I've put my current campaign on indefinite hiatus and I've been trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. After much thought I think I have a pretty good idea.
Scale
I adapted Skerple's GLOG, adapted Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, adapted Michael Curtis' Stonehell, mashed them together and spread the resultant slurry out onto a cooled marble countertop; went through the Labyrinth Lord monster manual, reskinned everything that appeared in Stonehell to better fit the science-fantasy-gonzo setting, restatted them all for the GLOG; went through the megadungeon itself, rewrote all the room descriptions to move away from tasteless oatmeal paste fantasy to something more umami, redid the mapping and exploration procedures; and yet when things really got into motion and the players breached the dungeon for the first time after months of playing, I realized all the prep I did either amounted to not at all enough or far too much. I floundered often, misunderstood or forgot my own overtuned mechanics and procedures, but then sweated and failed to improvise interesting encounters one minute and overcompensated the next, sticking slavishly to the purpley, overwritten narratives I'd managed to prep beforehand.
Time
No campaign of any chunky substance can be sustained on the amount of time my group was able to devote to it. At most, sessions were 3 hours every 2 weeks, often shorter and less frequent. To cement (an attempt at) a make-believe world that doesn't rely on the meme-meat of standard western fantasy in the minds of players and GM requires repeated, lengthy, consistent exposure and habitation. I bet, anyway. You can't teach and reinforce new mechanics, and you can't easily tell what's working and what isn't, without that exposure. You can't build a web of relationships with characters and factions when you only talk to them a couple of hours a month. Trying to do all that anyway only results in frustration and fatigue for everyone involved; prep is the cost, play is the benefit, and I was deep in a sunken-cost fallacy for a long time.
This discord between intention and reality was without a doubt the biggest reason why the game started to feel like a chore. Why should I subject myself and my friends to salvaging a D&D game that wasn't working when I could be having a much better time with them playing a board game or watching Iron Chef or whatever?
Ability
GMing is a weird business. It requires (at least) two skillsets that, at least for me, seem to originate in totally unrelated parts of the brain: 1, the slow solitary creative artistic ability to dream up a detailed alien place full of people and things - to take a bunch of stolen and original elements that you think are cool and design/nurture them into an espalier over many periods of quiet, many periods of writing and rewriting, until you've made something detailed enough that the illusion of depth is achieved and it becomes a whole thing ----- and 2, the quick active social improvisational performative ability to present that thing to other people in real time and have them inhabit it and dynamically react/break/reform it realistically according to their actions in order to MAINTAIN the illusion of depth, so that it's not just a bunch of cool ideas you like and not just a novel made out of those cool ideas such that it becomes something new but something alive and responsive to other people doing story-telling with you!
What the fuck!!!
And there's another layer if you're playing in a system because without a bounding box of rules/cracks in the cliff there's not much to grab onto and you're left playing a storygame, which is fine. But if you want to activate the epiphany engine in the human brain you need to give it a problem and give it tools and you ask for a solution, so you have to design the tools too.
Turns out I am passably good at the first thing and much much less good at the second, and only kinda okay at the third, so I attempted to compensate by doing as much of the first thing ahead of time and leaning on what I'd written during play. I will say that out of everything, bantery NPC interactions were consistently enjoyable, but I suspect that's because bantery NPC interactions are only one or two steps removed to just talking and joking with your friends, which (and I don't know if many people know this) turns out you can just DO without having to invest in a make-believe elfgame.
Experience
What have we learned children, well I will tell you now
1. Calibrate the depth and complexity of your elfgame according to the ability of the parties involved to interact with it. The fewer spoons the people you're playing with have to spare for your game the more you should lean on established tropes, familiar ludonarrative concepts, and lower-impact decisions. Trying to force something complex and high-concept into a couple of hours in a tiny apartment with one shitty coffee table and not enough chairs is a recipe for disappointment.
2. Write your own stuff so that you feel most comfortable and natural while immersed in it. My attempt to take no less than three published or semi-published works with three sets of pre-conceived notions variously at odds with one another and synthesize something with a degree of internal consistency was never going to work seamlessly. Narratively, it might be generously argued that, at least externally, I appeared to successfully present a cohesive world to my players; mechanically, such a compliment could never be unblushingly paid. The rules were all over the fuckin place, and even if it looked from the outside like I had the fiction under control, the head-on mental collisions between the various source materials from which I airlifted the bulk of everything resulted in delays, flinches, inconsistencies, confusion, and arbitrary rulings.
3. Be good at both the creative and the dynamic aspects of the hobby. If you're lacking in one aspect, it's better to do your best to improve it rather than lean more heavily on the other to try and compensate. In my case, I learned that unless your prep constitutes hundreds of hours of work, huge planned out decision trees, plans and backup plans and backup backup plans, you cannot present your players with the kind of dynamic world that comes with experienced improvisation, and even if your prep IS that insane, A) you're going to burn out very quickly and B) your players will still do things you didn't account for.
Without the ability to make stuff up on the fly, to iterate on your ideas in the moment, you will inevitably begin to push your players away. Eventually this cements in the mind a creative hierarchy in which your fiction is absolute, where, because change and reactivity is uncomfortable to you, the other people playing the game become rogue agents who must be corralled and railroaded into the correct decision trees. The entire enterprise moves away from the collaborative and the magical and towards a powerpoint presentation.
4. Play on a real table. The table is so, so crucial. It establishes the spacetime it occupies as one in which we are engaged with each others imaginations. On it we spread our character sheets and random generation tables. Sitting at it, we are drawn into each other and mutually connected to a central stage where the dice-actors play their parts. The standard visually- and kinesthetically-pleasing height of around 30 inches off the ground unites our focus on each other and by extension on the shared imagined world; like any good set, the table we play on needs to disappear beneath the drama it facilitates.
This is the table WE played on and I hate it's stupid guts.
The slats mean you can't roll dice without either a bulky tray or bringing them to your lap and rolling them on a laptop or a book or something, which removes the dice, their result, and you yourself from play and the attention of the people you're playing with. It's so short that you need to bend your field of view away from the players around you and uncomfortably stoop, even from a seated position, to do anything on it; the height also means you can't pull right up to it because you'll hit your shins. It's too small to comfortably hold three people's character sheets (and beers and so on), much less five.
I hate this fucking table, but IN REALITY it is myself that I hate. It's a very bad gaming table, but no one in their right mind should ever ask it to do anything more complicated than sit in front of a couch and store books or whatever on the bottom shelf part. Like a bad parent, the table's failings are really my own. I was asking it to do things it was never designed or imagined to do, and yet I was also unwilling to buy a new table, a larger, more robust table, more suited to my table needs. After all, we only played twice a month.
If I run anything else in the near future, it will be a pared-down, simpler adventure, not a sandbox, and one either lifted fully from someone else's brain (Patrick Stuart's Demon Bone Sarcophagus should be arriving in my mailbox soon, I hope), or fully original, not stitched together from a bunch of other people's stuff. And it will be played on a well-lit, solid, roomy table.
