The Magic of Familiarity

So what have I been playing over the past five years? Not a lot, at least not as regularly as I would have hoped or liked. I most recently ran OpenQuest 3e, an elegant distillation of d100 fantasy. I've run a few one-shots (even if it has taken us several short sessions) of Barbarians of Lemuria/Everywhen, one of my favourite systems. And in that time I did, of course, run a fair bit of Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, a system to which I will inevitably keep bouncing back, despite my desire to 'fix' it - or perhaps because of that.

I will have more to say about each of those games in time, but the one thing this sporadic gaming had unfortunately reinforced has been the advantage of familiarity. Oh, yes, I am like all of you; I am constantly distracted and tempted by the new shiny thing, or even some quite old shiny things - I have recently been rereading/skimming through a lot of Fate rulebooks, keen to internalise the game logic that promises that player characters, in all their complications and diverse sources of narrative agency, power the rhythm of the game. We will see if I get there.

But this familiarity is why Advanced Fighting Fantasy really rolls at *my* table in ways that even OpenQuest and Barbarians of Lemuria do not. I can knock up an adventure more or less on the fly, or at least with half an hour of preparation. I can, roughly, anticipate how long each encounter or node will take to resolve mechanically, how likely is failure, how heavy might be the costs of success, and how much fun it will be to play out. At least at *my* table. 

So just default to published adventures, yes? Let the familiarity of another GM guide your path. But published adventures - even very good ones - are dotted with places and events where the GM using the adventure has to divine the intention of the writer, else risk a cascade of GM interpretations, undoing the advantage of relying on the crystallised familiarity[1] of the writer. Roleplaying games are a *lively* experience, and the adventure writer is 'dead'. One of the first things I do with a published adventure that I plan to run is print a copy and, with my red fineliner, go through the text (after changing the names to ones that I can pronounce) marking sections where I need to think carefully - and produce possible answers - about the ways in which the choices of the players might unravel what the writer assumed might happen next.  

I am not just talking about situations in which the PCs murder an important NPC, or set fire to an important (and flammable) adventure location. The great wonder of roleplaying games is that they are open and unconstrained; players can always do something to surprise you (murder and arson are rarely that surprising). But when it is *my* adventure, I do not need worry about how to roleplay Lord Blackstone's reaction to the PCs' diplomacy, their theological arguments, their threats, or whatever. Of course I know what Lord Blackstone is going to do, how he is going to react, because he is me! I invented him, perhaps months ago, perhaps five minutes ago. And my familiarity with the world and the system *as a way of producing an adventure game* means that even if I somehow get Lord Blackstone 'wrong' I can, as GM, unfold the world in a way that stands a chance of being satisfying to the people at the table. 

Apologies for the ramble, going over what it pretty old ground. Stuff about actual games soon, including some more stuff for AFF2e.

[1] I am using 'familiarity' here to mean something different to the way I would use 'system mastery'. It is not so much that a GM can resolve situations at the table with minimal rules reference, but that a GM has a intuitive feel for the logics and rhythms of the game - encounter, session, adventure, campaign, etc. - and player and GM *experience*. I think that you can have system mastery with a low level of familiarity, and given how often I check the rules for magic and priestly powers in Advanced Fighting Fantasy, I think you can have a high level of familiarity with imperfect system mastery. I possibly need a better term than 'familiarity', but I am wary of inventing new terms in my professional, academic writing, so I will not do so here.