This week has been momentous and positive for me as I began to once again run games for both friends and students. The big question that’s hovering over my head is what to do with my Solo Sunday time. This has got me feeling worried…
There are three ideas competing for attention:
- Continuing to play with the GURPS-powered Urban Fantasy idea I started and posted on RPR’s Solo Tales this past month.
- Developing my experiments with minimalist rules and Otherworld-immersion that have been noodling around for some months.
- Picking up D&D and just running another game in my newly created world of Fellmyr.
The first one is about pleasing the listeners and avoiding the complaint that after beating the GURPS drum for the past year or more, I really should get that game rolling. It’s the “should” that bothers me because it smacks of unhelpful thinking about imagined expectations from others.
The second idea is appealing because I want to go and fiddle with Mythic and Fudge, playing around with descriptive attributes (words, not numbers) and freewheeling my own rules from those toolkits. The worry is that this will distract me from the focus I have plus lead me down the rabbit-holes I so often encounter when I try to do my own rules.
The third idea is appealing because it’s simple and easy to play. It’s the thought that solo is a good way to develop your own fantasy world, adding details and exploring it as you play, that draws me in. I could also argue that it’s a good way to practice the rules and procedures of play for social games set in that world.
Overall… I am torn and uncertain. Typically I expect to end up doing none of the above and simply feeling paralysed. This is the agony of anxiety which for those who are not sufferers probably seems preposterous. Let’s try to apply some reasoning and focus on the facts.
Firstly, we can notice the “should and musts” in my thinking – am I simply setting up unreasonable expectations based on imagined desires from listeners and friends? Probably.
The question is really one of what might be most enjoyable and/or useful. I can’t really know what I will enjoy until I play, so that attempt at prediction is also not terribly helpful because I can’t know what I will feel or experience in the future. To cap it off, this decision is feeling like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill: am I exaggerating the negatives and ignoring positives?
The fact is that Solo Sunday is free discretionary time that I am permitted to use however I like because, frankly, I am an adult. Memories of past failures and all those rabbit holes are certainly ideas that make me feel bad, but they are not actually happening right now. Projecting past memories into the imagined future is not helpful either.
Perhaps the best choice tonight is to place the options on the table and then see what appeals when I get up in the morning. Perhaps there will be a fourth idea that I haven’t considered between then and now. Maybe I could simply pick up something at random and see where that takes me.
But I wanted to air the experience I face almost every Saturday night. I tend to find that a worry exposed is a worry challenged.
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
As someone who started listening to your podcast for GURPS content, I’d say playing any game because of other people’s expectations isn’t a great idea, especially for a solo game. What’s most ‘useful’ doesn’t sound like a good criterion for play either. Play to have fun.
Is there a reason you feel that you have to commit to the same game every Sunday? Personally, if I had those choices, I think I’d just play whatever calls to me most in the moment, and potentially change it up every Sunday, depending on my mood.
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I probably feel that I “should” play something consistently because of the underlying belief that RPGs are best played over a longer sequence of sessions. An hour or so isn’t a very long period for anything, so it seems reasonable to string sessions together.
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