Confessions of a Reluctant Game Master

It's Never As Good As The First Time
I love the idea of D&D.

I lowkey hate D&D.

An incomplete list of grievances:

• I do not care about dungeons.
• I do not care about dragons.
• I do not care about the differences between a mage, a wizard, a warlock...
• Why does creating a character take so much time?
• If creating a character takes this long, why is it so weak?
• Why is there so much math?

Thankfully, my first experience with tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) was not with D&D, it was with Fantasy Flight's Edge of the Empire starter kit. The Edge of the Empire system was simple and prioritized storytelling over game mechanics, shenanigans came quickly and easily, and I had a blast playing a pre-made character, Sasha, who will be my forever legend.

That brief campaign was ridiculous fun and it's never been as good as that first time. I tried additional Edge of the Empire campaigns. No character I've created since has been as fun to play as Sasha. Scheduling always became an issue. And for my attempt at playing D&D, please see the list above. (In all seriousness, there are many merits to D&D, it's just not quite for me.)

No campaign was ever as fun as the first one, but I kept trying because the first one was so much fun. Through those attempts, I began to see that what I enjoyed most wasn't necessarily playing by the rules... it was imagining the world the characters lived in. That idea of worldbuilding is the wiggly, persistent idea that eventually became Shipyard.

Designing A Game I Would Play

My TTRPG is called Shipyard, and I created it for many selfish reasons. I wanted to spend more time writing about romance and interpersonal relationships. I wanted to see what types of romance stories other people were interested in. I wanted to see my friends more.

I figured many of my friends would love a version of D&D with the mechanics turned way down and the fun turned way up. I built the Shipyard campaign to cater to that particular sensibility:

• I'm using Fantasy Flight's Genesys system,^[1] which makes it easier to prioritize storytelling.
• There's no physical combat, only social combat. Instead of throwing daggers, you throw dagger eyes.
• Each session is a one-shot sandbox. I find 4 friends, they show up, we have some laughs, they go home. A few weeks later, I find 4 different friends, they show up, we have some laughs, they go home. No ongoing time commitments, no ongoing scheduling headaches.
• I pre-made all the characters. There are 9 character sheets with cool abilities and loose backstories ready to be used. Choose your favorite, embellish the backstory however you like, and start playing.
• The true glory of Shipyard is the setting: the players are staff members of a matchmaking service, and each session they help a hard-to-match client find a date. It's D&D, minus the D, minus the other D, plus a funny romance novel.

Outsourcing the Boring Stuff
As I put the world of Shipyard together, I used generative AI, specifically Perplexity Pro, to do a ton of heavy lifting.

I love worldbuilding. Also: there are important parts of the world that I do want to get right that I also want to spend zero hours of my life researching.

Examples:

• How many museums should my metro area of 1M people have?
• How many universities?
• What are real world comparables for my city?
• How would the economy of this city have evolved over a couple hundred years, and how would that have transformed the city?

Those were all important questions to me when I was worldbuilding. Did I want to spend my weekends researching census data? No... I did not.

Thankfully, I had an easy solution: I asked Perplexity, and Perplexity told me.^[2]

• 5-6 museums
• 2 major universities, 2-3 specialized colleges, 2-3 community/technical colleges, a number of trade schools.
• Madison, Boulder, Asheville, and Rochester
• First, there was the original economy; now, people are either A) doing the original economy in a new way, or B) still doing the original economy, except calling it "artisanal" and selling it to tourists.

Generative AI told me how many theaters I needed, and I got to spend my weekends dreaming up what they could be.

First Looks: Early Playtest Wins
Two sessions in and things are feeling good! In each of the first two sessions, the person with no previous tabletop RPG experience was the absolute star of the show, which I take as a very positive sign. They were fully into the characters they chose to play, and they were bursting with creative ideas.

While they didn't have any TTRPG experience, they both are genuinely hilarious people, and they both understood the assignment: examine the problem, make ridiculous choices, roll some dice, everybody laughs.

Two Lessons For Games And Life
Two big lessons I think anyone could learn:

One
Just make up the rules. In games, yes, but also life. If something doesn't work quite the way you want, change it. Keep what you like, get rid of what you don't like. Make up some new stuff, try it out, see if it works, switch it up, try again.

Two
Let Gen AI do the boring stuff.

In your creative work, or even in your daily life, there are a host of things that fit the following criteria:

• It needs to get done.
• You hate doing it.
• It only needs to be pretty solid or just good enough.
• It doesn't need to be overly personal or revelatory.

AI is great for those sorts of tasks. Use it to steal your time back for yourself, so you can do more of what you really care about.