The Sleepaway TTRPG ¶

Sleepaway is a horror TTRPG where players each play a camp counselor in a camp of their own creation suffering from the evil and chaotic influence of the Lindworm (like John Carpenter’s The Thing but more lovecraftian).

Sleepaway is a GMless TTRPG and so players are encouraged to “pick up” setting elements at appropriate times, stuff like “The Field at the Center of the Camp” or “The Campers”, and bring these parts of the camp to life at the table in a collaborative way.

My Story Game Experience ¶

My experience with story game TTRPGs is relatively light. I’ve played a few sessions of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (James Wallis) almost a decade ago. I read the rules for Apocalypse World (D. Vincent Baker) and Sorcerer (Ron Edwards). I’ve ran a dozen sessions of Blades In The Dark (John Harper) and I’ve played in a few dozen more but it’s been a few years.

I’m always looking to improve my roleplaying skills and so when I was given the chance to play in a kind of TTRPG that I don’t have a lot of experience with, I jumped at the opportunity.

The Oneshot ¶

So how did this oneshot of Sleepaway go?

Great! I’ve never played a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game before and now that I have, I think it would be a perfect fit for some of my players who’ve expressed an interest in doing more collaborative storytelling and roleplaying at our table.

For context, in this Sleepaway oneshot, the character I chose to play was Burt Bertrand, AKA BB, the Athlete. I felt like my inexperience with this kind of TTRPG would be a good fit for a character who’s bottling up their emotions, walking away from most sources of emotional and social conflict, eventually leading them to explode under the pressure.

Let’s get into it. I’ll start by writing about the things I would do differently if I were to play Sleepaway again as well as parts of the game I really liked.

The Less Good ¶

Time (or lack of it) ¶

The session was three hours long in total. We started by creating characters, creating our camp and after about an hour and a half, we began to play.

I felt like we didn’t have enough time to introduce the characters and the camp we’d created as well as ramp up satisfyingly to the camp’s eventual collapse by the end of the session.

At the start of the session, coming to an agreement about the genre of horror we were interested in roleplaying and the vibe of the final scene might have helped.

Is this a mystery that ends with the flaying of an animal or is this a slasher that ends with the last camp councilor holding onto a bloody knife, hiding in a closet? Answering these kinds of questions might have helped us set up appropriate scenes that would naturally lead to a satisfying conclusion for our oneshot within the allotted time.

We got there but not everyone was equally satisfied by the events leading up to the climax (completely fair, if our session was a movie, the ending would have been poorly edited and extremely schlocky).

My Roleplaying ¶

I never end a roleplaying session feeling like I’ve run or played it perfectly. I always try my best and I’m always looking to improve what my best is. Compassionately critiquing my own play is part of that. So let’s have at it.

The one rule of improv is “Yes, and”. Basically, you should accept the ideas that are presented by others at the table and build on these ideas constructively. The “Yes” part of this is easy for me but the “and” part, not so much.

When responding directly to a character speaking to mine, I sometimes find myself at a loss for what to say and by responding quickly and poorly in situations like this I’m letting down the other players by failing to “and” their “Yes, and” appropriately.

I need to catch myself in these moments and recover gracefully. In the future, I would like to try describing what my character is doing while he’s thinking about how he’s going to respond to whatever has been said to him (BB runs hand through his hair looking up at the sky, BB closes his eyes and rubs his forehead in frustration, etc.), giving myself time to process and come up with a better in-character response rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind or, even worse, not responding at all.

One example during play where I recovered semi-gracefully from a situation like this, was when birdmilk’s character Randall, the Councillor, said something to my character BB, I fumbled a little with my response but I caught myself in the moment, realizing that I hadn’t really given birdmilk much to respond to and so I followed up with another line from BB to give birdmilk a bit more to work with.

A more specific example of me fumbling my roleplay (it’s much easier for me remember the bad than the good) was when I was busy killing my character BB off (cool!), he didn’t say anything (not so cool…) That was a big missed opportunity.

Screaming “FUCK YOU!” as BB was leaping off the pier into the middle of the lake (partially parted) straight at the, clearly evil, Horned God standing there ominously would have been great and would have fit BB’s character perfectly. But I didn’t. Sigh.

It happens though. What’s less forgivable is that the Horned God sliced BB in half with his greatsword killing him instantly and the Horned God didn’t say anything before, during or after this pivotal moment. Heavy sigh.

At least I noticed this problem now, I’m calling attention to it and I’ve provided myself with a potential solution so that I can maybe do better next time!

Now, let’s talk about what I really liked about Sleepaway and the session.

The Good ¶

Moves and Objectives ¶

Capital M Moves are the bread and butter of PbtA style games. After reading a few PbtA rulebooks, it seemed that Moves would be a great way of constraining roleplay just enough to help players get into their characters’s minds and help them figure out what kinds of things their characters would do and say.

Now that I’ve actually played a PbtA game I can confirm that Moves do exactly what I thought they would do and it’s amazing.

It’s interesting how my Moves combined with the other players’s Moves, usually different ones, felt so freeing and just by being written on the page, these Moves, told me so much about how I should be roleplaying my character.

NB: I feel like I might start writing Moves for all the characters I play not matter what system I’m using just to help me think explicitly about the kinds of actions that my character would take and how those actions would affect and be responded to by others.

The oneshot section of the Sleepaway rules contain a list of objectives like “Make aggressively strong choices” and “Put your Characters in bad situations” which combined with the Moves that I had access to felt like being given permission for my character to be an asshole and, in doing so, produce interesting in-universe conflicts at the table.

Without the appropriate rules and tools to support this kind of play, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being as bold as I was during this session.

For example, one of the Athlete’s Moves is “Lash out at someone and injure them”. I interpreted this as a verbal attack rather than a physical one and so when Sam, the Fresh Blood, played by Sparky, started crying and puking at the sight of a dead camper, BB lashed out at Sam.

BB: “These campers need you to be strong. You’re a fucking disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Sparky took that in stride and used a Move on his sheet in response: “Do something you didn’t think you were capable of doing”.

For the first time, Sam stood up to BB, shouting back at him with Sparky delivering a great monologue. BB took that in stride and respectfully tipped his metaphorical hat to Sam.

This was cool as hell, in a campaign I think that we would have returned and built on that moment in subsequent sessions. What’s so interesting to me about this moment, is that a scene like this would have never in a million years happened in one of my OSR games.

Don’t get me wrong I like my OSR games but clearly I need to play more story games if I want to experience more moments like this and that’s what I’ll be doing.

The Character/Camp Creation Process ¶

The character creation process was simple and quick yet left a lot of room on the page for thinking about my character’s motivations and their vibe.

Despite it not coming up explicitly in the session itself, through the character creation process I came up with the idea that BB’s coach/mentor would be his homophobic dad and this could explain some of the emotional repression and outbursts that are built into the Athlete’s Moves. It never came up explicitly in play but I think that this backstory element helped me to roleplay BB more effectively at the table.

Reading through the character description, the simple picklists that you can choose from and their Moves made me feel ready to roleplay my character immediately which is great for a oneshot.

The camp creation process was quick too. This sort of collaborative world building is a great way to get everyone at the table invested in a shared imaginary space and it works great in Sleepaway (it also works great in TundraFundra’s Blightfall, I’ll be writing about that later on).

Conclusion ¶

Even though I’m much more familiar with OSR-style TTRPGs, this oneshot of Sleepaway has convinced me that I’ve really been missing out and that I should find more opportunities to play more story games. And, that’s what I plan on doing!

Let me know if you’ve got any story game recommendations for me.

EDIT: Reworded conclusion to be a little less needlessly self-critical.

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