2025 in the Rearview: The Roleplaying
2025 was a shitshow for most of us. For me, much the same. While I'm very happy with the gaming I got to take part in, the year was generally filled with downswings in family health that continually pull me away from my own attempts to make a life in a new city. Still, it wasn't all bad. I'm going to focus this retrospective on gaming, not only because this is a gaming blog, but because this is something that brings me joy, and by god did I game a lot in 2025.
This first post just covers roleplaying games. Maybe in a second post, I'll talk about video games!
I tried to break this into sections for each game I took part in, and give sub-sections for overviews, problems, lessons learned, and questions asked of the community. If you don't wanna read this whole post, just CTRL+F "the problem" or "the lesson" or whatever you're looking for!
Night Freaks
RIP August 2024-April 2025.
Also known as the final form of the horror setting that doesn't exist yet. This was an open table campaign with a player pool of 13 IRL friends, played on discord (due to the size of this country), accepting up to 6 players per session, using a system I made myself. It was fun, and it lasted 30 sessions before boss music plays FAMILY HEALTH INTERFERED, but I want to touch on its biggest issues because the experience was very educational to me...
This was not a dungeoncrawler. This was not a hexcrawler. This was a motherfucking MYSTERY GAME. And therein lay the big problem.
The player-facing structure was like this: GM posts a session date, players sign up until we hit the cap. Then, there's a document available to you that lists several "hooks", i.e. leads for mini-mysteries that are aimed to play out in one session. Each mystery has (hopefully) a satisfying little through-line in one go, but also contributes to overall getting clues or tools or info about the OVERARCHING MYSTERY.
I thought this was genius, because I had just run a very successful 50-session superhero open table the same way, with largely the same pool of players. But you may already have noticed the big issue...
The Problem: How do you, as a player, if you get a clue during your session that contributes to the OVERARCHING MYSTERY, transmit that clue to the other players? I'll save you the guesswork and tell you the two options. Either you dutifully write down a session report, organized and highlighted and bookmarked to show what you think the important clues are...or you don't. And plenty of players rightfully did not!
I don't view this as a player issue. I view this as a structural issue with how I built the campaign from the very beginning. Because there was no predefined EXPECTATION that you'd have to write (and read!) session reports.
The campaign was dying before boss music plays FAMILY HEALTH INTERFERED. Dying because I could not keep spinning the plates that players had never agreed or expected to spin themselves.
The Lesson: If I tried to run something like this again, I would ditch the OVERARCHING MYSTERY and make it a "monster-of-the-week" situation from the get-go. Long-term fulfillment for the players could come from pursuing their character stuff during a short downtime at the start or end of sessions, or somesuch. We were already doing that somewhat.
The Ask: If any of you have run open-table mystery games with some success, reach out to me in DMs or something! I'd love to hear from you.
Wild Sky
This campaign, going strong since June, is like an antidote to my ills, a balm for all my woes. We meet every 2 weeks, for 4 hours, with the same 4 players and 1 GM (me) every time. The game is very much about a single big adventure, a quest to defeat a necromancer who's long dead but still acting upon the living world...somehow. My players read this blog so I won't give any spoilers!
We are 14 sessions in, having just finished a second act/arc before the holidays. It's a blast! It's high-flying adventure! It's everything I wanted it to be when I set out.
The Problem: The only problem I have with this game is that I don't know how to prep it. After 2 campaigns (1 successful, 1 abortive) that were more West Marches-y in structure, the "roller-coaster" format continues to bedevil me. I have tried adopting the "Lazy GM" method of a strong start, a fantastic location or two, and some memorable characters, and simply improvising the rest. Working well enough so far, but room for improvement.
The Lesson: Running a committed, same-cast game every week is hard to square with life, but aiming at once every 2 weeks is very doable. Also, I have loved ending every session by setting the date/time of the next - it clearly annoys everyone (me included) to end the game with a bang and then taper the fun with scheduling, but it means we never have uncertainty or communication gaps about when the next game will be!
The Ask: If anyone readers have experience or even untested ideas about FORMATTING prep for a roller-coaster/less sandboxy campaign, I'm all ears! Hit me up.
EXTINCTION
It's had 2 sessions so far. The goal is a "bright colors" Saturday morning cartoon superhero world is violently invaded by an outside force that doesn't play by the tame genre rules everyone is used to. It remains to be seen whether this will work out!
Another goal for EXTINCTION is for it to be a micro-campaign. With so many ideas for games, I have realized I'll never run them all if I try to go big. So instead, EXTINCTION has been devised (with the full knowledge of the players) to last only about 6-8 sessions. This was all very inspired by Mediums and Messages fantastic session reports for their micro-campaigns!
The Problem: Someone bailed on the most recent session last minute, and then the holidays set in. I'm not counting this one out yet! But a multi-week break right at the start of a new campaign isn't my ideal...
The Lesson: This, like most games, is one I made up the rules for. In this specific case, I spent dozens of hours and dozens of Google Docs trying and failing to make the thing I wanted. I settled for something fairly FKR, which made the previous work feel like a huge waste of time. We'll see if I like it! Maybe I am into more ultralight games? We'll see. But I'd say the lesson is "say fuck it" and go the easy road more often.
The Ask: A thing I'm already noticing in EXTINCTION - and have noticed in the past - is that I have a hard time saying "no" to players. Blame years of improv? Especially when it comes to letting PCs die as a result of bad ideas, bad rolls, bad planning...So my ask is for generic GMing advice on how to say "no" when appropriate, and how to let characters bite the dust when they deserve it!
Mud & Lasers
I have run 3 or more playtests of a system/game I keep changing the title for. That's one way I can tell I haven't nailed down enough about the concept yet, much less the rules, which change drastically between iterations.
Mud & Lasers is meant to be a high-lethality THING striding the line between wargame and RPG. PCs are space troopers caught in desperate action among bleak, alien stars in a hopeless war.
Big inspirations were like...IDK, too much Warhammer mixed with a lot of Helldivers playtime?
I don't know if I will keep going on this one...it feels like both a game-design dead-end, and something that few if any of my friends actually want to play.
Not even going to do the sub-sections here, blegh.
Don't End on a Downer!
Overall, it's been a good year for gaming. Much fun, much time spent with friends across the country via the medium of Discord. I won't present any New Year Goals or some-such, mainly because I've observed that writing about them is a surefire way to NOT accomplish them. But I do hope to be more active in 2026, both on this blog and in the community!
Happy New Year!