I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately, reading my old AMRN posts and enjoying the interactions I had with other characters and the long scenes I’d write for characters and NPCs. I decided to share the posts I was enjoying with other people on the board, so I started a thread on the GenDis.
For the most part it has been a fun thread, with some old-timers chiming in with their thoughts. But at some point I mentioned that maybe I wasn’t that bad of a GM after all, and then he made a comment.
I’m not noting a lot of combat posts in this thread. Bar scenes and briefings and debriefings, yes; combat, no.
Just an observation.
He’s actually wrong; there were no bar scenes ;P But that’s beside the point. What he is really doing is gently reminding me that yes indeed, I did suck as a GM.
This guy and I have never gotten along. He rubbed me the wrong way from the very first time he emailed me to tell me all the things the AMRN was doing wrong. I was always on the defensive with him and completely unwilling to listen to anything he had to say.
I’m not proud of my reactions, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole.
Up until the time I read his post I had been thinking I wanted to run a small game, with players I liked and with all new characters. I wanted the game to cover a long time period, to involve character development, and to span various different types of campaign. I planned to start with the characters as hostages, then move to things like ground-pounding, intel-gathering, escaping into the underground, and maybe occasionally a mecha battle. But the idea was that the group wouldn’t have a home to return to at the end of each day; they would be on the run, trying to get to somewhere they could call home. Thanks to events at the beginning of the story, no one would know they were alive, so it would be completely up to them.
It was a Macross game in my head, partly because I didn’t want to have to build a whole new universe. New settings are one thing, but laying out ground rules for an entire universe is a bit much for something that’s supposed to be a fun hobby. But I wondered if I really wanted to do Macross, or if I just chose it because I was used to it.
Now, of course, I’m feeling depressed. Regardless of the fact that this guy’s a jerk, he did remind me of the reason I quit the AMRN in the first place. If I go back and try again, will the results be any different?
Bleh, indeed.