Evil Labyrinth - Observations and Thoughts on Arcade Gaming Session Reports
Last Sunday, the 24th, Nathan ran the first session of his Evil Labyrinth: Of Gods and Monsters campaign, a very "back to basics" arcade style game where we begin with dungeon crawling, then will move onto wilderness exploration in mid-levels and presumably domains at high level? We'll see! I played in that session, and plan on playing in future ones too. As someone who likes to write session reports about the games I play, this has presented me with a strange conundrum however.
Something Like a Session Report
But before we get into that, let's go over the actual session. That first session was appropriately insane, with 13 players attending for the first two hours, then after a break a few of us left, yet there were still 9 more players effectively running a second session of an hour and thirty minutes.
In those two hours our rather impressive gaggle of adventurers killed a few beakdogs, some giant spiders and eventually solved a clever puzzle involving said spiders to open a secret door and find an incestuous Revenant which we proceeded to dogpile on to overcome it's 4 dice of Supernatural HD and claim his cool loot, followed by a wonderful highlight of the two Chefs in the party rolling off to try and suck in the revenant to gain it's power, in a scene resembling a mix of a horror movie and The Lady and the Tramp.
Oh yeah and I plan on just using my long-running character Jenx in this campaign, just remaking him every time he dies. It was all in all a high-energy session, though perhaps a bit much for me with it being online and, I would like to stress this again, having thirteen players at once.
On Writing Session Reports for Arcade Games
Ok so that's not much of a session report is it? I mean shit, even for my verbose ass that's very very short. And that's kind of the point of this post.
Arcade Gaming is something I quite enjoy, it requires minimal cognitive load which where I've been for the last two years, as life continues to chug along with its bullshit. I have attempted to move my own game in that direction, though if players are not going along with it things just don't quite work out that way. As with any TTRPG, the table is what determines what the game is actually going to be.
But a curious thing I noticed with arcade gaming during the previous Nathan campaign, Devil's World Heroes, is that while I loved the game and had a lot of interesting discussions relating to it during and after it...well I never really wrote any session reports.
Part of that is that Zygo had already been working on writing absolutely wonderful ones on his blog, before that fell through, and there is simply put no reason to have multiple players writing event recaps of a campaign. For a game as batshit as DWH, even more so honestly.
I have talked plenty of times, including earlier today in fact, about what I find useful when writing or reading session reports, and simply recounting events that happen within the fiction is not high on that list. But without that, what else is there to say? It's arcade gaming - you go from place to place, you kill dudes and try not to get killed yourself. Repeat until satisfied. Yeah there's other bit in it, and Nathan is a wonderful referee who brings amazing energy to the games he runs, but like there is not much deep thoughts to be written about this on a week to week basis.
This is why I only wrote that retrospective that I linked above, rather than write weekly session reports. Clearly I had plenty to say on that campaign, look at the size of that post, but those formed over the 30+ sessions of the campaign.
Part of that is that as a player I only interact in a certain way with the broader process of running the campaign. Session reports are, for better or worse, kind of the rightful domains of referees and GMs, who get to talk about their practice and tools and ideas with other like-minded hobbyists.
But plenty of people have written nice session reports as players. Hell I had a fairly extensive run of in-character session reports (styled as journal entries) from my time gaming in Legacy of the Bieth and those were fun enough to write. So it can be done. But the thing that is appealing in arcade gaming at the table is also the thing that makes it kind of pointless to write about it afterwards - it is the base, almost boardgame-like, loop of D&D as presented back in 1974. There's only so much you can say about it.
So consider this post my preemptive excuse for not writing enough about this campaign that I am playing in, and for which I do in fact have plenty of thoughts about already, only one (maybe even half??) of a session in. This is, in fact, me covering my ass.