A Moment of Doubt, The Second Session

I had this Moment of Doubt: "Maybe I should just abandon the Stone, Steel, and Steam project altogether. Or put it back on the back burner for another 5-10 years. I've learned and grown a lot as a gamer and as a person in the process of making it, so it hasn't been a waste of time, but maybe I've got what I needed to out of this and it's time to move on."

Part of this, I know, is a sort of post-partum depression. I had the same thing back in March 2010. You have all this energy and momentum and caffeine trying to get the draft out on deadline and then this big rush that it's finally done and then...nothing. A couple of people say, 'that sounds interesting.' And the Big Thing that was the Center of your Whole Life for the past few months is gone, and there's always going to be some depression with that until you find something to replace it with.

And I think I put a lot of that surplus energy, emotion, and momentum into Dave's Exalted campaign and not my own Stone, Steel, and Steam campaign. Because with Exalted I'm in my comfort zone, it's familiar, I'm competent, and I'm teaching it to others. And since SSS and Exalted are on alternate weeks, but Exalted generates a lot more chatter between games, it's easier to keep up enthusiasm for that game than my own. Plus, Dave's GMing, which means it's not as much work for me.

Anyway, I'm not abandoning SSS - at least not yet. We'll give it a few more weeks to work through the depression and the kinks, and then decide. Or, alternatively, SSS is about setting, and the system has been the biggest headache for both me and the players, both to create and to use. I've been giving some thought to making SSS an alternate setting for an existing system. This might still be the depression talking, so haven't committed to anything yet, but definitely looking into it.

(In addition to moments of depression and doubt, I am occasionally subject to delusions of grandeur, storming the gates of GenCon, etc. So part of the reason I built a system was just to learn how to make a system, part was to make sure it was philosophically consistent with my overall design goals and ideals, and part of the reason was to make it my own intellectual property in the event of ever going public. So now I need to decide if I want to look seriously into 'open-source' mechanics and keep the public option open, or, if it's just going to remain a garage game for me and my friends, then I could totally rip off a non-free system and no one would ever know or care.)

I really meant to be documenting the actual play of the second session. I should be both GMing and taking notes about what's going well and what's going poorly in the game. And I didn't really do that. Let's just say that last night's session didn't 'pop.' Aside from developer post-partum, there's been a bunch of other real-life stuff - job stuff, house stuff, car stuff, baby stuff - that really put me off my game.