Reaching the Horizon

Play any rpg campaign long enough and you’ll reach a point where you’re playing more your table than whatever game you’ve allegedly sat down to play. Your particular relationship to the rules, your particular social dynamics, your preferences and histories and fiction become the dominant force at the table more than however the fuck downtime works or whatever. When you sit down to start playing, this point is at the horizon. Some people other than me will argue this is true the minute you start playing. Even if you think this is true immediately, I believe there’s a “lock in” moment that happens later on, a gear shift you can feel click into place when things change and the rules are thrown more into the back seat. Unless you are sitting down with actual nothing backing you up, the game is a big deal until one day your fiction is a bigger deal. Maybe what I’m really feeling is a moment where the table reaches a critical mass of system mastery, but I think that’s a parallel or related…

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