Beyond the Open Table

Something Judd Karlmann said in a recent episode of the excellent Daydreaming About Dragons podcast caught my attention. It was part of a larger discourse on the challenge of scheduling and running games within the constraints of modern schedules. I quote it as follows, but the relevant bit begins around the 10 minute mark of this episode, for those interested in further context.

“Could we stream a classic Traveller game, where if everybody can’t make it, we just make up new characters in the same world? And we just go and we build something slowly together.”

I started running a West Marches game in 2017 in part to solve attendance issues that had plagued my previous game. Those issues were not the attendance issues of sketchy people failing to commit, but merely the realities of people running businesses, raising families, and otherwise trying to fit a game into the packed schedules of real life.

The game that began in 2017 gradually shed its West Marches origins, but the open table aspect – in which group composition could change session to session based on who could attend – stuck, and it was a big part of the reason that game ran for five years. All of my games are now open table games, and they will be in the future, unless I ever meet a group of players willing to hard-commit to a particular day with a particular frequency.

But Judd’s idea suggests to me an interesting step beyond the open table model I'm already familiar with. It would require the right game and a low-prep or no-prep system. But I can envision a game working like this. 

Every other Thursday night is game night. Same time, same location (it’s either a virtual game night, or always hosted by the GM, or at the same FLGS). Barring holidays, emergencies, or the like, game night is always happening on this night.

If only the GM shows up, game night is composed of prep or worldbuilding. Or even solo roleplay in the style of Ironsworn or similar. Presumably this is the exception, and most nights involve other players. But there’s something powerful about the players knowing that even on a particular night when none of them could attend, the game is still "happening."

When one or more players can attend, they decide prior to the session (or right at the beginning) if they will continue the story from where the previous session left off, or start somewhere else. This will be obvious in some cases. If the same three players are attending two sessions in a row, they will probably want to pick up from last time. If a session is composed of four all-new players, they will presumably want to begin a new story.

But sometimes the session's frame won't be so obvious. If one long-running PC joins with several new ones, where do we place this story? Perhaps flash back to their past? Or forward to the future, relative to where they have spent most of their time? Will this be a side story, an amusing diversion? Or will subsequent sessions show that the original long-running game was only a prelude to an unexpected story?

Obviously this kind of game requires a different shared understanding of how we treat time and how we choose to frame "the present." This will be familiar to players who have done a lot of collaborative storytelling, but will take some practice for those accustomed to scenarios where only a GM has firm control over the frame. We should ask prior to each session, what are you most interested in exploring this time? Flashing back to before the story began? Or forward to the far future? Was there a part of the story we breezed through too quickly that we want to return to? Freeing the game from chronological rigidness opens up very interesting possibilities.