Hope

So I ran my first TTRPG session today, and I wanted to jot down some thoughts I've had on the subject and have a sort of written postmortem! Well, it's not my first ever GM session but its the first I feel I gave 100% on. I feel like this experience might be mildly interesting to a certain kind of person, but it's more of a record of my experience to look back on later and to improve at GMing.

The system I ran is Lancer, I love mecha and sci-fi so it seemed like a natural fit, but all my experience in TTRPGs has been in Pathfinder and DnD. Both have a very familiar high fantasy setting that I didn't realize I had closely tied into the way I think about TTRPGS and how they're played. Moving to a completely new setting, one that has, as a normal fact of life, access to a galaxy-wide internet, calculates for time dilation when moving at near light speed, myriad planets with different combinations of seasons and gravity and weather, and has access to cloning and life extension technology akin to magic adds a ton of difference to how you even can think about playing a satisfying game, both as the GM and as players. I could write an essay just on this topic so for now I'll settle for saying it caused me to spend most of my waking free time for a week considering how I would approach anything.

So, I spent a ton of time preparing. I worried that I had actually overprepared after reading some advice from other GMs, but I think I'm glad I spent as much time as I did. The adventure I'm running is Sleeping Above a Stolen Crown by Laurie O'Connel, and it's been a good starting point with the game I think. However, I wasn't satisfied with the level of detail provided in the text, so I ended up homebrewing over half of my take on the book. This was purely my decision to complicate things and many of the points in the book seem to be hooks designed for just this kind of approach, which I both appreciate and have come to see as a bit of a headache. I think it would've been more efficient for me to pick a more detailed book for my first campaign, but nonetheless I enjoy a lot of the ideas, as well as the maps provided. It seems like I could've run it just as it was written and things would have been fine, but I do tend to get carried away in my ideas...anyway, here are some observations from the experience overall.

• I'm a prepper and I kinda hate it
  I spent dozens of hours writing and considering the people and the setting of the campaign, as well as stealing repurposing tons of Arknights characters and backgrounds. This is probably the place where I shined most while actually running the game. I feel like I was able to dole out appropriate amounts of information depending on the situation (unfortunately the PCs rolled kinda poorly every time they tried to study something). There's certainly still a ton of unfamiliarity with the setting, but I think it's appropriate since none of the PCs are natives of the planet. Unfortunately, I'm not too proud of my performance on this front because I feel like it's one of the least important elements to running a fun session. Wikipedia articles can be mildly interesting, but they aren't fun! Knowing the history and details of my setting feels useful of course, but only if they serve a more important purpose. And well...they often didn't, I think. Much of my prep time has yet to pay off of course, the players essentially have met 1 NPC so far. Going forward I want to try to balance how much I prep with how much I'm comfortable improvising.

• My descriptions were a mixed bag
  I feel that my prep helped a lot in describing things in a literal sense but giving texture and feeling to a scene ranged from adequate to falling flat. I'm tempted to just solve the issue by prepping even more detailed text to read but I think that's the wrong way to approach this. I cannot do this amount of prep every week, it's unsustainable and I believe will make me eventually want to railroad the players into my prep, robbing them of their agency. And that just defeats the whole point of a TTRPG! I think I simply need to get better at "public speaking". I felt INTENSE stage fright as soon as the game started, and while it eased as the game went on, I never did relax. I was so focused on not messing up, on conveying information accurately to the players that I shoved the flowery, emotional part of myself out and never let them back in lmao

• I default to "you..." statements.
  I tend to dictate to the players, "you do this", "you feel that", "you have an idea", "you remember", etc. etc. I'm really not happy with this, because to me this is even further from the spirit of TTRPGs that I enjoy. The players should be thinking and feeling things and then choosing to share them if they wish, there's no point if I just tell them!! I'm not even sure why I defaulted to this, my guess it that it feels like I have better control over what's going on, and it calmed my anxiety to dictate rather than let things play out however the players let it. I think this will be my #1 thing to improve at for next time.

• Combat is crunchy but also my brain is weird
  I spent a decent amount of time doing mock combat scenes so I could do a good job leading the game smoothly, and I'm super glad I did because even with the practice there was a good bit I just didn't understand or forgot. I expected this to be a problem; even in Pathfinder2E (as a player) I struggle to remember what actions do, and regularly forget about chunks of the system or misunderstand how something works. A couple times players had to remind me of a rule or I had to handwave something and promise to look it up later, which I think is fine overall, it's bound to happen sometimes. I do want to improve and get a better handle on the system, especially since this strikes me as one of the easier things to nail down since it's mostly math and logic, something more measurable than the way I speak or conquering stage fright. I'm happy with how I described combat at least, having a less familiar player coached by his onboard AI was simple but fun and describing how the players utterly dismembered a Berserker class mech was great.

• When do I ask for rolls??
  I think I did an okay job at prompting Skill Triggers, in the future I want to try to build up a sense for when it's fun to roll and cut out some of the more boring ones.

• This is not Pathfinder2E
  The split between "narrative" and "combat" mechanics in Lancer is probably the most divisive thing about it, and I can feel why. It's just not a natural feeling to come from DnD/Pathfinder style into this one, all my mind knows right now is how this would work in Pathfinder and it's tough to break from that. I ended up just winging a lot of skill checks because of this. Because the players are in Giant Robots and there's no traditional "Initiative" system, it was tough deciding if the players should be able to notice an incoming ambush using a Skill Trigger. As far as I can tell, the answer is no, and that combat should always be presented in a sort of "video game" fashion, where you tell the players "you've entered combat mode, you always get the first move", but that just didn't sit right with me so I set it up to allow the raiders that were trying to jump the party go first if they managed to avoid notice, thankfully they didn't and the party spotted them. I'll have to think on how this should be approached going forward.

Overall, I'm pretty proud I managed to run this as well as I did, even if it was far from great. I've always felt an urge to GM a game, even when I tried DnD with my uncle when I was like 13. It always felt like I just wasn't confident enough, and that bothered me the longer I went through life. I hated feeling so scared that something that seemed so innocent like playing a sort of complicated board game wasn't a possibility for me. Trying and failing seemed so scary then! And yeah, I was scared today. I barely slept last night, and felt stupid the whole time cause it was like "I'M JUST PLAYING A GAME WITH MY FRIENDS WHAT'S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN WHY. AM. I. LIKE. THIS!!". But I know I put a lot of time and thought and effort into this and having that fall flat because of my own inability to bring it to life was a really scary thought.

I'm thankful I have friends I can do stuff like this with. I'm loving their characters and the ideas they bring to the table, my favorite thing about these games continues to be the collaborative story telling aspect, so it's the part I want to get better at fostering. Looking forward to next Saturday!