The House of Worms is the Empire of the Petal Throne campaign I've been refereeing since March 2015. Until a few months ago, I wrote regular posts briefly detailing the actions of the player characters in it. Though the campaign is still ongoing, I stopped writing those posts because I began to question the utility of doing so. They are consistently among the least read and commented upon posts on this blog. Few of them cracked 200 unique views and most have no comments on them at all. Aside from a single player in the campaign, almost no one has asked me why I stopped writing them or encouraged me to start doing so again.
I write this with a little disappointment. I am very much aware of how few people have any knowledge of or interest in Tékumel. It is and always has been an exceedingly niche setting within the wider hobby. Likewise, it's been my experience that campaign play reports rank only slightly higher in people's affections than being cornered by a fellow at a con who wants to tell you about his character.
On some level, this is understandable. Most campaigns, especially long running ones, take on the nature of a "you had to be there" joke. Even if my posts were immensely long and detailed, there's no way a reader could properly appreciate the context of what's happening. In our most recent sessions, for example, the characters embarked on the investigation of several mysteries whose seeds were planted years ago, before some of the campaign's seven current players had even joined it. Expecting readers to find much interest in these posts is thus probably too much to expect.
At the same time, I remain convinced that long-term campaign play represents the highest form of roleplaying and that the best way to demonstrate this conviction is by showing the unparalleled joys of such a campaign. March of next year will mark the seventh anniversary of the House of Worms campaign, making it the single longest RPG campaign I've ever continuously played with the same group of people. My players tell me that this is true of them as well. I suspect that, with a few exceptions, this is true of most readers of this blog. Heck, I'd wager that it's probably true of most roleplayers, period.
I had naively hoped, back when I started posting session reports, that they might at least encourage some discussion of the care and maintenance of long campaigns, because I think this is something of a lost art. The impression I increasingly get is that much of our hobby is devoted to idle consumerism – the never-satiated pursuit of the latest baubles – and not much play of any kind, never mind dedicated campaign play. I've sometimes darkly mused that the interest in so-called "actual play" videos and streams serves as a substitute for playing oneself.
Perhaps I conclude too much from the lack of interest in the House of Worms session report posts. It may simply be, as I noted above, that Tékumel is such a niche interest that even those theoretically interested in campaign play are turned off by the setting itself. If so, that's fair enough; we like what we like and there's no point in trying to argue otherwise. If it's something else, though, I'd be curious to know, especially if it's something I could do differently. As it is, those posts take a long time to write, far longer than one might expect based on the word count. That's because I try to condense them down into something relatively brief and intelligible to people not deeply immersed in the setting. There are limits to what I can do and it may well be that, despite my wishes to the contrary, there is simply no way to make these posts more appealing.
Regardless, I'd be grateful for any specific thoughts readers have on the matter. The House of Worms campaign is a huge part of my gaming these days and I'd like to use it as the springboard for more posts here. However, I have no interest in boring anyone, if it's not a subject that's of wide interest (which is what Blogger's stats tell me).
0 Yorumlar