I'm carefully tracking my roleplaying activities for a couple of years now. 2018 was no exception. For the next three blog posts, I talk about what I have done and played with some deeper insights behind my personal statistics.This is Part 1 about my general activities. Part 2 will be about the statistics and Part 3 is an Award Ceremony for all the characters I played.
I continued to be in Guatemala most of the time in 2018. That meant that my playing was mainly online. But I also traveled a while in Germany which gave me the opportunity to find time for my f2f group and visit a convention. I also continued to play with my son, who turned seven in 2018.
So generally 2017 was comparable to 2018. Main place for me to play and exchange was again the Gauntlet Slack with its amazing online gaming calendar and an inclusive and welcoming community. I gamed a bit less, but got even more into design with some first published games.
Before I go deeper into statistics in a separate blog post, I would like to summarize what else has happened 2018 beside gaming. But stay with me, the statistics have some interesting points as well.
Part 1: What has happenend
Erzählspiel-Zine
My German language writing output was with the Erzählspiel-Zine in which I act as a writer and co-editor for the main responsible people Tina and Thorsten. The zine team is publishing German language games, interviews and essays on a quarterly basis. I published a play report for Winterhorn, contributed to Drachenreise (Dragon Journey), a Route Clearance hack, by Tina and my son and a workshop report for Tuk Fast Tuk Furious there.Online Gaming
Online gaming was again the most important part of my gaming life with the Gauntlet calendar my most valuable resource for exciting games, facilitators and players. Other sources of online play but to a lesser degree was through spontaneous sessions between Gauntleteers.
I was also part of the Mercy Falls series again by Jason Cordova, a Monsterhearts actual play (AP) series which gets transformed into a podcast series of cleaned and slightly edited 30 minutes pieces called Pocket Sized Play. I was in the '83 part of the series.
The publication of the We Hunt the Keepers, a Dungeon World series by Jason Cordova, in which I played Arcon Megalon, the Brogar Psion, continued, too. So if you want to listen to my voice roleplaying a teenager called Julia nearly killing her friends and then getting killed by them, or hear me as a mind reader talking about the true meaning of friendship in a city where defecating in public is the norm, go ahead.
Online gaming suffered last year from the loss of the API for Google Hangouts, the most convenient and free option to create custom overlays for your screen. That was especially a loss for me since I loved to do some Barbie play by carefully designing overlays like this one
for the very first online game of Dialect (without the designers).
Part of the fun with Tuk Fast Tuk Furious is that players have an online template at hand to design their own tuk tuk front. This is how the designed túk tuks looked like. Beautiful, aren't they?
Indie Schwarze Auge
At the beginning of the year I returned
to some degree to my roots. The system and even more importantly the setting I
grew up with is The Dark Eye, often explained as the German D&D in terms of
popularity and impact. In 2017, I hadn’t played anything related to The Dark
Eye and started missing it. Then again, the rules system is simply too trad for
my taste. I also wanted to run games in German on the Gauntlet calendar since
the German language part of the community had grown significantly.
Find more about my Indie Schwarze Auge
project and Actual Plays in this blog entry.
Laogs - live action online gaming
The other project I started on the
Gauntlet was how to bring larps into online spaces. The most well-known example is Raphael Chandler’S ViewScream. I started with writing a version of
Winterhorn that was suitable for online play. In Winterhorn, players are
participants of a meeting of different public agencies. Nothing easier than
assuming that a modern agency would offer home office and video conferences to
their employees. 
The idea of live action online games,
laogs, was born. I wrote a manifesto for it. I re-shaped existing games for the
concept and finally designed games specifically for it. Read more about laogs in
this blog entry.
Designing
My fun in designing games was unbroken
in 2018. Jason Cordova was my mentor for half a year which meant that we had
monthly design talks about a design I made. That gave me a good pace. I had
some playtests online for Atitlan Riders and from there continued to develop a
much more personal edition of the game.
I learnt about some amazing local Mayan folk tales in Santiago Atitlan and designed Ghost Drums together with Daniel Sojuel. Ghost Drums was published in the Gauntlet Codex Dark 2, the Gauntlet’s monthly game zine which you can buy on DriveThruRPG.
The Election of the Wine
Queen (published in April 2019 in Codex Sunlight), the laog adaption of End
Game were other outputs from my design desires. More about the Wine Queen in a separate article one day.
I learnt about some amazing local Mayan folk tales in Santiago Atitlan and designed Ghost Drums together with Daniel Sojuel. Ghost Drums was published in the Gauntlet Codex Dark 2, the Gauntlet’s monthly game zine which you can buy on DriveThruRPG.
On the Gauntlet
The Gauntlet stayed my main focus of
community and exchange in 2018. The Gauntlet’s Slack, only available to
Patreons, doubled in size (to ~400), the number of the games of the calendar is
now 200 per month, all Indie and OSR games. I played more than half of my
sessions through the Gauntlet calendar. I’m active in the organization’s
broader team with community tasks: I manage and curate the online Play Aids folder with character keepers and the like for more than 130 games now.
Together with Tomer Gurantz I take care for community tasks. I especially feel
responsible for welcoming new German speaking Gauntleteers. Tomer and I have
made a New User Orientation video.
Tres Volcanes Gaming Retreat planning
Since Metatopia 2017, I had the idea of
organizing a small, private gaming convention in Guatemala with a three-fold focus: i) the place we live
there is incredibly scenic and fantastic for the soul to explore, ii) building connections between the Indie gaming scene
and the people from Santiago Atitlán and iii) having a good time together with a
better balance between enthusiastic gaming, personal well-being and learning
from each other and the place we are in. I explored a bit among people in the
scene, and received lots of support. Alex Roberts was excited enough to become my co-organizer which meant working on documents together and having monthly calls. Larson Kasper was another great help in the background although he himself couldn’t come in the end.
That’s how the Tres Volcanes Gaming
Retreat was born. The retreat itself only happened beginning of this year, so
that is something I will talk more about in next year’s summary. The
organization though kept me busy most of the second half of 2018. It was a good
and interesting experience.
Extending my horizon
In 2018, I became active on Twitter for
RPG purposes. I already had an account for many years but only used it to to
keep myself updated by political allies and work related networks. Twitter RPG
is actually a good place and helped me to get to know parts of the scene I
wasn’t aware of. Latest after the announcement of Google plus’ shutdown, it
seemed also be the place where a good part of the community went to.
Since Google plus was the place of my 'awakening' roleplaying-wise and where I had the best exchanges for the last 7 years, it was now time to look for something new.
Since Google plus was the place of my 'awakening' roleplaying-wise and where I had the best exchanges for the last 7 years, it was now time to look for something new.
Especially nice was that a good part of
the German Indie RPG scene is very active on Twitter. That helped me to get in
touch with them right in time before my summer traveling through Germany so we
had a chance to meet in person.
However, I’m not happy on Twitter. I
will continue using it. But it’s nothing like a real community and not a good
place for honest and deep discussions for me. Your mileage may vary, but for
me, the format just doesn’t work. I see a high degree of performative and
agenda driven postings there. I see polarization and arguments getting more
heated or discussions staying too flat due to the character limit and the
structure of responses. What I enjoyed in Google Plus was that I could
carefully curate to whom I’m posting, that I could actively decide in which
parts of somebody’s life I’m interested and the totality of Twitter is just the opposite of all of this - and my opinion: not healthy.
Fortunately, there is a new star for
good and deep discussions for me now available: The Gauntlet Forums are
bringing back forum discussions but with modern technology. I can tag people
in, I have tools to properly embed media and can design my own user experience. So far,
many of my favorite people in RPG are already active there and I feel
comfortable to bring myself in.
One result of many discussions around
how we play our games in 2018 was that play culture is an important element and
one we can actively work on. While I can’t directly change culture, tools and
procedures in our games and gaming sessions can support certain play cultures.
With that in mind, I wrote an article called Sharing The Cognitive Load, which
discusses possibilities how a facilitator can include other players at the
table in tasks we usually associate with the facilitator alone.
Among these tasks is moderating a
debrief. Debrief, de-role, reflecting about the experience is an important
part of a game session for me. So I have built in several procedures in my
designs and provided a template for debriefing.
At Gauntlet Con I was on an interesting panel about feedback and debrief which lead to many thoughtful discussions afterwards.
At Gauntlet Con I was on an interesting panel about feedback and debrief which lead to many thoughtful discussions afterwards.
The year ahead
I’m about to do more larping this year
and plan to go to a larpwrite retreat. The very special 3W6
convention in Vienna is something to look forward to. I’m also eager to have a
full weekend with my f2f group again to continue our decade long Dark Eye
campaign Sieben Gezeichnete (we are at Rohals Versprechen now).
A few more games and supplements will
be published this year, too. I had been a stretchgoal for several crowdfunding
campaigns and some of them were something really enjoyable to work on. For BrieBeau Sheldon’s Turn KS, I’m writing a supplement about my home town Halver, for
the #rollInclusive KS I’m writing a laog which limits communication channels
between players, for the Ulisses crowdfunding Drachenhandbücher II, the
Erzählspiel-Zine editors, Tina Thorsten and I, wrote an essay about Emotional
Play.
So, I expect a relatively calm year
RPG-wise but fortunately, calm nowadays means lots of good gaming and a
continuous extension of my horizon for me.
This was Part 1 of me looking back into 2018. Part 2 will discuss the statistics I made and what I learnt from them.
