Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Endings becoming beginnings

More and more I've been thinking about how much time I spend spinning my wheels in this hobby. That's why I decided to make the Jack the Ripper adventure my last foray into Call of Cthulhu. And more than once I've thought of my present Mutants & Masterminds campaign as my last Marvel-fueled superhero campaign. I've got a Marvel one-shot in line after that, to be run as a con game, but after that I'm done. I've said all I want to say in that particular subgenre or whatever the hell you call it and it's time to move on. If you accept the premise that this role-playing stuff is some sort of art form (some days I accept this premise, other days I reject it) then it follows that one should move on to new forms and new experiments. I still want to tackle both a Star Wars and a Star Trek game. Boot Hill and Gamma World type adventures still hold some lure for me. I can name others games that intrigue me: Mekton, Nobilis, Uresia, etc. And then there's the whole damn indie rpg movement. Until I move past my usual ruts I can't effectively explore these areas. Which brings me round to the World of Greyhawk. I'm not done with Dungeons & Dragons as a whole and I probably never will be, but my gut is telling me that this campaign is my last DMing foray into Uncle Gary's world. I need to make some sort of progress. Right now I don't know whether that means giving this shiny new Eberron a try sometime in the future or agressively pursuing work with my own world or using someone else's published setting. Standing on the cusp of a new Greyhawk campaign, that decision lies well into the future. But I just get this feeling that I owe it to myself to do better than simply following the same patterns I've been repeating for two decades.

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