Monday Musings #154 🤬

Play / Run / X-Card.

Good Monday, Gamer!

Play. Run. X-Card. Forever.

You know the parlor game Kiss, Marry, Kill (AKA F/M/K). Three names. Pick one to do for the rest of your life. Pick one for fun. Pick one to send to the void. Every party in America for thirty years.

This Monday, it’s TTRPGs.

The rules: one game I’d play forever — receiver-side only, never picking up the screen. One game I’d run forever — the home address of my GM life. One game I’d X-Card forever — the one I’m tapping out of and not looking back.

Forever is the operative word. Not “favorite right now.” Not “currently in rotation.” Forever. The pick has to survive my future self, the next ten years of releases, the next ten years of my own taste shifting. Three games. Three verbs. No takebacks.

Here are mine.

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▌ RUN FOREVER — TWILIGHT: 2000 (Free League)

Of course, it’s Twilight: 2000.

Fifty-plus sessions with the Kalisz crew told me this answer years ago. Free League’s reboot of the 1984 grimdark Polish countryside is the game I’ve already chosen forever, by hours logged. Every other game on my shelf is in a polyamorous situationship with my GMing time. T2K is my main squeeze; my shawty; my Ace.

Every campaign I’ve run is better since my run on T2K — Black Sword Hack, Monster of the Week, Hallas through Moria, all of it — got better because T2K taught me what scarcity does to a sandbox. Fuel matters. Ammo matters. People matter. The encounter mechanics do the heavy lifting. The sandbox is alive. The whole machinery is built to let you sit back and let the players push and we all FAFO.

I will run T2K at the FLGS. I will run T2K online. I will run T2K at a con. I will run T2K when I’m 100 and the players are someone’s grandkids who don’t know what the Cold War was. I’ll run it in 2030, 2040, 2050. I will run it after the world ends.

You are on your own. You always were. That’s the game.

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▌ PLAY FOREVER — CARTEL

Cartel is the one where I want to be in the player’s seat, running, desperate and giggling.

Mark Diaz Truman’s PBTA take on narco-fiction, I’ve always respected from the GM side and always enjoyed from the player side. Some games you want to run because you can’t wait to see what you’d do with the prep. Other games you want to play because the fiction is the gift, like pumpkin cheesecake— and you want somebody else to hand it to you.

Cartel is that for me. The premise is tight: Durango, Mexico, the drug trade, the costs that come with the work, the cultures and sub-cultures. The playbooks are sharp. The system is asking moral questions that the GM should be steering, not me. I’m not quite the right voice to run this game, but I’ve met plenty of GMs who are. Mark Truman and the Magpie crew, to start with, do a great job of teaching the game and its culture, and letting situations get out of hand. Carmella, Miguel, and Vaughn are others who were ABSOLUTELY cooking one-shots at the con tables I sat at. Each bringing something new and fantastic culturally, sub-culturally, that blew my mind, I love them for that.

Forever doesn’t mean easy. It means I’d come back to this even when it’s hard, even when the table got somewhere uncomfortable, even when the genre is asking me what I think I’m doing here. Cartel, Sagas of the Icelanders, The Velvet Glove, Jiangshi, these games keep me honest about why I show up to a TTRPG at all. If I’m at a table that’s playing this game, I’m there to pick up what the game is putting down. Let’s ride.

I keep talking about wanting to see what the Black American culture TTRPG looks like — and one of the reasons I think about it is because Cartel exists and demonstrated that this register is possible. Specific. Rooted. Hard. Worth playing. Even if some folks hide from it.

I’ll play at this table forever.

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▌ X-CARD FOREVER — FREEMARKET

Sweet Cthulhu... For realz. I tried. I’m tapping out.

The X-Card protocol doesn’t require an explanation. I’m at this table. I’m not going to play this thing. No further conversation. And then the game moves on. Which means I could stop right here.

But forever deserves a sentence or three. So:

Freemarket — Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen’s 2010 post-scarcity TTRPG, the one with the cards and the reputation tracks and the whole Donaldsonist memetics of it — has long since been sold from my stash. I have played a handful of sessions and campaigns. I have read the rules cover to cover. I have read other people’s actual plays. I have tried to figure out what I was missing. I have tried to give it the benefit of the doubt I give every Luke Crane joint, because Burning Wheel rewired me, and I wanna be transformed.

And every time, the game failed me.

The reputation economy didn’t engage me. The card mechanic felt like a procedure I was performing on top of the fiction instead of through it. The post-scarcity setting kept asking me to care about social currency in a way the table never made matter. WHAT DO I DO???

Other people love this game. They’re not wrong. There’s a real audience for it. I’m just not it. I don’t dig okra either.

That’s why I’m X-Carding instead of burning. Burning (Kill) a game says this is bad for the hobby. X-Carding a game says this is fine for the hobby, but it isn’t for me, and I’m done explaining why. Forever doesn’t have room for the ones I’m still hoping will click.

The X-card is on the table. I’m out. ✌🏽

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but forever is a mighty long time...

The point of forever isn’t about the choices. It’s about what the choices make you admit.

Picking T2K to run forever means I admit the kind of GM I am. I’m a sandbox-and-crunch guy. The other things I run are vacations. My home address is the WW III that never was.

Picking Cartel to play forever means there are tables I belong at as a player. The good GMs in my life have been a gift. I want to be on the receiving end of someone else’s take for the rest of my playing life, in a cultural/diverse register that I respect too much to drive. A high-octane, frenetic, desperate session is just 👨🏽‍🍳🤌💋 — I want this shyt forever, mane.

X-Carding Freemarket forever means I admit which games I’ll never get and I’m done being polite about it. There are too many games. The shelf is too deep. Forever doesn’t have room for the maybes. I only got so many Saturdays left.

What are yours? Drop them in the comments. Play forever, run forever, X-Card forever. No takebacks.

2 Mondays Left.

Catch ya next week!