Current music:

Maximo Park - In Another World (You'd Have Found Yourself By Now)

It's what we fight for
DM of the Rings taught me everything I needed to know about GMing.

GMing is only relevant here because for the better part of the last four weeks, I've been running a Mouse Guard game for a few friends (vestapx150, raiblu and friends of theirs). It's been fun so far, if somewhat bumpy at first - I'm fairly new to this whole GMing thing.

I won't talk much about the game itself besides the fact that you play mice with swords - you either think this is kind of childish or frickin' awesome. Whichever camp you belong in, the game bears mention nonetheless for being less about the stereotypes I've associated with tabletop gaming, like the consultation of accuracy charts and matrices and the like, shirking that for a system that lets players go "Here, Mr. Game Master person, these are my buttons. Push them."

Ironically, the game only uses six-sided dice.

As always, I tend to get pretty introspective when recounting these things. Amongst my observations;

1.) I'm pretty egomaniacal
Most of the time, when RPing, I'm often doing nothing but thinking about my own character (and myself, by extension), and that remains a hard habit to give up even when I'm not actually playing an established character complete with coffee-stained character sheet. Instead, it manifests itself in overarching plotlines that the players may or may not care for, in pet NPCs, in taking everything a touch too seriously, and all sorts of other details. And though I attempt to work their characters in as best as I can, it sort of feels like I'm shuffling about little mousy pawns across a chessboard that only I can see.

2.) My imagination's gone to pasture
I was never a font of creativity to begin with, but it's clear to see from these sessions that I'm beginning to rely on cliches and culling a plot together from ideas I've seen elsewhere, often lifting them directly from where I read them with bare few modifications. It's a bit hard to drum up the enthusiasm I need to get myself into gear and do prep work, but then again, this is true of more than just GMing.

3.) This is still pretty fun
It might be one of those phases, but I'm going through a time in which escaping into fantasy seems less and less endearing by the day. Videogames provide instant gratification, but not the immersion that I'm typically drawn to when roleplaying, which takes time to develop. Even the books I've been reading as of late seem to reflect this (Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, and more recently, Who Are You People: A Personal Journey Into The Heart Of Fanatical America, which warrants its own discussion in a future post). But I digress. I may not have the time to roleplay much anymore, but I've never stopped either. Pretending to be someone imaginary never gets old, even if I only get to do it once a week.

The Mouse Guard RPG recently won the Origins Award for best role playing game.

Mouse Guard RPG

Official Mouse Guard site