Game Aspirations for Summer

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”

— Heraclitus

A toast to summertime
gaming aspirations.

Our much-manipulated academic schedule calls for the local public school year to end before Memorial Day (and begin the first week in August…don’t get me started). So we’re already considering father-son gaming and history activities to stay engaged over the summer. I remain thankful my teenage son has cultivated an interest in history, one that, over the years, has matured beyond simply visiting sites and playing games into a more critical examination of our past and how we can explore it on the gaming table. This offers me some comfort in my ever-challenging efforts to engage him in anything beyond sleeping, spending time on his electronic devices, and asking what’s for dinner. He has, surprisingly, voiced an interest in several activities that would involve him in somewhat productive intellectual activity (and pry him away from his devices). Right now we have a list of very flexible objectives, but it’s a start in providing some structure to what can easily become a summer of lazy days.

The Personal View of Sweeping Events

 “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill

What's it like to lead the advance at
the Battle of Great Bridge?

Too often I see history education in America focusing on broad events and key figures, the sweeping view of events, with little if any time spent on a more personal perspective of those average people living that history. I fear this has become a greater issue in the age of Standards of Learning (SOL) tests (“No Standardized Test Left Behind…”), which emphasize educators “teach to the test,” covering the basics every student should know with limited time for developing critical thinking skills about that material. (Though I’ll freely admit my own education in the latter quarter of the 20th century bore hallmarks of simply hitting the marks, with a few notable exceptions.) Certainly some exceptional teachers inspire students to take a closer look at historical topics, especially zooming in from the macro view of great events to the micro perspective of individuals who lived through history. A personal view can engage our empathy, give us a more relatable impression of history beyond names, events, and dates, and challenge us to ask questions, investigate further, and reflect on relevant issues...important to better inform our current situation and our inevitable slog into the future. Games can help us relate to that personal perspective, though we cannot appreciate it without at least a general knowledge of history to provide context.

Scenarios & the “General Idea”

 “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”

— Seneca

Everyone holds an opinion about roleplaying game adventure design, some quite vehemently, some quite inflexibly, some by ease of writing or preference for play outcomes at their own tables. Certain games encourage a particular format to which, understandably, writers try to adhere whether writing for the publisher or simply creating something familiar for fans. In the 50-year history of roleplaying games many adventure formats have emerged and evolved, sometimes tied to the ever-changing style of such games. Designing adventures can offer a somewhat displaced challenge; one essentially writes a kind of instruction manual for someone else to run themed action at the game table, a kind of toolkit to enabling a gamemaster to evoke a particular experience with players and their characters. Some prefer a step-by-step approach through encounters, others like a more free-form “sandbox” arrangement. Adventures require some degree of preparation from a gamemaster, even if it’s simply familiarizing themselves with a published game world...or jotting down notes of their own. I’ve done my share of designing and writing adventures, some for publication, others just for friends; lately I’ve been toying with different techniques, as I’ve mentioned before. Sometimes for games — as in other aspects of life — it helps to look at history, to see how others approached challenges, for insight on issues we face. I looked to roleplaying games’ pre-history, back in the days when wargaming slowly emerged from a Europe ravaged by Napoleon’s armies. And the idea of the scenario tied to a “General idea” seems core to designing an adventure serving as gamemaster resource for greater player agency.