw some wild west tropes into the mix. It seems like a lot of D&D people are leaning hard into the horror and faerie ideas at the moment (unsurprisingly, given recent D&D releases), but I’m not as invested in those settings and ideas. I just want to mess around in Wildspace or the Outer Planes!
But if I don’t get back in the saddle soon, I know it will be disappointing. And running a game is the best way to get good at running a game, and it would be nice to get back into that with a bunch of extra ideas and tips I have now.
Never too late to learn and try out new tricks!
I’ll let you know when I manage to get my own game going. Hopefully soon.
If you want to check out some of the resources I’ve been watching/listening to, check out my Appendix ï page, and if you want to check out my writing, head over to my Carrd for links.
jot jot ïota 