3 Responses to Gnomecast #44 – Resisting the Shiny

1. 

   Solomon Foster on July 13, 2018 at 7:07 am

   Great podcast. I do think this has the exact same issue as the original post — it never establishes why you’d want to resist the shiny, and its advice is all great advice about avoiding GM burnout. Seems like the major advice was about putting off the shiny for a few months, which is not really resisting it at all, is it?

   But OMG, the “BBC series” idea is pure genius!!! My notion of a campaign has mostly always been a big, sprawling monster which goes on as long as it possibly can, and whose direction sees major input from the players, so perhaps that’s why it never occurred to me before. But it sure seems like even a big sprawling monster campaign would be seriously enhanced by having arcs with a major resolution every 5-8 sessions. I suppose the trick is figuring out how to organically craft those from the sprawl. Hmm…

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     J.T. Evans on July 14, 2018 at 12:27 pm

     Solomon,

     In the 4th paragraph of the original post, I do outline why I (personally) want to resist OSS. Here’s the text from my original post for easy reference:

     Despite having all of this material readily at my fingertips, I’d love to be able to engross myself (either as player or GM) into a wonderful, multi-year campaign with huge character arcs, story events, changes to the world, and fantastic adventures. This typically means one game, one system, (hopefully) one character, and a single world that is the core of the adventure. Because of this, I have to avoid OSS. I also have to get my fellow gamers to avoid OSS. With a new core book hitting the shelf (virtual or physical at the FLGS) pretty much every week, this is increasingly difficult.

     —–

     I have a very strong desire for an epic tale at the table, but if the system changes on a monthly basis, this makes achieving those epic tales pretty difficult.

     I do agree with your assessment that most of the article (not sure about the podcast, haven’t had time to give it a listen) is about avoiding burnout, but that’s the key leader on OSS, IMO.

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       Solomon Foster on July 14, 2018 at 7:34 pm

       But this is capturing what seems extremely weird to me about your position. Asking your players not to try other games during your epic is wildly unrealistic, if not outright rude. It’s arguably very unwise for you the GM to avoid other games during your epic. You learn useful stuff reading other game systems. You can learn amazing things playing with other GMs. (And other players, for that matter.) All of that has the potential to make your epic better.

       I dunno, maybe this is just a difference in gaming background showing through? In the mid-naughts, for a while I was in three different FTF games concurrently. With one group of people we had a Star Wars d20 Saga edition game that met every other week on (I think) Tuesday. With a second group of people (one player overlap) I ran a homebrew Star Wars game that met once a month on Sunday. One of the players in that game ran a once a month Amber game, with me and two others of the second Star Wars gang among players. Plus once a year about 50% of us would hit the local Ambercon, playing or GMing in more long-running (if very slow) games and several different systems. And many of the players who weren’t me were also in different long-running games I wasn’t involved with. None of those games interfered with any of the others, except very occasionally in scheduling. If anything, the synergy probably helped them.

       The idea that the other games I was playing in (or running at cons) somehow took away from the multi-year epic-in-scope SW game I was running would never have occurred to me…

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