I should be writing about GenCon. I should be writing about the Appendix N Jam, or like, reading other peoples' entries and rating them. Instead, after talking with people about the ideas I was noodling on in the last post (which I will summarize in a sec, hold your horses), I have stumbled into some maybe real sicko mode things that we could be doing at every event or even FOR specific events.
Last time around, I had brought up the idea that there are a few disparate movements I would like to see function together at one time: people making business card dungeons, or bookmark tables, or just regular one page rulesets, or people still tooling away on their GLOG hacks. There's any number of ways these things could combine, but my big point is making sure that however they do, they would be 1. not mutually incompatible and 2. made to be traded around. In my mind, there's basically two flavors of implementation for this kind of thing: fully virtual or IRL collect-a-thon.
Fully Virtual
Basically, what we have right now is the fully virtual version of this even if we don't have it coordinated in such a way as to be a logical way to deploy it - people are already doing things like collecting 1-page RPGs or specific mechanics and the like via Itch or from blogposts or - dare I say it - YouTube and writing them down or printing them out for their own use (or, y'know, bookmarking them online). People create something and blast it out into the ether, someone else finds it and picks it up and puts it in their pocket. Game jams provide a way to sort of localize this kind of stuff, but it's basically an unlimited resource once it's out there - there's an infinite time scale, and people really just have to hunt around for what they want.
IRL Collect-a-thon
The other way to do this is something that I alluded to folks like Shing Yin Khor doing in my last post with their "a short rest" booster packs, and is what is the thing that fascinates me more - in this case, you have people designing and printing things ahead of time, then bringing them somewhere and trading them around (or, in Shing's case, selling them - I know this kind of movement is generally anti-capitalist, or at least anti-money, but bear with me on this one, it'll make sense in a sec) with other people. This can be done in a few ways: either you're giving out your business card that has a dual purpose of providing content; you're including it as a bonus as a part of a sale or some other interaction; or you're just trading stuff around for the love of the game. This also overlaps with things like stamp rallies at conventions - a group of creators could come together to create things that are related, so if you go to all of them, you can make some kind of greater project - whether that means it's a full dungeon, or a zine, or whatever. Likewise, you can swap stuff with your friends - if your one friend is really big into spaceships but you're into writing fanfiction about your original character Blonan the Blarbarian, maybe you make a business-card-sized space hulk and your friend makes a d66 table of Cursed Sword Generation and you swap them. Cool, right?
Getting Perilously Close to LARPing
I don't really get LARPs - like, conceptually, sure, but from what I've heard from a few friends of mine, it seems a lot like there aren't any concrete rules written down anywhere to make these kinds of things a replicable experience - yeah, there's different schools of LARPs, but mostly it seems like someone assigns you a character ahead of time, you go make a costume and show up and improvise a whole character and most of the games end in you banging your friends for real but also definitely in character but also definitely not in character. Maybe I just know a bunch of the horniest LARPers, I don't know - regardless, that's not really my thing so I haven't looked into it. BUT, I bring this up because in the context of these bespoke rule and dungeon creation things, it occurs to me that there's a whole other tier of LARP that exists that DOES do what I'm talking about, it's just all oral tradition - immersive experiences like you get at Wasteland Weekend, Omega Mart, and that kind of thing. See, rather than writing down rules and trading them around, you DO have a staff of people who understand the rules and who act as questgivers and whatnot, and they convey those rules to people who choose to interact with them...but unless you're somewhere that gives you little trinkets for whatever you do, there's not, like, a tangible marker of the rules you've interacted with outside of the totemic representation of the questline in the form of said trinket.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
It's Not An Alternate Reality Game if it's Actually Reality
With a concerted effort, one could, were one so inclined, get people together under a shared premise (say, like a game jam), give people parameters to work inside, then all agree to meet up somewhere (say, PAX Unplugged) to share their inventions around. Essentially, everyone gets to build a bespoke set of rules that they have access to. Meanwhile, if there were another group of people, say, some sort of group of facilitators that provided dungeons or additional rules, then as people traded around their little bespoke rule cards they might encounter these facilitators who, if people had rule cards with mechanics for overcoming whatever dungeon they had on them, could win a copy of the dungeon and maybe a special mechanic card which could help them overcome other facilitators. It's not LARPing, necessarily - you're still you, it's just that you might need to have a rule on you for doing something like climbing walls in a dungeon, and if you find one of these roving facilitators and they tell you that the dungeon they're running has a wall you need to climb, then you can use that game mechanic (however it's written) and once you beat it then you can proceed. Or maybe you have something else - that wall is still there, but maybe you've traded your buddy for a mechanic card that has rules for creating explosives that can blow up the wall!
What I'm saying is, you could have groups of roving Game Masters with their own little mini dungeons, and you can have people who go and make mechanics about stuff they think is cool, and you could trade things with your friends and complete the little dungeons and get them as rewards and at the end of the day you've not only had a fun little live gaming experience, you also HAVE ALL OF THOSE MECHANICS AND DUNGEONS TO USE IN YOUR HOME GAMES. And maybe you stick all of those little cards in a binder or a Pokemon card binder or whatever and you bring it to the next meetup and you can show off all the stuff you can do and maybe you trade for something with your friend or maybe you replicate little booster packs of your favorite mechanics and hand them out to people but the point is that YOU are making all of these things, YOU are sharing all of these things, and each thing you make and share is unique to interacting with YOU even if it's something you copied from someone else because you thought it was useful enough to want to share with people!
Maybe I just have the post-con madness, but I really feel like this could be something. And then, you can invest in nice things to keep all your business card rules in - whether that's what I did with the A5 notebook with all the pockets or if you go the fancy route and get a padfolio that has room for all your fancy pens and notebooks and stuff and you can show THAT off to your friends too! Or go oldschool and slap all that mess in a Trapper Keeper! Whatever works!
OK. That's all for now. Get at me if this is also giving you The Madness.
Stay weird out there.
