Author: Ronan McNamee

I run thedicepool.com, a blog about ttrpgs and my experience with them.

What I’m playing, July 2024

Lists

The internet loves a list. A top ten, preferably. I don’t have a top ten today. Sorry to disappoint you, dear reader.
Instead, here I have gathered an unranked list of the six RPGs I am currently involved in. I’m running half of these and I’m a player in the other half, so it’s organised that way only.

This list does not represent the full catalogue of games I have been involved with so far this year. That will come in a separate post or series of posts in the near future. I guess this might seem like a lot of ongoing games to some. On the other hand, I’m quite sure it doesn’t seem like all that many to others. I usually fit in the odd one-shot into the schedule too, but other than that, this works well for me, especially as they are all fortnightly, pretty much.

I play two of these games in my house with my wife and friends, I play one with some members of our fledgling local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We play that in another friend’s house. Two more are online with friends and the last is played online with members of the international RPG community, The Open Hearth.

There’s no doubt that the ability to play online has opened a world of possibilities that, up until the start of the pandemic, I had not really even considered. It’s not the same as meeting around a table with snacks and drinks and banter. You can’t have cross-talk on Zoom. The chaos that is allowed to reign over the table in home games at times is to be treasured, in my opinion, and you really can’t recreate that on a video call. But when your mate you want to play with lives hundreds of miles away or when the only people you can get to play the little-known, esoteric story game you want to experience are located all across the world it’s definitely a boon.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to write a post on each of the games I’m running since I have more to write about each of those. I’ll do a single post for the games in which I am a player.

The Dice Pool

Taking the initiative

Do you consume a lot? I feel like I do. Food, beverages, books, videos, films, music, podcasts, games, opinions, facts, feelings, content, content, content. I get a little bloated, to be honest, physically and mentally.

So this is one outlet for my mental bloat. I think I’ll write how I feel about some of the things I consume as a way to digest them (not the food and drink, I’ll do that in the traditional way.) But, mostly, I’ll be writing about my main creative outlet, playing, running and making things for tabletop role playing games. Let’s not be coy about this; the internet is not lacking for nerds going on about their games, or someone else’s games or games they watched other people play or games they hate or games they actually quite like, surprisingly enough. So, even knowing this, why would I have the gall to add to it? Good question, good question indeed. Maybe I will figure that out as I do it. The adventure is the journey and all that.

History check

So, I started playing RPGs back in the eighties, when I was a kid. What an amazing outlet for my imagination and a way to share it with my friends. I remember the feeling of playing games like AD&D, Twilight 2000, MERP, every single Palladium game. What feelings? Well, there’s a fair bit of dissatisfacion, frustration, and boredom if I’m honest. But, crucially, all of that is tempered by moments of sheer elation, joy, sorrow and anger. I don’t remember that much about the games themselves now, other than that there were a lot of numbers and arguments about numbers.

A few years ago I started to get back into RPGs (I know TTRPG is the more standard term these days but it is rather unwieldy and I can promise you that there will be few occasions for confusion on this blog) again, partly because my wife was curious about trying it out and partly for the sake of nostalgia. Anyway, as I got back into the hobby and started playing with adults, I discovered a whole new world of games the likes of which the tween me could never have conceived.

Treasure

RPGs have changed since I was a kid, and I don’t mean the edition numbers, or the abandonment of THAC0. I’m not sure when or how it occurred, but at some point, someone very clever and observant realised that you don’t HAVE to wade through a morass of stats and modifiers and encumbrance and spell descriptions to get to the real meat of the story you and your friends want to tell. You can if you want, that’s its own sort of fun, but if your aim is to just have a laugh, or to tell a particular story or to make your players cry, there are games and systems out there to allow you to do that. You don’t want to solve problems with violence? Cool, try out Wanderhome. You want to solve problems with ultra-violence? Give Eat the Reich a go. You want to investigate mysteries with a creepy-weird feel, pick up Public Access. You just want to tell an emergent story with your friends, you have so many options, give Blades in the Dark a try, or Heart, or Wildsea, or Mountainhome. Look, this is still relatively new to me. I’m still trying to figure out what’s OSR and what’s just trad. I am still mostly mystified by GMless games and a little intimidated by story games.

I’m learning a lot all the time so, this is where I’ll be writing about that. Other stuff too, no doubt, but mostly the games I play and the stuff I learn from them.