I particularly despise committing to run a session only to have a wave of ambivalence wash over me. Given that I’m normally decisive, it’s a weird and uncomfortable sensation. For me ambivalence comes on like nausea.
Not long ago the feeling of wanting to back out of Game Day hit me hard. GMing duties fell to me this winter when my buddy Brian, who’s been heroically helming our long-running Yellow King game, had to travel out of the country for work.
In the interim I’ve (mostly) been running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, an excellent and too often neglected Cortex game written by Cam Banks & Co. Thanks to some timely sleepover invitations for my son, my wife has even been able to join the regular group for some X-men flavored shenanigans.
But even with mixing in some Indie one-shots to keep things fresh, inspiration completely left me. It was baaaad. Real bad. (If you’ve been a campaign GM you know what I’m talking about.) We play on Saturday, and by Friday afternoon I just couldn’t imagine running at all. I couldn’t even tell you why!
It wasn’t about coming up with session content. True, we’d just gotten to the end of a story arc, but there were still some loose threads I could follow up on… I just couldn’t generate excitement for any of them.
My wife reminded me that I could tell everyone that I didn’t have it in me, but somehow that felt wrong, too. One of my buddies had just gotten furloughed, and possibly fired, in the big wave of Doge cuts, and my other buddy, a retired postal worker, has been struggling to get his benefits set up properly. For these guys Game Day is an island of fun in a turbulent sea.
I didn’t want to take that away from either of them if I could help it.
So, I took stock. I decided that even though I hadn’t achieved utter system mastery of Marvel Heroic, I wasn’t going to look through the rules or do any prep of any kind. I’d been building elaborate layouts for the sessions with my collection of Heroscape tiles, but I decided not to do that either.
Instead, I focused all my efforts on hosting. A consequence of Brian being out of town is that my place, a modest apartment, has had to serve as our gaming spot. While I can’t make it bigger, I can clean it and make sure everything unnecessary is stowed away. My efforts went into tidying up. Whenever my energy flagged, I reminded myself that this was something I was doing to bring joy to my friends.
When game day came, I told the guys that I wanted to really focus on the characters and on the daily life of being an X-man. They were enthusiastic. (Isn’t it always great to have players that lean in?)
So we started with some lowkey RP scenes. A while ago I introduced the idea of the X-men exploring the opportunity to develop a reality TV series, with Beast enthusiastically offering to work on a cooking show. Along the way he’d struck up a flirtation with Jennifer Walters (aka She Hulk) who is temporarily acting as their entertainment attorney. We delved further into that. Not wanting to leave anyone out, I spun up an unlikely love triangle featuring Yelena Belova, a hesitant Colossus, and a self-involved Cyclops.
At some point, things started to get a little delirious. I felt moved to play Professor X with the weird Canadian/not Canadian accent he has in X-men: The Animated Series, and to put a plastic bag over the top of my head like a poor man’s bald cap.
The session peaked with all our heroes, plus Yelena, at a local disco that was holding a Dazzler impersonator night. We wrapped when a Sentinel ripped the roof of the dance floor, foreshadowing a combat-heavy follow-up session.
All in all it was a great time, and it turned out to be just what I needed. And (hopefully) it was a memorable time for everyone else.
It’s easy for me to get wrapped up in the things that brought me to gaming in the first place. The sense of surprise and collaboration, the hope of creating meaningful choices for the characters, along with the opportunity for some great laughs along the way… and (occasionally) witnessing a moment that feels like it’s from an awesome improv.
And it’s easy for me to forget that underneath all of it is the idea of doing something meaningful with people you care about. But for one Spring weekend, that was enough for me.
toomuchcontent 