#RPGaDay2021 Day 22: Substitute

There is nothing I feel great about connecting to the word Substitute. I suppose I would say however that there is no substitute for great players. No decision has more impact on how good your game night will be than the decision of who you will play with. This comes across in two ways. Firstly, game night is a social occasion. Do you enjoy the company of everyone you're playing with? Secondly, do your play styles vibe and bounce off of each other in pleasing ways?

When I was younger I'd definitely had times where I'd gamed with people that were either not kind, or I just didn't enjoy their company socially. This isn't even a case that they were "bad people" necessarily, or anything. It's just about how good it feels to spend time with people, game or not. It's not easy for everyone to find a group's worth of people they unreservedly enjoy spending time with, but I've been lucky in this regard. From time to time we'll have a drop-in player that doesn't fully fit, but even there we've had good luck (or whoever invited the drop-in player has had good judgement). The place where I most often come across players that don't fully work for me now are RPG conventions. I've had great conventions sessions, but they can also be a great reminder of just how good I have it at home. Once you find yourself in an RPG group where you enjoy everyone's company socially, I don't know if you'd ever want to go back. More than having compatible play styles, this is foundational to whether I'm even bothering to game in the first place or not.

In the Street Fighter campaign I'm currently in, in addition to social enjoyment, we all love how we bounce off each other while playing characters. The way we improvise and interact and set each other up is just a joy, reliably. I remember after one of our sessions we just talked about how great it was, and how great Street Fighter was. Because it reminded us of the way Street Fighter has made us feel in the past we gave the game itself a lot of the credit at first. But then... yeah. Chemistry is chemistry, and we've come to feel that we could make almost any game we were each into work. Rules and setting and all the rest matter, but in so much as we are playing a role playing game and love how we interact in that... the rules can only do so much to create or destroy it.

So, ultimately you'll read about games you maybe want to play. Characters and settings, rules you want to try. Try them all, but nothing they can do can even come close to providing a substitute for the lack of a group of friends with a great RP dynamic.