Wraith session #5
The hurdle: Non-game anxiety
Game was back on this week, and it went well. I kept on with the engagement tools that I started using last session — enthusiasm on display, with lots of hand gestures and pantomime — and player involvement remained quite high. I only had to get their attention once during the whole session. Otherwise, everyone was attentive and engaged. Great!
But getting started and running through my notes wasn’t easy. I had slept poorly the night before, and I came into the game with a lot of anxiety. Not about my campaign in particular, but stress from other sources entirely. It’s not really important where the anxiety came from, only that by the time I sat down and opened up my laptop to start game, I was shaking, sweating and felt like I was going to throw up.
I wasn’t scared about the session — I had reviewed my notes and could have run that game from memory — but anxiety doesn’t care. The real world is so much more complicated than our RPG ones. My life problems and mental health issues don’t wait for a dramatically story-appropriate moment to crop up — they fly in and take a crap on my psychological well-being at any random interval, and the hours before Wraith was apparently that time.
Thanks, anxiety…
Now, my players are wonderful and understanding — none of them would have given me shit if I decided that I just couldn’t run game. I could have bowed out and canceled game, or handed the reins over to Aron and had him run the side-adventure that I just finished writing up.
And this is an advice blog, so it needs to be said: If your mental health just isn’t up to Storytelling a game session, don’t force it. Take care of yourself, gamers. Your psychological health and happiness are far more important than any RPG.
But I really wanted to get back into the swing of things and move my players toward the end of this chapter, so I weighed my needs and desires, and decided that I had to deal with my unrelated panic while trying to run my game.
First, I leaned on a little food-based help. I made sure to eat as well as I could while dealing with my anxiety-induced nausea. I didn’t want my energy levels to crap out on me and make things that much harder, so I ate some mild food — potatoes, and pancakes without syrup — and then had my usual Storytelling cocktail of coffee and a little splash of Kahlua.
But those just laid some groundwork. Now I had to get through the session without melting down. I was honest and told my players that I was having a hard day, but that I was still up for running game. They all told me that they understood, that I could bow out at any point if I needed to, then we got started. And it went well!
First, I threw myself into my characterizations. This section of my story called for only a few NPCs — Frankie, the PC Cohort commander; Collins, an enemy marshal from a rival Legion; and Bell, a subordinate of Collins who doesn’t like the marshal much. I stuck my hands in my pockets playing Frankie, growled a lot when speaking for Collins, and did a lot of wide eyes and staring when Bell got caught in the middle. My clearly over-acted enthusiasm seemed to work for my players, and they engaged with all of them.
But I struggled to convey the power dynamic between the three NPCs. Frankie and Collins both ultimately work for the same authority — the Hierarchy — and are equal in rank. While Collins belongs to the larger Legion (Grim, victims of violence), Frankie represents the Legion with more esoteric power (Fate, the smallest Legion). They can’t actually defy one another, and any clash of power would likely accomplish very little. Bell dislikes his boss, but Collins has the power to punish him with next to no fear of reprisal. Collins is much more powerful than Bell, both personally and politically. And Bell likes the player characters — who Collins despises. But all of them must fear and respect their ultimate bosses: the anacreons who rule the Necropolis together.
I was far too anxious and off-kilter to play any kind of remotely subtle power struggles, though. I briefly considered making the attempt, but knew that my fumbles would just make things confusing — and I need the players to understand the connections between these three NPCs because they will have to navigate them later.
So… screw it. I didn’t even try to play subtle. Collins growled at Frankie, who just told him that their ranks are equal, and they can’t order each other around. And rather than try to have Bell come up with some pseudo-clever way to get himself ordered to work alongside my PCs, he just asked Collins — who said yes, then promptly abandoned Bell, leaving with the rest of their Cohort.
No one would ever call it great dialog or Machiavellian plotting, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. My players know the score between Frankie and Collins, and Collins and Bell. They know that while Collins hates them, their own Cohort commander is keeping them more or less safe from him — for now. And they know that if they need help from the Grim Legion, they can go to Bell — but that he will have to tread carefully.
It wasn’t my best scene, but I told the part of my story that I needed to tell. My players won’t remember my clunky dialog, anyway — they’ll remember that Collins was an asshole and Bell wanted to work with them. That’s all I need. Not every game can be the best one, but every session can be part of a great campaign.
And by the end of game, I actually felt a lot better. Rather than fanning the flames of my anxiety, the session occupied my entire mind and left no bandwidth for feeling shitty. So I managed to get through my game, and it helped me fight off my anxiety. Win-win!
