We’ve kicked off a new game as of last weekend. This means new setting and new characters, and while a session zero is meant to give you space to figure out what you want to play and what you want your character to be, there’s still a sense of going in a bit blind, especially with a new setting. There’s another wrinkle for me personally; thanks to the fact that I am the one most recently coming off of a GMing rotation, I haven’t written a new character for a new long-term game in three and a half years.

Three and a half years ago, I got to write two off-the-wall characters that both perhaps reflected a penchant (or at least desire) for scene-stealing. Yeah, looking back and seeing that I wrote Soshi Masaji, an incredibly promiscuous samurai, and Tickles the Clown, an incredibly, well, clown rockerboy at pretty much the same time now says to me that I was in a particular mood there in the start of 2023. In a way, though, although that mood may have been attention-seeking, it also may have been strategically playing against type. With Legend of the Five Rings, that was obvious to everyone in the group, including myself; I immediately bristled against the social mechanics in L5R when we first played a one-shot and was somewhat defensive when the campaign was suggested. The campaign itself went brilliantly, but only because it subverted most of L5R’s tropes; the characters who most played along with Rokugan as-written were also by far the most obnoxious. Ultimately, Legend of the Five Rings is a good example of a game being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ having to be a much broader discussion than just the mechanics; Roll and Keep and a lot of the system design ideas are quite good, and Fantasy Flight’s attempt to turn them into a custom dice system was actually pretty interesting. However, these are the mechanics meant to support a setting of unabashed Japanophilia written by a bunch of white guys who fell into a common trap of relying on books about either a very narrow time period or subject (Musashi’s Book of the Five Rings which the game is somewhat named after) or written after the fact with an overt political agenda (arguably Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan). It’s appropriate that Rokugan was used as the basis for later Oriental Adventures, because under that title it’s pretty clear where the issues lie. As such, I did what I thought was best given the self-seriousness of such a muddy pastiche: I refused to take it seriously.

Cyberpunk is of course more complicated. I had finished GMing a campaign in Cyberpunk Red at the end of 2021, so I was faced with joining another Cyberpunk Red game after about a year of downtime from Night City and all it entailed. Running Cyberpunk Red had revealed more complicated feelings about the game than I described in my review (though given its length the feelings in my review weren’t exactly not complicated), but I remained steadfast in my belief that Cyberpunk Red did at least two things better than Cyberpunk 2020: netrunning and support characters. As such, I wrote a rockerboy in part because someone else called netrunner first and I didn’t have a good character idea for a netrunner anyway. As I found out, I was, if not wrong, at least uncomprehensive in my assessment of Cyberpunk Red support characters. Some of them can be quite good, but those are typically characters you already had at least an idea of what to do with in 2020, like techs and medtechs, fixers, and nomads. The media did get a big upgrade, but the media was the worst implemented role in 2020 and had nowhere to go but up. The rockerboy also got an upgrade from 2020, but actually playing one quickly leads into a problem: Medias, rockerboys, and to a certain extent corps and cops are all interesting choices for Cyberpunk main characters. You’ve got Spider Jerusalem, you’ve got Johnny Silverhand, you’ve got Rick Deckard. When they’re just in the party, they don’t necessarily have anything to do. When you then take the game and tune it so that the combats are supposed to take 2-3 times longer, your support characters suddenly have to choose between being good at their actual shtick or surviving, and that choice sucks hard.

I talked a bit about this when discussing Tickles in particular, but when we look broadly at Cyberpunk as a trad game, there’s a huge focus on combat. Given that, 2020’s lethality was actually a huge boon because it forced players to at least think about other ways to do things. Cyberpunk Red’s tuning to be more like D&D makes players, consciously or unconsciously, treat it more like D&D, and that kinda sucks. I retired Tickles in part because I was being disruptive to the game as well as disruptive to the meta, but also because at our level of advancement I had to choose between Tickles being able to do Tickles things and Tickles being able to survive, and that choice sucked. Much like L5R I think the campaign I was actually in was damn good, all told…the system, though, I’ll probably never use again, as sad as that makes me to say.

So where does that bring us, with L5R in the rearview and Cyberpunk coming up on its conclusion? Well, the next game is Wildsea, and it is, unlike either of those other two games, strongly narrative. I’ve played and run a bit of Wildsea, and it’s really striking how much the game is trying to make everything a hook. When I reviewed it, I said that the rules are simple but invite you to make everything striking, and that is absolutely true. It doesn’t particularly matter that your Aspects usually have only two mechanical elements (a single tag that tells you whether the aspect is a trait, gear, or a companion, and the length of its track), their descriptions give you so much in terms of color and fictional permissions and, most dangerous of all, ideas. It’s those ideas that not only dictate how you’re going to play your character, but how you figure out who they are.

I’m really looking forward to Wildsea as a next game, but I’m also looking forward to trying out a new perspective when it comes to playing and writing a character. Wildsea is a weird setting that very purposefully dispenses with a lot of fantasy trappings, and that does mean we’re going in a little blind (other than some high seas and golden age of piracy allegory we’ve already glommed onto). In a way, that’s exactly what I want. My last two games were laden with cultural baggage and my own personal baggage, and that greatly informed how I made characters and, in a way, defended myself from my own distaste with elements of the games and their settings. This time around, I don’t think I have to worry about any of that. And that’s really exciting.