As I mentioned in Monday’s post, one of my priorities lately has been reviving a flagging game. A lot has happened to it, between shifts in players and changes in time available, motivation differences and who-knows-what, and it needs a little looking at. On the plus side, I probably have an old player returning.
Where to start? (Aside from ‘taking a long break’, which I do first.)
I look at the three secrets first; they’re all plenty relevant to the situation. What looks like resistance is a lack of clarity; all right, make the solutions more specific, and don’t depend on the players to think of something. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion; is that why nobody seems to touch the wiki? (On the other hand, that can also be applied to me; there’s a lot of prep work to be done.) What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem; maybe it isn’t just that I don’t have me in my game. I start by addressing Point 2 on my end; I’ve got a lot of material I need to put together, not near enough time to do it in, and the result is a little intimidating. So I ask the players for help with one of the aspects. “You have these Hearthstones,” I tell them, both by IM and over the wiki. “Would you be interested in designing and maybe running for the group the Manses they come from? Any except this subset (I’ve already got plans for those) are fair game; you can coordinate here.” They seem interested, so I stop panicking about that and move on to the next phase. (I don’t think it fully works, since most of my ideas at this point seem to be for illustrations of some of the characters, but given that the sketch I did of one of the later confrontations seemed to focus me, it’s not a complete loss.)
The last few times I attacked this issue, I focused on what was going wrong. Certainly, I have a couple of friends who are very effective about explaining that. The problem is, it’s been backfiring. Between all this “This doesn’t work, and neither does this, and neither does that”, it’s way too easy to get defensive. Second is, even when I can get past that part, that leaves me with a whole lot of what not to do, and not much what to do. If I can find out what I’m doing right, I can emulate that, which with any luck will be a whole lot more satisfying. I try it with one of my more vocal critics (left because of differences with the other players, we’ll see how things go), and find that this whole figuring out what I’m doing right thing seems to work pretty well; not only does it make it a lot less painful to work through, but with all this stuff that isn’t complaining, I find it easier to respond to areas in need of improvement. The catch is that the feedback isn’t very specific; I know these things are strong points of mine, but I can’t figure out which part is the strong point, and it’s back to ripping holes in my style within a day or two.
Speaking of which, one of the definite instructions I got in my feedback: “Stop having so much trouble with combat.” I’ve been working on this one for a while, but this is the first time I go really meta on why, and get the result I shared yesterday. The prepwork for the combat is something of a killer; it’s not quite as bad as it was back when I had the character who really wasn’t made for a fight and the characters with the ridiculous die pools in the same party, but it’s still enough to send up aversion behaviors right there. With the problem identified, I start working on how to fix it; this could take a while.
I’ve actually been doing a lot of talking about the things that go wrong, despite my “look for the good stuff” emphasis, like answering why it was that in groups, the characters never opened up the way they did in sidechats. I’ve already explained that part, so that isn’t really necessary, but that gives me something else to ask: does the group really not-care that much? Finding out that I’m overreacting could actually be an excellent motivation for me, since that means I can play to my strengths; on the other hand, it’s possible that the issue is that nobody thinks we have time for anything but the plot, in which case I need to find a different way to incorporate my taste for character motivation. Result? Still in progress.
Salvage in progress. More details later.
