Ruminations I

31 characters. 31 games. 31 days. This didn't seem all that hard when I first heard of it at the end of December, provided I did some planning.

The Planning

In retrospect perhaps sticking to the “31 games” thing was a bad idea, because even with the planning it added unnecessary overhead: either learning new rules while creating the characters in my Copious Free Time, or re-familiarizing myself with rules that I hadn't touched in decades. It might have been easier (though perhaps not as interesting) to stick with games I knew well and made several characters for them. Still, between planning and a little bit of cheating, I got it done.

For the planning part, I started making the characters in advance, building up a queue of characters to present. I also selected several “beer and pretzel” games (the 1PG games, Kobolds Ate My Baby!, and Ninja Burger) to quickly generate characters for days I fell behind. Between both tactics I got 30 days done fairly easily (though I almost didn't make the 18th's goal, Mythras was more difficult than I thought it would be, quite different from the BRP-alike I'd presumed it was).

And then there was the cheating. My personal goal was 31 games. But nobody said anything about 31 different game systems. All the 1PG games share the same system: learn one, and the rest are tiny variations on the same game. They're thematic skins over a simple core game. The same applies to the two XPG games, as well as to Ninja Burger vs. Kobolds Ate My Baby!, (though XPG is a more complicated and more serious system). Finally both Mazes & Minotaurs and Vikings & Valkyries are the same game (indeed you can't use the latter without having the rules to the former: it's more like a supplement). By cheating I cut down the amount of learning/familiarization time to be tolerable with only one serious risk of failing to meet the schedule, and one minor one.

The Games

My selection process was essentially whimsy. While I had some games that were “must have” in my list (Mazes & Minotaurs, HARP, and my grand finale with Chivalry & Sorcery), mostly I just opened sizable list of gaming PDFs and browsed, picking things at a whimsy. This has led to some retrospective regrets.

For example with FGU games, which were the gaming backdrop of most of my gaming life, I picked two games (Wild West and Gangster!) that in retrospect I'd not have chosen. This was out of curiosity of what they were really like, since I'd never actually played them, only having read the first, and kind of flipped through the latter. My absolute favourite FGU game—Psi World—didn't make it into the queue, as a result, because I spent so much time with these two rather substandard games. Wild West is … OK, but it's not a game I'd ever play with its gimmicky way of working out your chances to succeed, and Gangster! is an incoherent pile of nonsense. There's barely a game there, and what's there is … well, I'll leave the allusions to faecal matter to your imagination. It's just a very large pile of that imagination.

Additionally, Space Opera, despite being a game that brought me many hours of joy in the past, was probably also a bad choice because I let multiple decades of not using it blunt the memory of how astonishingly badly-written and badly-edited the game is. It's a game infamously complicated, but much of the complexity could have been mitigated had information been presented in a fashion that didn't resemble computer software documentation: a pile of technical jargon and drivel splattered over the page like the writers had the authorial version of dysentry. (Yes. Another faecal reference. I need to tone those down I think, if I want to be taken seriously … while talking about pretendy fun-time games.)

As the number of slots began to run out near the end, along with the time to fill them, I made difficult choices. I made, for example, a CORPS character, but I really also wanted to make one from the same company called EABA. Both games, however, take a sizable effort to make characters in, with the latter requiring more, so I whittled it down to one.

Still, I think that I made a decent enough selection showing enough breadth to illustrate both the diversity of games available and the diversity of characters you could make to play in them. Which brings us neatly to …

The Characters

I'll be going into more detail into some of this later, but I personally think I did OK here. (I even managed to make a few male characters despite, you know, being pretty shit at playing them.) I made:

(The numbers won't add up to 31 because there's overlap. My final character, Alruna, for example, slots in as a mage and as a priestess.)

This is not bad in terms of breadth of character types. In addition, even when a category has multiple entries, there's a large difference across individual characters: all five of those who count as “priestesses”, for example, in some form or another are quite different characters, ranging from naive and newly untested to battle-hardened.

So which of these are my favourites? That's a question for a later rumination. I strove with each one to make a character I would want to play. I succeeded, I think, in most of them. (Why a later rumination? Because I want to talk about that and about how the game systems impacted which ones I connected to and which I didn't. The conclusions will not be the obvious ones.)

One major thing I've come out of with this challenge is … “never again”. Not “never again will I partake of this challenge”. More “never again will I commit (to myself) to 31 different games”. Making the characters was fun. Making them for 31 different games was insanity. I'll stick to at most five games I know well instead of this insanity.