Adult Games

No, not that sort of thing. We’re taling about gaming as adults, and the perils and pitfalls therein.

Doyce quotes quite a bit of a fine 2000 article from Pyramid magazine. Check out the link above for the bits he’s quoted. I’ll wait …

… okay.

I agree with most of what it has to say, in principle at least, to wit:

• Adult gamers do not have the copious free time that college and high school aged gamers do/did. Live with it. Don’t set the bar so high that you can’t meet it. That being said, adult gamers do have time to do some level of gaming.
• Keep the group small. The article recommends four. That’s how many I have, though I’ve tendered an offer to a fifth (before I read the article), and I think that will be manageable. But I will not go higher than that. Believe me.

• Cut to the chase. You don’t need to detail every encounter with everyone and everything between point A and B. Think of a TV show. Go from scene to scene, and not the stuff in-between. I only partially agree with this — it’s certainly easy to get too bogged down in details for the time available (though we manage longer games than the writer suggests), and figuring out what’s not actually contibuting either entertainment or plot is a useful GM skill. By the same token, it’s possible to entertain, for a while, without the plot advancing significantly, and that’s part of why people play, too.

• “Don’t cancel unless it’s an absolute emergency.” Yes. Habit is 80% of scheduling. Cancellation can too easily become a habit, too, and cancelling for less than critical reasons will backfire on you when you have to cancel the next session because of truly critical reasons — at which point you’ve lost two meetings of momentum. Trust me — I’ve done this, and it sucks, big time.

• Use the rules of TV to keep the game interesting. Have an A-plot (basic conflict) and a B-plot (character-driven stuff), and short arcs of 2-3 meetings, with appropriate climaxes. Keep things to a crisp time-table. I think you can go overboard with this, but it’s a good starting point.

• Before you make everything go higglety-pigglety for the characters, establish the “normal” pattern, first. That’s Basic Storytelling 101, but it’s a lesson I keep having to relearn. Cutting to the “exciting stuff” too soon is a huge temptation that must be fought.

Good stuff, altogether.