Casting Shadows

Sometimes it is easy to praise our friends, but in life it seems that without a specific intention to pay the sort of attention to the people around us that they deserve, many of those positive comments might go unsaid. Of course, all of this gets harder it seems, if we are asked to single a person out from among a group. What about those others? Are they not deserving of praise, too? As RPGaDAY is intended to promote positivity about the hobby, those ideas that lead us to negative places can safely be expected to be rejected out of hand – by default. For #RPGaDAY2024, you might focus on the bold prompt (player) and take that as inspiration wherever the spirit leads you. You might also check out the alternate prompts. If you stick with the notion of peerless player as the prompt for today, you might demonstrate how each of the people you play with is worthy of such praise, you might single people out for their abilities in certain areas, you might choose to remember someone from the past that has been separated from you in time, you might be bold and choose a single person and praise the crap out of them, or you might choose to define what constitutes a peerless player. I think I will do the latter with the reminder that the people I play with online and off are excellent, I believe I have let them know that, and that I count myself lucky to play among them.

For me, the players who truly stand out from among their peers in play – either consistently or from time to time – are those who bridge the spoken and imagined elements of play with the confident familiarity of experience, whose play (to act, react, and interact as their characters) with the group and of the game shows an empathetic understanding of the other people who play it and the intellectual understanding of the chosen system and setting, its genre, and the particular idiom defined by how the group plays that game together in their current circumstances. Further, they imagine with intention but are prone to moments of wonder sparked by unbidden imaginings. They seek experience, not story, but can both adapt to how play is shaped by the group and excuse themselves from the group when such adaptation takes them too far from their own enjoyment – without feeling or causing guilt. Finally, the peerless player loves running characters and loves running the game – they are neither solely GM nor solely PC, they are a gamer whose chosen games are RPGs.

This might sound like a hefty bar to live up to, but I tell you these players are legion. If you look for them, out there in the world, you will find them: Playing.