Game Setup:
1. Meet weekly for 20 years to play tabletop RPGs.
2. Mainly but not exclusively D&D.
3. Argue about which version of D&D.
4. Argue about whether D&D is irredeemably structurally flawed, and agree that it probably is but that people have invested a lot of time and money and want to know how the campaign turns out.
5. Choose one player to be The Gamemaster. Other players will also gamemaster, but the player who is The Gamemaster will insist that any game which is not run by him is not the real game.
6. Begin pandemic.
Object of the Game:
To feel any kind of joy at all.
Gameplay:
The game is played over multiple rounds, each of which is composed of three phases:
A. Hello? Is my microphone working?
B. Resolution of character actions which will be undone at the beginning of the next round.
C. Accusations by The Gamemaster that there is a secret cabal.
Phase A: Panopticon
Confirm which of the players are not in the Discord or Zoom or Teams meeting. Use passive continuous surveillance including Steam, Epic, and the Playstation Nework to find out which other game the absent players are playing instead.
Present players may choose to spend shame points accumulated in a previous round to convince the absent players to abandon their other more fun game in favor of the roleplaying meetup.
Note: If you are a late-arriving player, you may award yourself half of the value of the spent shame points by saying you forgot what day today is, which you did not.
phase b: Stability
Begin by summarizing everything that happened in the previous round, which was very little. If any player suggests something was decided or resolved, The Gamemaster must immediately question whether it was.
If a decision was made over email between sessions, each player must select whether to (1) copy and paste the emails as evidence they exist, (2) deny having seen the emails, or (3) acknowledge having read the emails, but remember them as having said something they didn’t say. After selecting any of these actions, players may perform an additional bonus action and claim to have intended to send another email. Players may not disclose what would have been in this email.
At any time during phase B, players may leave the screen to sing lullabies to children, walk dogs, or refill water glasses. If a housecat sits in a player’s chair during that player’s absence, the housecat will function as a proxy for the player.
Phase C: Dissolution
Confirm that yes the players are also meeting to play a different game of D&D on another day, and The Gamemaster has been invited, and the players would rather be playing that game right now. Yet here we all are, because The Gamemaster does not like that other game. If you are playing the Gamemaster, you must at this point claim not to care, although you are the one who asked.
At the end of phase C, adjourn until next week. To conclude the phase and the round, the Gamemaster must flip a coin. On a result of “heads,” The Gamemaster will make nervous small talk with the last person to leave the webmeeting, blustering that it went well and it seemed everyone had fun despite a few hiccups. On a result of “tails,” The Gamemaster must rail against the other game.
Scoring:
Award yourself 10 points for every successful game you play between phases.
Award yourself 10 points for not getting pulled into another game on a nice day when you could go outside.
The Gamemaster receives 50 points for inventing a new reason to dislike the other game, with a bonus 20 points if the disliked thing is also true of The Gamemaster’s game.
Award yourself 100 points for getting a midweek email from The Gamemaster expressing his belief that his terrified insomnia is not a result of climate change, wildfires, economic inequality, unstable government, resurgent fascism, or uncontrolled contagion, and would vanish if the players were more effusive.
Romie Stott (a.k.a. Romie Faienza) (website) is a narrative filmmaker and essayist, and poetry editor of the speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons. For the last two years, she’s been writing a musical about Death and Cupid at a New York piano bar. Her favorite board game is Acquire.
Image based on Conall O’Brien’s “Office Cat Will See You Now“ under a CC BY-NC-SA license, and released under the same license.