Old Dogs, New Tricks: Playing the Game I Want To

Tonight, the G+ Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad campaign was absolute blast, a sheer joy that proved to me (again) that I love to DM and I really enjoy playing with the players of that campaign, but it didn't start that way. The way I saw it (from my side of the computer screen), it started to become a crazy-great time when I  started playing the game I wanted to play and started to play it in the way I wanted to.

I know, that sounds like child's play, like I should have known it already, like I should have already been doing it, but it's harder than you think, particularly in hangout gaming where you only know so much about the other folks you're playing with.

What's the game I want to play when I'm running DCC? It's a wild and crazy game of swords, sorcery and science fiction where mind-warping trans-dimensional tentacle beasts have as much a place as barbarians and horses and every wizard works magic by reshaping reality and shredding the laws of physics. It's a game where I get to use long-winded words and crooked imagery to describe brain-addling scope of the totality of cosmological truths and why that's both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a game where flocks of monkeys chase you into monstrous sundew liers-in-wait which attempt to digest you; but don't worry, you can sneak up on the monkeys and garrote their heads off and knock them out of the trees, making a snack for those sundews so you can get away.

That's my game, not some average vanilla fantasy, and tonight's session became amazing as soon as I let it.

As a result of letting the game be what I wanted it to be, I now get to create a table that determines what happens to the players when they decide its time to eat the dimensional-horror-down-a-well's severed tentacle.

Damn good times.

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