This afternoon, I ran a game of Lasers and Feelings for a couple of friends. It was the first time I’d really had fun GMing in quite a while. The game was rather silly, as the system is geared towards, and ended up parodying anime and early Star Trek (though that’s kind of part of the game). It was a lot of fun to run. It was a lot of laughing, and joking, and being silly, so it was truly enjoyable. Lately I’ve been trying to run more heavy games, that focus on political intrigue and other more weighty things. And because this hasn’t been gelling with my group, and because I haven’t figured out exactly how to run it, it has been really hard for me to get excited for each session. And much of my prep time is spent thinking how to even get my players to be engaged, not actually prepping for the game.

And so because of this, I haven’t been loving RPGs as much as I did. While I used to look forward to each session, now I dread it because I don’t know what to do, or if my players will even care. But with this, I just threw myself into it, I made almost everything up on the fly, and it was tons of fun. It felt like back when I first started playing RPGs, when I made a lot of it up, and joked around, and it was fun. Nowadays, I don’t feel as though I can make much up. And the attendance at my games is so sporadic, and my players seem so disinterested that I often find myself slipping into that uncaring attitude as well. And so it’s been tough to really get into, but Lasers and Feelings helped me realize something: Who gives a shit, do what’s fun, make it exciting, and improv a lot. This used to be more my attitude, where I’d go into a session with some ideas, but then I’d just make it up as I went, and that was part of the fun. Constantly thinking, and making up shit. Hell, I used to make up hooks and whole story lines as it struck me. Now, I try to plan for everything, I still improvise certain things, but it has to be with the plan.

And that’s a problem, if it doesn’t go according to plan, I don’t often make something interesting happen to keep them on track. I don’t throw an enemy ship at them because there’s not another enemy for them to fight, or make their target suddenly sprint out of the alleyway when they can’t find him. But Lasers and Feelings taught me to say ‘fuck the plan,’ and do the thing that’s more interesting. To instead of waiting for them to figure out what to do, to throw something at them to make them act. The problem with that is, I’m always hoping for a more active plot. Most RPG plots seem to me to be very reactionary, you are only doing something because something else in the world is acting. The players are always responding to others, not the other way around. And that bores me, I’d much rather see my players take more active roles in the world. But it seems that players, at least my current group, are not exactly up to that. So the GM must make things for them to react to.

But I think there’s another part of my GMing that has changed: I no longer always want my players to ‘fail forward.’ It used to be that if they botched a roll, or did something dumb, I’d find a way to move them forward. But now I often find myself thinking: “That was such a dumb thing to do! I shouldn’t reward them for that!” Lasers and Feelings does include the rule of ‘failing forward,’ and so I did that for my players. But in my more serious campaign, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to reward them for screwing up. At least not most of the time. But it seems my players aren’t fond of this, two of the times they’ve had the most fun in my most recent campaign was when I failed them forward incredibly hard. But maybe this is just a part of GMing, you have to fail players forward, you can’t have them screw up too much. But there’s a hard balance there, where I don’t want them to always win (even if they seem to want to), but still be able to progress. And I feel as though I’ve either failed them forward too much, or not nearly enough. So that’s something I will have to work on.

But anyway, I must thank Lasers and Feelings for allowing me to love RPGs again, and for teaching me so much.