All the games I played in 2021
2021 in review
2021-12-30
Contents
Introduction
This year I jotted down a few notes for every game I played or hosted.
I’m going to share the raw data, a few statistics, and a few highlights.
Other entries in this series: 2022
The List
Here is the list!
Dungeons & Dragons, Storm King’s Thunder (DM)
Status: Hiatus
Length: Campaign
Format: Roll20/Discord
Notes: My original long running D&D campaign with my original gaming group. Calling it ‘on hiatus’ is generous. It’s dead in the water. We haven’t played in a year. But I just can’t let it go.
Troika!, So You’ve Been Thrown Down A Well (DM)
Status: Complete
Length: Adventure
Format: Play By Post
Notes: So we started playing this one game and the the GM vanished, so I stepped in and turned it into So You’ve Been Thrown Down A Well, which was super fun. Highlight: the insectoid race who rules as written couldn’t speak, so in play-by-post, the communicated exclusively via emoji.
Troika!, Acid Death Fantasy (Player)
Status: Dead
Length: Adventure
Format: Play By Post
Notes: Abandoned by gm after a valiant effort at keeping it going which is sad. Andy was one of the most creative and generous GMs ever, creating original playscii artwork for us, and providing us with groovy vintage vinal soundtracks.
Troika!, 13 Story Bizarre (DM)
Status: Ongoing
Length: One-Shot
Format: Play By Post
Notes: Originally supposed to be a really quick adventure with my core Troika pbp group, but has been slogging along for months now. I’m about to just end it so we can move on to something else.
Troika!, Dome Riders (Homebrew) (DM)
Status: Hiatus
Length: Campaign
Format: Play By Post
Notes: One of the most tragic stories of 2021 both in-game and without. Epic setting dreamed up by GreyWarden, and then when they abondened the game, me and fraidy_cat and jade decided to keep playing by ourselves using a GM emulator. It was a great experiment in collaboration and self-government, and it was really going places. We have 22 pages of original setting content in a google doc. But then a huge in-game encounter killed our NPC leader and things never really recovered from that. Currently on infinite hiatus.
Wicked Ones (Forged in the Dark), Homebrew (Player)
Status: Hiatus
Length: Campaign?
Format: Play By Post
Notes: Update 2021-10-31 on hiatus
Pathfinder, Agents of Edgewatch (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Campaign
Format: Roll20/Discord
Notes: Pathfinder is everything I hate about ttrpgs. I only keep playing this because it’s the only way this particular friend group continues to get together, so I’ll probably keep playing it forever, hating the game and enjoying the company of my friends.
Troika, Cocaine and Alligators: Florida Man Sphere (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: One-Shot
Format: zoom
Notes: Fun pick-up game from Melsonia discord. The game hilariously involves googling random Florida Man stories to create NPCs and encounters throughout the game. Could have honestly done without the whole police violence part in the middle. Good times overall though! I think this was my first time playing Troika in real time.
Mothership, Picket Line Tango (Player)
Status: Dead
Length: Adventure
Format: Play By Post
Notes: Just started. Not much to report yet. Update 2021-10-31 Game stalled out really quickly, probably not going to pick back up
Mausritter, Honey Rafters (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: One-Shot
Format: Foundry/Discord
Notes: Fun game! Surprisingly spooky. Quite lethal. Cursed sunflower = corrupted bees and candy cultists. Played with FKR discord folk.
Smithy of Sacrilege, Anvil (Homebrew) (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Campaign/Open Sandbox
Format: Play by Post
Notes: A hack of Tunnel Goons by Nate Smith. Very fun original world, hex crawly open sandbox. You can get a lot done even with hyper minimal rules
Troika, Acid Death Fantasy (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Campaign
Format: Play by Post
Notes: Another more different ADF! Born of the APJ server, but on another new server with Kunailby. Playing Gliftwirp, a sarong-fu master who is also basically the hamburglar
Risus, To Kill A God (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Campaign
Format: Play by Post
Notes: pbp on rpg.net with tibbius. Playing former child actor Sender, who is a blade for hire who just wants to retire and be a mushroom farmer, who is also haunted by the ghost of his dead twin brother who he absorbed in the womb, and who is also followed around by small woodland animals like a disney princess.
Marvelous Mutations and Merry Musicians, Rockaway Beach (Player)
Status: Hiatus
Length: Adventures
Format: Discord PBP
Notes: wendi’s game of mmnmm. almost immediately fizzled out. might resume at some point?
Cthulhu Dark, Garrets Ranch (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: Zoom
Notes: Kyle ran us a game of Cthulhu Dark! Played with Josh and Mike and wendi. Investigate Garret’s Ranch in Fate, Texas. Everybody escaped intact and alive. A very simple but very flexible game. I liked how you can boost your roll with a cost with the insight die. And we did a good job of using the failure die once or twice. Occupation is really important and you can kind of cripple yourself if you pick something off like “uber driver” like josh did. Nobody took advantage of infinite rolls, and I think somebody suppressed insight only once. Which is all to say that for a rules light game, you kind of have to remember a lot. Anyway, it was fun!
Troika, Moon’s Shot (DM)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: Discord
Notes: Did moon’s shot again but for the skookums-and-dragons crew. Zigs, Alex, and Jess. They murderhoboed the whole thing.
Troika, Moon’s Shot (DM)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: Zoom
Notes: ran moon’s shot for alex, sparky, and jade. a good time was had by all. they did a capitalism, but for good
2-bit, Numenera (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Adventure
Format: Discord PBP
Notes: gonna start a coin-flipping game with tibbius. gonna play a witchy person.
troika, crapland 2 (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: Discord Jamboard
Notes: beautiful craptastic chaos at galgoricon 2021! Galgorian and Spooky Rusty ran a two table game with players constantly teleporting between the two locations before joining up at the final encounter. It was bonkers and fun. Big cast of characters, almost 12 players
D&D 5e, Zigs and Dragons (Player)
Status: Ongoing
Length: Series
Format: Roll20 + Discord
Notes: Zig’s first time DM-ing! A series of oneshots on a mysterious island. Getting to play with Alex again is fun. The characters escalate from session to session from level 3 to 6 to 9 etc. Have played two so far. Having a lot of fun playing and getting to make new characters all the time.
Giraffe Wants Best Leaves, Giraffe Wants Best Leaves (DM)
Status: Complete
Length: oneshot
Format: jitsi -> mumble (technical issuse)
Notes: This was a first, made a little toy rpg (a lasers and feelings clone) and some tildepals wanted to play it, so I ran a game for nico and malvarma. fun little session!
Into the Odd, yule homebrew (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: oneshot
Format: Owlbear Rodeo + Zoom
Notes: another Kyle game! got to play with eskur and wendi and kim. first time playing into the odd. played Luna Saturday, dreamy moonchild with a cane. we ventured down below a giant tree, and prevented a goblin invasion. (Wendi stopped the ooze ritual and tossed a bomb into the mirror.)
D&D, Quiet Midwinter (DM)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: discord + owlbear.rodeo
Notes: super good! ran for z and j. the premise was ‘Cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie for OSE’ and I think they pulled it off really well. Players arranged for the best ending possible: get /everybody/ to meet up at the docks: dinaz and lucretia to steal the ship (desperate move by L to get on the naughty list) both bounty hunters, yvette and midge, to capture dinaz and lucretia + bitter; winter and loss there, snow to arrange a romantic sleigh ride with Z and Loss… it was a beautiful chaotic mess that was super fun. five thumbs up.
2400 Exiles, Ultraviolet Grasslands (Player)
Status: Complete
Length: Oneshot
Format: discord voice
Notes: fun! eskur ran it, played with hat and wrongtube. never played 2400 before, that was fun. never played the UVG setting either. that was also fun. played in the Forest of Meat!
Highlights
System Of The Year: Troika!
I played a lot of Troika this year. It is a wildly evocative, rules-light system with a simple 2d6 mechanic and fast character creation, and I love it to pieces.
I think it’s the game that initially transitioned me from the D&D hegemony into other systems.
Game Of The Year: Crapland 2 (Galgoricon)
This was a Troika game, and wins game of the year for setup and execution.
Galgorian decided to host a “fake con” over a long weekend. There were multiple games going on the whole time, and this is the only one I was able to join.
He and Spooky Rusty co-hosted the game. There were two tables with 5 - 6 players at each. In-game shenanigans caused characters to portal to other locations which caused players to bounce to the other table.
The games were synced and tied up, and at the end everybody arrived together at the final encounter.
It memorably eschewed any kind of virtual tabletop and instead was played on a single Google Jamboard shared by and graffitied on by everybody.
The game itself was absurd urban decay parody surrealism at its finest.
Game Of The Year (Honorable Mention): Quiet Winter
This is probably elevated in my mind because I just finished running it as the traditional annual holiday one-shot for my regular group, and it was so much fun.
The author describes this as a cheesy Hallmark holiday movie for OSE.
And it is. The game is 90% messy, tangled relationships and tension, and 10% mystery/exploration/sandbox.
The players are left to their own to decide what their goal is, who’s “good” and who’s “bad”, which relationship they’re going to help fix (if any), etc, etc.
In the end, my players managed to convince nearly everybody to show up at an arranged time down by the docks for a final confrontation to get everything out in the open. It was a beautifully chaotic mess, and almost everybody ended up getting what they wanted.
Brightest Star That Burned Itself Out Too Soon: Wicked Ones
I joined a play-by-post game of Wicked Ones this year that ended up being a true highlight.
The game system itself is somewhat complex and I never quite grokked it.
But the players were so creative and talented, the characters so layered and interesting. And the DM did such an amazing job leading us through encounters and worldbuilding. It was all so vivid I can still almost see, hear, and taste it.
We played feverishly for a couple weeks and then Real Life Happened (tm) and the game tragically fizzled out.
Best Joke Game That Ended Up Being Really Fun: Giraffe Wants Best Leaves
Okay so this started out as sort of a meme.
Some friends and I wanted to learn a little Godot this year, so we brainstormed a bunch of game ideas and the one that stuck was “There is a giraffe who wants to get the best leaves but his neck is too short”.
We started working on a platformer, but didn’t really have much of a plan, and we stopped working on it.
But it lived on for a while as a meme on mastodon.
And then some time later, I made it into basically a Lasers and Feelings clone, and shared it as a joke, and some of my internet pals immediately were like, “Yes I want to roleplay a giraffe!”
So I ran a quick no-prep game for them and it was mad fun.
And now I have plans to expand the silly thing with a setting and a few encounter tables, because why not!
Stats
- 24 games
- Role:
- 8 as a game master
- 16 as a player
- Format:
- 11 play-by-post, 13 as some kind of “in person” voice or video play. (Zero actual in person, face to face games.)
- Of the in person games, 3 were on zoom, 9 were on discord, and one niche one started on jitsi and then moved to mumble
- 2 were voice only, the rest were voice + some virtual tabletop
- Virtual tabletops: Not many! 2 owlbear.rodeo, 3 roll20, and 1 memorable Google Jamboard.
Reflection
It was a good year! Roleplaying really saved my sanity in 2020 and 2021. It’s a creative outlet that I really enjoy and rely on. I tried my hand at creating games for the first time this year and had fun with that.
I made a lot of progress away from the D&D family of games towards more indie/smol/freeform styles of playing, and probably became pretty close to becoming a bit of a zealot about rules-light gaming. But then realized that I still now and then enjoy the process of creating a D&D character and playing a tactical combat game. I just don’t want it all the time.
Anyway, happy new year! Hope you have a great 2022!
Colophon
I kept my notes in a structured plain text format that is queryable by an obscure GNU package called recutils.
I created a little bit of tooling around it, but it is ultimately just a plain old text file that I append records to.
In practice, I can query this simple plain text database for whatever
reason, e.g. the questions I answered in this post, by using the
included recsel query tool.
To create this post, I piped the data through a few transformers.
Recutils includes a rec2csv utility which, you guessed it,
outputs csv. I already have csvkit installed, so
then I piped it through csvjson to get some JSON.
Finally, I used a few mustache templates in this document to render that JSON on the page. (Before finally running the whole thing through my own custom m4 + pandoc filters to create the site.)