Reflections on the gaming year 2020

 
A year has passed and I have not written anything on this blog. So it seems fitting that I start and close this years's blog post season with the retrospective on 2020. It has the same structure as last years retrospective.
 

What I did

This year I did not keep track of the games I ran as I did last year. So, there are no numbers and my choice of order is an educated guess. As GM I ran regular sessions with in order of decreasing number of sessions

• Starfinder: Signal of Screams (complete) and Dawn of Flame (we are in book 3 for now), 
• Pathfinder 2: Age of Ashes (still playing the first AP, we are in the middle of book 5)
• Cepheus Light: Uranium Fever (custom campaign)
• Amazing Adventures 5e: The Stone of Rosetta (custom campign)
• Mutants & Masterminds: Teen Titans (custom campaign)
  
• Dungeon Fantasy: Mortality of Green (Castles & Crusades Conversion)
• Modern Age: London (custom campaign, inspired by the Rivers of London)
• Starsiege: Fall through the Frost Ruby (custom cmapaign based on Perry Rhodan)

There have been a couple of one-shots and left over sessions from last years mini-campaigns, but the above were my main focus. I tried to make a collage out of all the games I played as part of a mini-campaign this year:

What worked?

In general most stuff works ok-ish.

I challenged myself to run a game in English and with a bunch of strangers nontheless, but it worked out decently and we have had much fun. A quick shout out to Babies with Knives, where I managed to do this.

Other than that, I wanted to get a mini campaign in the Perry Rhodan started, as promised last year. I was pondering which system to use and ended up with the classic StarSiege (the Amazing Adventures based StarSiege has been released as preview and is supposed to come out in 2021). So far, we are only two sessions in, but I see no problem with the way the system works, i.e. simple D20-style rules with nova points as bennies.  The characters are reasonably competent in their area of expertise, having powerful computers called syntronics supporting their actions.

I hope to continue this campaign next year and might even be looking the get into a another iteration of the system using Cortex Prime after that.

What didn't work?

When it comes to this, I'd say, it is mostly about expectations and group interaction.

One time I asked a player to leave a campaign, since he could not stop to correct other players mistakes in interpreting the rules up to a point where I felt uncomfortable running the game. Another time a player was very unhappy with the way another character was treated by the group which lead to an in-game escalation and him losing the fun in participating in that player constellation.

Especially, I have to keep in mind that the pandemic situation is more demanding and might lead to me being annoyed more easily than usual.

As a GM I have not had campaigns that ended in total frustation for me like last year's Splittermond. To be frank, I have not even played Splittermond after that.

As a player a thing that left me sad was they way my playing in the Dungeon Musing's campaigns ended. The Starfinder campaign broke up after almost exactly a year and I can understand how this happened. We did try to play Modern Age: Threefold then, but that broke up as well. These experiences are my main reason that I always try to bring my campaigns to some kind of intermediate endings and never have more than two of three session story-arc until some kind of minor conclusion is reached. In cases where one player left a campaign I did offer a conclusive session, just to provide closure.

One-Shots

There have been a couple of one shots as well. I liked Cyberpunk RED, Genefunk 2090 and Cortex Prime: Mythikal.

Two one shots were particularly bad, but for similar reasons:

1. The Sprawl: This is a Powered by the Apocalpyse Cyberpunk-style game and it was less fun to play than it could have been, because the system is highly rigged against the player characters. Each Move has more negative consequences than positive. If you play the game as written a chracter's best option is to do nothing or to play with loaded dice. Since there was a wonderful GM, the expericience had some positive moments as well, but I actively advise people not to play the game as written. Unless, you like to be a crew member on the Titantic.
2. Hellboy 5e: This is another game where the mechanics are problematic. You would like to play a gmae like in the Hellboy movies or comics? That is not what is in store, if you go with the playtest adventure. There the players have to choice to investigate a room which leads to negative consequences, not to investigate a room, which leads to the same negative consequences or to do nothing, which also has this negative consequences. If you run the adventure as written it is a garantueed total party kill.
   

There might be persons out there who are into roleplaying these kind of "this a trainwreck unfolding in front of our eyes" style, but I'm not one of them. Neither as a player nor as a GM.

What was not run?

There are a couple of things I'd like to try next year:

• I have not played the recent edition of The Dark Eye, but I'm really curious if all the preconceived notions I hear are still valid for this edition. 
• I'd love to run a more heist oriented Cyberpunk style game. It does not need to be with the original Cyberpunk 2020 or RED rules, tough.