Some things just stick with you.
Torchbearer and I have had a contentious relationship, as recorded previously. At the time I logged my issues with the super-focus on dungeoncrawling, the advancement system, and the Grind. Ironically enough, these are the reasons I'm going back. After trying some old school stuff and spending some years learning a bit more about why I play games, I'm going back.
Dungeoncrawling
This is probably the most unexpected change, at least for me. As I stated in that previous post (it's linked above, go read it) I generally don't like being told what to run. At the time I wanted a more open and general system, within a genre.
Well, guess what?
I made Crescendo. I run it four times a month.
I don't particularly need a "general" game. And, having spent years looking into old school stuff and dungeon crawling, I've come to a different appreciation for dungeons, specifically. My appreciation has changed from "running Zelda puzzles" to "Oh cool, a mythic underworld that can do things that the overworld can't!". It's a shift in what I want, and it's the least rational of my reasons, but it's fundamentally the most important one.
Advancement System
Five years ago, the advancement system of Torchbearer really bothered me. A number of passes and fails that you have to take to advance? Why??? That's a lot of tracking. And it is, don't get me wrong. That's a lot to put on players. But, years later, I've learned these are the kinds of things you just have to trust people with. You help when you can, but you leave the systems at their fingertips, and they either play or they don't.
And if they don't, it's no skin off my nose.
I like the system. It leaves things completely under player control, and makes them need to learn the Trait system, so that they can leverage it fully. Is it clunky? Sure. Does it force engagement? Yes.
It's not my favorite part of the system, but it sure does ensure play that I care about more, as I get older.
Play or get out.
The Grind
This may be the biggest turnaround from the original post. I have done a total 180. At the time, I was very much in the school of “narrate till the GM calls for a roll”. In that framework, I came to hate what Torchbearer was doing: why have all these rules if narration was expected to be the primary method of play?
I have since come to disagree with this manner of playing, to a degree that almost excises me from storygaming. For awhile I thought it did, so I looked rather extensively into the oldschool. And I almost thought I was one of them.
Almost. But Not Quite.
See, the thing that I found was that, ultimately, the oldschool was too tactical for me. The oldschool, as a movement, are quite tactical. Which makes sense! The rules are derived from Chainmail, all told. ODnD calls itself a wargame. The goal of the rules is not to impart an emotion, but to create a tactical situation you have to navigate. You can create emotional connections to what you’re doing, but the OSR stories are (shockingly!) going to create the effect of a Tony Bath campaign, if you are if you are running the systems as written
The theme of the OSR is war.
And that realization came about because of seeing the OSR at its best: ACKSII. Macris’s magnum opus is a serious work, and pretending there’s any modern contender for its scale is silly. If there’s any modern example of Tony Bath personified, it’s ACKSII. And I played twelve glorious sessions of it… and then stopped.
But why?
The Need to Return to a Moment
At the time, I couldn’t have been able to say. My emotional impulses have been much harder for me to read post-2016, so I accepted this was where I was at, and moved on.
And then this moment happened in The Fall of the King of Sota, where the Sword of Uriel was drawn and used.
This little moment set off some major fireworks in my mind and heart. It wasn’t the only moment this had happened, but this time the moment woke up something different within me.
See, over the last five years one moment from that last Torchbearer game had been living in my head.
Stephanie’s “Jedi” had been lowered down a rope to the top of an enormous stalagmite. She stood in a sea of black. She had no way of knowing how far it was to the bottom; her torch simply didn’t reach that far. They were on turn 2 of The Grind: not so far as to get worried, but far enough to where if something happened Stephanie was gonna feel it.
So of course I dropped The Big Bad of the dungeon right on her head… and they had a talk. Turns out he hadn’t meant to cause all the problems that had occasioned the dungeon delve in the first place. He had woken up and started burrowing up.
Oh, and he was a creature of plague and pestilence.
And he liked Stephanie’s Jedi.
What made this moment stick out, years later,
was the history up to it and the ludonarrative coherence around it. Torchbearer’s language is one of exhaustion. If your narration is less than perfect, it costs. Hurts. Cripples. But it also is why advancement happens, why Fate and Persona points are handed out. You are constantly looking at the how limited your time is. You measure the world in time passing. Not even literal hours, the feeling that time has been pressing on you until you collapse.
So when something totally unknown comes out of the dark, the first thing that pops into your head is "Oh God, I'm so tired already". There was a dread. "If she gets hurt, her exhaustion may kill her before she ever gets back to us." Everyone knew exactly what was at stake, and they were absolutely terrified for Stephanie.
For the last five year I haven't been able to find that feeling anywhere else. Anywhere. And what I thought of as the annoying parts of that experience was the reason why I was able to have it in the first place.
I spent five years running away from Torchbearer's friction, only to realize the friction was the engine of the exact feeling I'd been searching for.
Oops.
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