Reflections on Wrestling
When I last finished a long-running campaign a little over a year ago (oh god its been so long since I've had a big campaign), I wrote an article reflecting on it. Devoted followers of the blog or my social media will know that I've been running a World Wide Wrestling campaign for the past few months – shorter than my hex crawl, but still in the "campaign" rather than "one shot" territory. I wrote a review of the system a few weeks back, but today I wanted to take some time post-campaign to reflect on the lessons I learned from the system as a GM.
Some basic concept layout before jumping in: I like running campaigns in my persistent homebrew world, which has lived and breathed for over a decade over a number of campaigns. I usually try to run campaigns around historical eras or events. So even this campaign was set in my world, with a nobleman sponsoring a small-scale wrestling group trying to break into the guild-controlled entertainment business of a small town in my mostly dwarvish kingdom of Tundor. For inspiration, I drew from professional wrestling, yes, but also specifically from the earliest professional wrestlers in America, their travelling carnival origins, and how they originally blurred the line between real and fake.
Characters
The Good: Entertaining and Unique PCs
As I said in my hex crawl reflections, I'm so grateful for my players. We had 4 returning veterans, though some of whom I haven't played with for a few years, and one person completely new to playing with me. None of us were familiar with wrestling nor with the system. And while we hit some stumbling blocks with knowing how to wrestle in the system, I also gave my players a challenging task: to think of both their PCs, and the wrestling gimmicks of those PCs. Playing two characters, nested like this, was not easy, and my players rose to the occasion.
Some people took this in a very serious direction--our player who wanted to grapple with sexism-in-wrestling and who was the most technical wrestler, who 'killed off' her backstory gimmick to be a representation of the undead scourge from a past campaign. This was a brilliant blending of the in-ring gimmick with a still meaty out-of-the-ring backstory and motivation, tied perfectly into the world in both regards. Other people went a bit more silly--the ex-soldier who threw stuffed cannonballs at his in-ring opponents, with a catchphrase about making his opponents "taste modern dwarvish artillery". My players are so creative, and even when I demand that they write me two character personas rather than one, they step up to the plate. And I've never laughed so hard playing an RPG as I did at some of the gimmicks my players threw at me and at each other.
The Bad: Not Enough Time to Explore
I love a backstory. I wrote a whole series about how to prompt better backstories. I even prefer a good backstory to the sort of 'build it at the table' advice that is popular nowadays. While I did not ask for as thorough a backstory for this campaign as I normally do, knowing that most of what I had planned would be "in-ring" rather than "out of the ring," I think that this was a mistake. While the PCs were fun, they tended not to be deep – or at the very least, they did not grow and evolve. Part of that was the length of the campaign, only around 8 sessions, but a bigger part was that we were so focused on the wrestling, not enough time and space was dedicated for real, deep, emotional character moments.
This meant that even the richest characters were less fleshed out than they could have been. There simply wasn't enough camera time spent outside of the ring to really develop what those 'real' personas were like. And so while the in-ring gimmicks were well-developed, the 'real' personas wound up feeling flat. That also contributed to the decision to end after "season 1" – there wasn't enough meat on the characters to spend more months with them.
The lesson is clear to me for the future: if you want richer characters, there needs to be time and reason and campaign justification for that. It is easy enough to say that this system focuses on the in-ring storyline drama, but if you want something longer running and more deep, you need to build in time away from the campaign's focal point (the ring) and more time for character work.
The Narrative
The Bad: I Overcorrected
In my reflections on my hex crawl campaign, I wrote about how I felt that I had prioritized themes over plot--and how hard plot was in a player-directed sort of structure like a hex crawl. Well, this time I overcorrected.
There was a plot, even as we played a system designed for player influence in the plot. There were both short, in-ring wrestling rivalries stories being told, as well as the larger theme about the party raising their profile enough to gain admission to the Guild. This was not prescripted, nor was it a particularly narratively deep and nuanced plot, but the driving push for fame with limited time to achieve it was a tighter storyline than I had in the meandering tale of my hex crawl. It even synergized with the system's method of promotion.
But, on the other hand, the story--like the characters--was a little flat, and I think the reason for that was overcorrection: not enough themes!
So, keeping in mind for my next campaign: I want more of a plot to drive the party than "explore the frontier", but I also shouldn't hyperfocus on the plot. I need to let the themes of the world and of the specific story and genre I'm working in breathe. It is a balancing act, but I think if I want a richer tale, the themes are too important to neglect.
The Vibes
The Good: The System
I'm not going to go too in depth here, since I wrote a whole review about the system.
Lucas Asher
But the short version is that it worked, but I still have my issues with Powered by the Apocalypse games. I think the lack of "options" inherent to PbtA (at least on the scale of a D&D spell list) hamstrung some of the character growth opportunities--at least for my players, most of whom had never tried PbtA before. And I think the ways in which we struggled to settle into the genre, due to our collective lack of knowledge about real professional wrestling, certainly did lead to a couple of moments of frustration and to a general "meh" about the campaign as a whole.
On the other hand, the system did deliver a really fun, lighthearted experience.
The Great: Wrestling is Over the Top
I generally try to run fairly serious campaigns – not brutal, grimdark, overly brooding campaigns, but things that are a mix of serious moral quandaries and more lighthearted fun.
This was not that campaign. This was dumb and fun by design, a game that was not really meant to have a deeper narrative. It was intentionally a chance to get together with friends, to get back into the swing of a regular RPG campaign, and to have more lighthearted fun.
World Wide Wrestling delivered. I don't think I've ever laughed as hard in a campaign as I did at this. It took a lot less mental energy to run something so goofy and low-stakes. It brought a really good vibe to the table, even if the narrative and the thematic content and the opportunity for character growth were all lacking.
Conclusion
So while I don't think my World Wide Wrestling campaign is going to go down as one of the best campaigns I've ever run, the vibes were good. It was a bit like seeing a trashy movie in the theater, or seeing something goofy like Shucked on Broadway: I had a ton of fun during the experience, and I think that this campaign will leave relatively little in terms of lasting impact from a narrative perspective.
Still, I had a lot of fun running the game. Sometimes you want a deep narrative, and sometimes what you want is something with a good energy and low stakes.