The Tyranny of Time
They’ll never cure this thing with medicines and rpg zines
In my last post, I discussed the way that procedures can help with the pacing of a game. Examples of this might be exploration-turn procedures in b/x, or in the procedures for assembling dice polls and downtime in Blades in the Dark. This is very helpful especially for the way so many of us play now: we might be older, with jobs and/or children, playing online, for sessions of 2-3 hours. In my experience, during the pandemic a lot of play shifted to this more micro format, and there were a lot more cancellations or even no-shows. So in these circumstances games are played in short bursts of activity with somewhat distracted participants.
And yet, there is something that makes me recoil from this pragmatic reality. I think it was in reading Wanderhome by Jay Dragon, a very creative person who is also quite young. There is this example of play:
The first time I played Wanderhome was with friends outside, sitting in the grass by the creek. I brought pencils and tokens, while Charlie printed out copies of the playbooks. socks baked cookies and had a pitcher of punch, and Mel didn’t have the energy to bring anything—xyr presence was a present…A few months later, we welcomed a new friend to our group—this time digitally. I curled up with a PDF of the game and a plate of crackers, while we all said hello to Maeve…Mel spent fifteen minutes showing of all the art xe had drawn of our characters (the most xe had talked in months!) and Socks helped Maeve figure out what character she wanted.
It made me wistful for the experience of pleasurably wasting time (i.e. “wasting” time without worrying about it going to “waste”). I remember when I finally saw one of my good friends after we got the vaccine we were talking and we lost track of time, and that little thing, forgetting that we were supposed to facetime with a third friend, losing track of time because we were spending time with each other, and thus not even “spending” it, was so unexpected and pleasurable.
This just doesn’t happen in our online games. When we meet, we chit chat a little, but we are there to get something done, and we only have a couple hours to do it. There is little space for aimless hanging out, either in or out of character. I’ve grown inpatient with shopping scenes, with anything that doesn’t ‘cut to the action’. At first I spent a lot of time preparing digital handouts and images and maps if I ran a game, but that was too much overhead and was exhausting, so now I keep it simple; still, it does mean that the game can miss a personal touch of the tangible and the crafted (other GMs, no doubt, burn themselves out preparing online “content”).
Of course, this is all so different from the world of an 11 year old, armed with a rules cyclopedia and some graph paper, engaging in lonely and sometimes not so lonely fun. Part of the pleasure of fantasy—not as a specific genre, but as a mode of escape, of daydreaming—is that it does not come bearing time, but is a space to get lost. Time is an imposition (think Sarah getting called away to take care of her little brother in Labyrinth). Even when I started playing as an adult, the charm was in devoting a Sunday once a month to travel to a friends house and hang out, our play interspersed with a quite-adult dinner party and usually a fair amount of beer and whiskey, ending perhaps at midnight. And I wish I could get back those times, just to lose them again.
d6 Things We Lost in the Fire
Your first character sheet
A stupid joke about a snoring ogre that only a few people would understand
The way you used it to survive
Vulnerability, tolerance
The refusal of what was
The embrace of what could be