Scribbles and Horrors

Each session of Redux begins with 45 minutes of paperwork. Here’s a rough list of things which have to be worked out before the party can leave town.

1. The week in which the adventure takes place has to be picked (usually it’s the week after the previous one, but not always.)
2. A lead must be chosen to pursue from the Active Lead pool
3. Each player must select which eligible character will go on the expedition (often the choice of character depends on the lead chosen)
4. Characters have to be “brought up to time”, using non-expeditionary activity tables week-by-week (downtime). Occasionally this will result in the chosen character being unable to go on the expedition (injury, illness, etc.) and so another will have to be selected and brought up.
5. Characters who have levelled up since the previous session have to be updated.
6. If hirelings are to be hired, these must be selected, contracts must be negotiated, signed, and co-signed.
7. Equipment must be purchased for players and hirelings. Loans may be issued between player characters as desired.
8. New characters may have certain paperwork to fill out such as a Writ of Free Arms or a Letter of Release.
9. Each player character “signs in” on the Expedition Sheet, including their level and xp total, which serves as the main record of the session.
10. Each character needs to get a little cube with their name on it for a miniature. I should just have them all pre-written, but I never do, so I’m constantly fiddling with these.

To set up the game, I pull out the Index card character sheet box, the Active Leads folder, the Player Notes folder, the Expeditions Winter 1026 folder (to catch people up on sessions they missed), the Blank Forms folder, the Calendar folder, equipment and spell and level advancement zines, and several other folders and forms in sequence as I need and/or forget them. I’m usually there to begin the session around 6:15 pm, and it’s almost always past 7 pm when the party actually sets foot outside of town.

I have set up my game this way despite being someone who finds the idea of character creation taking more than 30 seconds absolutely intolerable. I am someone who thinks even OD&D’s speedy alternate combat system is infuriating and tedious, replacing it with a d6 system that resolves most combats in less than two minutes. I routinely leave rooms in my dungeons entirely empty so the party doesn’t waste time looking at the scenery. So much of the way I chose to run D&D seems to be aimed at quickness, at a certain kind of time efficiency, and yet a full third of Redux playtime is spent calculating xp and filling out forms. What’s up with that?

One might argue that I have chosen to focus on tedious things which are interesting to the exclusion of tedious things that aren’t. Discussing with your friends about which treasure to go after today, they might claim, is more fun than carefully choosing between two nearly-but-not-quite-identical feats. What I’ve done is be decisive about the way I manage time to more effectively tell the stories I want to.

I’m not so sure this is the case. Redux has a lot of time-consuming paperwork only because I had a lot of cool-seeming ideas requiring paperwork I haven’t given up trying out. It happened this way because of how my tastes intersect with my play modality. There’s no reason it should be this way other than that it is, and there’s no reason to change it unless distressing problems develop.

In some ways, it’s a beautiful thing. During the first part of the session I as Referee mostly need only sit back and listen to the discussions and negotiations, occasionally answering questions or handing out papers. It sets a relaxed tone to the whole affair, the act of preparing for an expedition, first by gathering everyone together, then choosing what to do and how to do it, assembling equipment and making sure one’s affairs are in order. Immediately during a session of Redux the players have to make decisions together about how to approach play. This is a good thing.

Still, every once in a while, when it’s 7:30 and the adventure hasn’t even reached the dungeon, I get a pang of worry. Am I doing a good job? Are people having fun? Are my friends being sufficiently entertained by the show I’m putting on?

This blog post has no conclusion.