The Lady and Tiger

My Worlds Without Number OSR game is now 6 sessions in. At a session a week, I’ve been GM’ing for a little over a month now and it’s been a rewarding experience. My previous attempts to get an OSR-style game off the ground have always failed and this has been the most successful attempt by far. I attribute most of that to learning to communicate better. It turns out, a TTRPG subgenre that is highly predicated on your players asking you questions, receiving reasoned and consistent answers, and engaging with a shared vision of the game world requires quite of a bit of maturity and communication skills to make work. Who knew?

I’ve also come to understand more of what people mean when they deride OSR games as “GM may I”. This doesn’t mean I agree, but having the benefit of my own failures to look back on as well as this relatively successful campaign start means that I can more easily recognize what makes this a hard style of game to run and to play.

There were a few things I wanted to incorporate into this game. Some of them, such as an open table, I’ve talked about before on this blog. Others have only really lived inside my head or my own personal GM docs, so it’ll be a nice change of pace to put it down where others can see it. My goals for the game were the following:

• Present an open sandbox world for the players to explore, with a number of different locations, such as dungeons and settlements, scattered about,
• Deliver on a challenging experience that rewarded player ingenuity, with character lethality being roughly on par with most OSR games,
• Cultivate an open table philosophy, with multiple players being able to drop in and drop out from week to week,
• Develop an engaging bespoke setting that I could potentially release, or at least blog about.

Now, did I outright fail at some of these? Unfortunately, yes. Some I went about the wrong way while others I came to realize may not have been necessary in the first place. I want to document those conclusion here mainly for my own sake, so that I can use this as a guiding star for determining how to move forward.

The Sandbox

In general, I find that the players (especially those who play every session or close to it) have been engaged and interested with the game world, their options and their choices. Hooks have been bitten, a dungeon has been explored, some understanding of the game world has developed and the party has made some strides in getting to know the NPCs who inhabit it.

There are, however, two problems here that I’ve found. The first is that I haven’t really been able to prep the quantity of material that I’ve wanted to, and the second is that my players don’t seem too interested in taking the initiative to ask about options in town and what other locations might be like.

The first is wholly my fault. Running a game while dealing with the rigors of daily life is hard enough, and finding time to write and prep material throughout the week is harder still. My hope is that in addressing it the second problem just shakes out. Once I do have a more fleshed out setting with surrounding towns and dungeons, I can be more liberal with setting hooks for the players and really iron home the idea that they don’t need to commit to a single adventure unless they really want to.

Challenge and Player Agency

Here in general I’ve found myself satisfied. I chose to use the Tomb of the Serpent Kings by Skerples to kick off this campaign and the party took to it pretty well. I’ve tried to highlight dangerous situations, creatures and traps and between losing two PCs to the trapped entry corridor and almost losing another to a lightning trap deeper inside, the players learned quickly to ask questions and investigate the environment.

Recently the players learned a harsh lesson on the value of caution and stealth while exploring a dungeon (which will be the topic of another post!), but essentially things have been going well on this front. It helps that I’m running Worlds Without Number which generally makes the PCs beefier.

In terms of player agency, I like to think things have been going well on that front too. I’ve tried to make my rulings very clear and have adopted an approach synthesized from Chris McDowall’s Information, Choice and Impact philosophy and Courtney Campbell’s thoughts on Anti-Illusionism. It’s easy for players to misunderstand what their GM is thinking and being as up front as possible (including telling them what a character may be thinking, if need be) can be helpful to really get across the totality of a situation. My party recently suffered an almost TPK and I was initially worried that I hadn’t been fair in my judgements as GM. Hearing from the players that they understood what happened, why, and knew how their actions led to such a disaster occurring was vindicating.

Open Table Gaming

This has been a failure, but a minor one. In general, only four players ever show up and while others have expressed interest they never quite seem to be available. This isn’t the end of the world however, and I’m grateful for having a core party that makes time for the campaign each week. Among the four main players, some aren’t able to show up for every session but by and large that’s been fine. My stance is that as long as 2 people show up we’re gaming and honestly I’d probably run the game for just 1 if need be. The hidden benefit of this has been that the party has taken on hirelings and gotten attached to a few of them. We’ve already lost one hireling during a dicey combat and seeing the players react with genuine sadness really drove home how valuable a resource hirelings are for an OSR GM.

Setting Development

I won’t rehash the issues present in the first point. Suffice to say, time management can be difficult for me and finding the time to develop the setting on top of already struggling to populate it with interesting towns and dungeons is pretty hard. One thing I did come to realize was that it was pretty foolish and even a little unfair of myself to expect that I could turn a setting intended for play at my table into a published product without a lot of work. Not to mention it being my first successful foray into OSR gaming.

Ultimately I’ve decided that this isn’t worth pursuing, at least not to the detriment of delivering the other goals of my game (on top of just being busy doing regular non-ttrpg things). I would still like to pursue publishing at some point but when I do, I’ll start small. As I continue to run this game and learn more about my GMing style and what experiences or ideas I value at the table, I can use that experience to start working on larger projects. So you can expect something closer to the scale of my One Page Dungeon in the works, but anything bigger than that will have to wait.