The unspoken campaign

The game is running as smoothly as can be expected. Everyone is having fun, every week you get together, catch up with your friends, possibly eat some kind of meat-splosion. You play the game, push the story along, roll some dice, have some victories, catch a few defeats, you laugh and play a little bit too late and go home to get too little sleep. The next week the game is mostly forgotten, but here and there you think about what you are going to do with your character, how you are going to tackle the next challenge. Maybe you shoot a few emails back and forth before you pack up your dice and do it all again the next week. The game keeps on going like this for weeks and weeks, and eventually years and years, building up into one of those epic games you talk about for the rest of your life.

Or

The game is running smoothly, you meet, you eat, you play, you clatter dice and everything is great. Then at the end of the night someone says, “Hey I just picked up Whaling Red Seas, the game about steampunk space whaling on mars. I'm thinking about running it when this campaign ends.” Now you go home tired, get too little sleep and go about your week. Only now instead of thinking about what your character is going to do in the upcoming game, you are considering what character you are going to play, Martian dolphin shaman, Chunkor the one armed harpoonsman, Cogmartial Goodman hunting down a rogue difference engine? You might think of the minor quibbles you have with the current game and how Red Seas would fix them. You might email character concepts around, then someone might email you back, and soon there is a growing snowball of enthusiasm. You miss a few weeks of your current game due to the holidays or vacations, and next thing you know, the epic campaign is dead, and you are on to the next thing. Soon space whales are replaced by supers in the dustbowl which is replaced by cavity creeps the rpg... and you are a serial next big thing gamer.

Now I can't help it, I love trying new games and systems, I have long since accepted my fate as a next big thing gamer. However I hate that feeling when a game isn't working quite right and the game dies before its time, it never feels good to have a game die early. Perhaps it is unfair to the games that I'm playing to be constantly playing the next game in my head. It almost certainly is bad for the current game to talk about future games.

The long open ended game is great. I love the long term building of a character, the chance to build a bigger story, the freedom to wander down random little corners of the world. The short term game is great too, the chance to tell a focused story, to try new things, to maybe play a character who is a little reckless. We are telling a story together, and that includes the time not at the table. So we need to keep focused on keeping our current games going strong rather than looking into the future. Next time I'll try to keep the extra games in my head, or somehow find more time for gaming!