Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

A group of beautiful people in our Slack put together this AMAZING Gauntlet FAQ. It’s the most comprehensive resource for our community I have yet to encounter.

Huge thanks to Tomer Gurantz Andi Carrison Lauren McManamon Gerrit Reininghaus and Lowell Francis

Go check it out!

Gauntlet Hangouts Expectations and B-Side Games

Hi Everyone!

We haven’t had a good chat about Gauntlet Hangouts in awhile, and since it has been growing like crazy, it’s probably a good time to do so.

Let’s talk about expectations. If you sign up for a game, you are telling the game runner: “Please use your valuable time to prepare a session for me.” When you cancel an RSVP, even for a very good reason, you may have wasted the GM’s time. Life happens, I get that; no one is asking anyone to sacrifice more than a little bit of their free time to play in a game. But if you find yourself repeatedly having to cancel your RSVPs, you definitely need to make an honest appraisal of whether the Gauntlet Hangouts calendar is a good fit for you. It could be that you instead sign up on some waitlists, or maybe you try to get in some off-the-books games being organized in Slack (for those of you in our Slack). And if you do have to cancel an RSVP, please make an effort, either on Slack or G+, to get your seat filled.

For GMs, if you put something on the calendar, you have even more pressure to make sure a game happens. I occasionally have to cancel a session, but usually only for highly exceptional circumstances (and even then, I feel like shit about it). If you have a few people missing from your session, that is not a good reason to cancel it. When you signed up to be a GM on our calendar, you committed to an open table play culture. And part of being in that play culture is that you have to learn to be a little flexible. Now, there are lots of great tips and tricks for making a session of an ongoing campaign work with missing players, and I invite folks to share some of those tips in the comments. But for my part, I want to talk about something different…

B-Side Games

I want everyone in Gauntlet Hangouts, GMs and players alike, to consider their RPG toolbox. Speaking for myself, I have about a half-dozen games in my toolbox that fit the following criteria: 1) I know the rules cold, 2) I have online play sheets ready to grab and go, 3) they work well as a one-shot, and 4) they work well for smaller groups. I’m calling these my B-Side games. In other words, we all purchased “We Will Rock You,” but “We Are the Champions” turned out to be a good song, too.

For the GM, B-Side games are really important. They are one of the things that make you a well-rounded, rockstar GM. And think about it: the players who did show up really deserve your efforts here. Trust me: they came to play a game. I’m sure they’ll be a little bummed out about not getting “Hello, Goodbye,” but you’re going to give them “I Am the Walrus” instead, and it might blow their fucking minds.

But I’m looking at players here, too: Just because you don’t run games on Gauntlet Hangouts doesn’t mean you’re not an important part of this community. I want to encourage you to develop your own list of B-Sides. What if the GM has to cancel for some reason? There’s no reason the players shouldn’t still have fun. What if, as above, a couple people drop, making it hard to continue the campaign that session? Turn it into an opportunity to try out that weird little GM-less game you have wanted to get to the table for awhile.

In short, being a good, giving member of the Gauntlet Hangouts community means being prepared and being able to adjust.

Anyway, I encourage you all to discuss this in the comments. As always, please be kind to each other, and please don’t make this about you. If you have had to cancel some RSVPs lately, or you had to cancel a session, we’re not asking you to chime in and explain yourself. This is a broader discussion than that.

(And thanks to Maxime, Maria, and Mathias for helping with the B-Side concept).

Cc: Lowell Francis

Hey folks! I’m going to be a guest at Queen City Conquest this year!

Queen City Conquest is taking place September 7th, 8th, and 9th. I’ll be around for all three days of the Con, playing games and hanging out. In addition to me, Kate Bullock and Rach Shelkey will be there from our network, as well as the crew from Misdirected Mark ( Christopher Sniezak, Phil Vecchione Senda Linaugh and more).

They are currently running a KS to fund the Con. You can check it out at the link below.

Let’s hang out in Buffalo!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leg/the-queen-city-conquest-2018?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=queen+city+conquest

We’d like to do some crowdsourcing for the miscellany in Codex – Moonlight. The miscellany is called “Three Dozen Truths Revealed by the Light of the Moon.” Submissions need to be a single sentence, or 2-3 short sentences. By submitting here, you’re agreeing to let us use it (you’ll get a credit on the issue). We’re looking for evocative things; the purpose of the miscellany is to inspire the reader.

Here are some examples:

“By day, the waterfall on the Crystal River is a beautiful spot frequented by young couples. But in the light of the full moon, a shadow can be seen moving behind the cascade, following your movements in a menacing way.”

“The sandstone obelisk is a vestige of the tribe that used to populate these lands. By day, it is a curiosity. By night, a vibration coming from the center of it can be detected with specialist equipment, unless there is a full moon, in which case the obelisk, and everything within three-hundred yards of it, is eerily quiet.”

“Jean Livingston is an ordinary woman. She has an ordinary job, an ordinary car, and when she comes home at night, she spends time with her ordinary cat. Unless it’s the night of the anniversary of when her husband and children were brutally murdered, in which case she goes into the backyard to greet them, their forms silhouetted in moonlight, and begs them for forgiveness, which she never receives.”

(Thanks to the Slack crew for helping come up with this miscellany idea and to Cat Ramen for the first example above.)

The Gauntlet After Dark

I have this super-sad feeling in my heart right now. The Gauntlet is growing, which makes me happy, but as it does so, I feel more and more distant from the new people who are joining up. It used to be I had the time to at least join in a game with them or do little check-ins from time to time, but my bandwidth is basically tapped at this point. I’m super-lucky that folks like Lowell Francis and Kate Bullock have helped fill the leadership role, folks like Tomer Gurantz are welcoming/orienting people, and folks like Tyler Lominack are the new rockstar GMs, but I feel actual sadness that I can’t be the person anymore. It hasn’t been that long since the Gauntlet was just a small group of friends in Houston, you know?

I look on with amazement at all the cool games that are being organized on our Slack and on the calendar, listen to how excited the participants are, breaking down their sessions, talking about their upcoming games and projects, and just generally bonding… and I’m not a part of it. I know, to some degree, it’s my basic narcissism talking here. I have spent so much time being at the center of everything we do, it’s kind of terrifying to think it might work fine without me. But I am also genuinely bummed out that I don’t get to take part in these new stories and experiences. Everyone gets a little bit of me through the podcasts, but I can’t have a little bit of everyone, and that sucks.

I know this just sounds like unnecessary whining, but the folks who have been around for awhile know how important the personal connection is to me. They know how sad I am feeling right now.

(And if anyone is wondering where this sudden outburst of emotion is coming from, it’s because Sean Nittner joined our Slack, which got me thinking about Narrative Control, which got me thinking about the early days of the Gauntlet when Narrative Control was so important to shaping what we were doing.)