Preemptive Retaliation

So last night my friends and I completed our first campaign of Heart: The City Beneath, which is the first campaign I have ever ran. I got home about eleven o’clock after we wrapped up, I went to bed before midnight, and I think I didn’t get to sleep until about two in the morning – I was still buzzing from it. It all came together so nicely, so completely. Over the last few days I’ve been having anxiety over the final session – what if it all falls flat, what if they don’t like the conclusion, what if the pieces I have laid out don’t fall into place. But it wasn’t like that. Whatever I put down, my friends picked up and ran with it. Whatever they gave me, I took and ran even further.

Mike is a long time RPG player and GM, and last week we inadvertently had a long, long conversation about what it means to run a game and what it means to play a game, and what we’re looking for in each. He asked me what it was like when I planned a game and when I ran it, and I compared it to building a jigsaw. I put together all these pieces, making an elaborate plan in an elaborate world, and then during a session the players come along with hammers and smash some of it up and rearrange it how they want. But then I played another session and, in the middle of the night again, I messaged him and said; no, it’s not like that, it’s like I build a jigsaw, and when the players see it they find all these gaps and blank spaces that I never noticed, and they fill them in for me – and sometimes these blank spaces so in such interesting or impossible directions that my original jigsaw is pointless now. But in a good way.

Overall – the last ten months of playing this game has been a lesson in collaborative storytelling. There were so many times I planned a tight plot for a session just to have my story beats pulled out from under me, or ignored completely. In preparation for running my first game I bought a red notebook, and a red pen, and I filled it with tips and notes about how to run it. In there I have so many pages of plot and story ideas that I’ve crossed out – on some parts because my players dodged them without comment, and on others because I realised that bringing in something so tightly was bad. It was bad to want to control what they did. For someone who writes like I do, who sees writing as a solitary, personal act; it was difficult. It was tough watching my ideas being blown past, to have all these interesting plot hooks fade into nothing.

But the collaboration of it was amazing. Not only did I get to present a story to my players, but I got to experience it myself. This wasn’t a gift or experience I was giving them, this was something that I got to be a part of, that I got to enjoy alongside them.

I’m torn. I want to take a break, to rest on my laurels a little and bask in what I’ve achieved for myself, to enjoy the memory of my game a little longer – but I also want this to continue. To run another, and another, to be scared and stressed and challenged, and reactively creative and just, god, just having a good time.