[RuneQuest] A tortuous session

Ok, now that I've had some time to reflect. I've also had an off-line conversation with Chris Chinn that got me thinking about what has gone on.

After some deep reflection, I think the real problem is that I pushed RuneQuest on the players when they really weren't that interested in it, or at least not interested in the simmy "experience Glorantha" part. And yea, as noted, I may be running the combats in a way that pushes a muddled sim/gam agenda. Add to the mix the Yelmallio brothers who are interested in a sim agenda, and it's not surprising it's turning out to be a confused mess (and I had posted on my blog back in May to that effect).

I am seeing an issue with the lawyer guy though (he came in after that blog post). Perhaps he's simply responding to things in the game, but this is the second campaign that he's joined in a disruptive way. When he joined my Arcana Evolved campaign, he wanted to bring in an Astral Deva character [an extraplanar, "good" aligned being], with a justification "well, it seems like extraplanar and aligned creatures aren't all that rare in your game" - AE is normally unaligned, however, I was adapting Judge's Guild's classic Dark Tower, but was balancing the alignment issues carefully, not intending them to be permanent additions to the game). I also seem to remember his first character offering was a cleric, before he even joined the game. Obviously bringing people in after a campaign has started can be difficult since the players don't participate in the initial brainstorming.

On long campaigns - ok, perhaps compared to "Forge inspired" games, I run long campaigns, but the longest I've ever run was a year and a half, and recently, my long campaigns (both Arcana Unearthed/Evolved) ran less than a year (one made about ten months, the other seven). On the other hand, your idea of periodically revisiting the characters may be a good idea. That might allow the restless players (I've had a few) and opportunity to change characters less disruptively.

On social contract negotiation and Monopoly - yea, normally cheating isn't spoken of when starting the game (except perhaps when a specific player has a history...). Of course the longer an activity will be persued, the more important a more negotiated social contract is. Yet still, many activities go along with very little explicit social contract (and almost never a written and signed one). Some clubs do have "probationary" members which is a way to give a new member a chance to see if they buy into the social contract (usually such probations include some note about active participation to weed out "slackers"). On the other hand, it seems like people are constantly resorting to passive agressiveness instead of speaking their mind about something that troubles them.

Mike - your comment on attendance was a little garbled, but I think you were trying to say the same thing I feel - the spotty attendance isn't so much that the players don't have the time, or totally hate the game, but that it isn't really grooving them, so the priority drops a little.

Frank