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The Fate of Tabletop Troubles Ch 5
2 years ago
Hello everyone,
This journal has been sitting unfinished on a word document for nearly three years. The entire contents of that document has been scraped save the title and I will cut right to the chase. For those of you who grew interested in the Tabletop Troubles story and have been hoping I've just been on some long hiatus before the story's final reveal, this journal is for you.
Will Tabletop Troubles Ch 5 ever fully release? No. The proper story is dead and will not be finished.
Will Tabletop Troubles get anything to close out the story? Yes. I plan to release the first draft and outline for Tabletop Troubles Ch5 within the next few days to at least provide some narrative closure.
If you were only interested in the main topic listed above, now is the ideal stopping point. The rest of this Journal will address the 'Whys' of it all, and what will be coming up next in the long line of future plans.
1) Why did this story have such a massive delay for Chapter 5?
Tabletop Troubles was a rather ambitious story that not only involved a wide array of characters but also the daring motivation to make the D&D side of the game as close to the actual medium as possible. To those ends, all the races and creatures encountered in the story as the challenging moments in the game are actual creatures from D&D itself and a few third party sources. On top of this I had made each D&D character that the story characters would use. And whenever a skill or combat check or anything came up, I would actually roll the dice and run with the results. Beyond those results I wrote the character's reactions to the scenario. These facts are true for every chapter of Tabletop Troubles but for Chapter 5 it had the final set piece encounters. A few random encounters and a massive boss fight that required a lot of outlining and tracking of dice rolls beyond the story itself and it could of made the finale be an awesome fight or a tpk depending on how the dice fell.
Translating dice rolls to a story took time, and I didn't have a lot of time during my days, so a lot of my writing actually took place during the down time of D&D sessions that I DMed or Co-DMed with a number of in real life tables and friends. Naturally, writing in those conditions makes it incredibly easy to absorb outside influences that may change or adjust how the writing is perceived or handled in regards to the final execution. It was because of these exposures that one of my characters was unfortunately tainted by real life drama: Boetian. This drama with one of the players makes it nearly impossible, to this day, to separate the character from the player and if I made any attempt to work around or fix this issue it would require a complete rework or rewrite of Chapters 1-4. It was for this reason Chapter 5 was kept in hiatus.
2) Why was Boetian unsalvageable?
To understand that I will have to break down the drama that happened during the Wednesday night D&D games I used to run at a comic shop before the world was thrown into disarray and a certain pesky disease was spreading everywhere all at once.
My Wednesday night game was a game where I was the DM for the D&D module: Dragon heist. We had a wide array of players that, due to store policy limiting the number of players at each table players had to RSVP ahead of the game night in order to make sure they got a seat before they all fille dup and they would have to miss a week or more depending on their luck. While I encouraged making sure players signed up in time before following games, a few players got it in their heads to compete to see who could get the closest to the opening registration time which was 12:00 AM the night after game night. Players being players, this competition tuned into a full on event where all my players would stay up late, or wake incredibly early, to RSVP their spots as soon as possible.
Enter our problem player. This player had a similar mindset and some actions to how I had written Boetian, despite the character existing well before the player came into the picture. With his confident attitude, and fixated mindset he knew what we best he was integrated at the table as a fighter and didn't like to delay around for RP events to occur so long as he got his combat in. While at the table he was openly friendly with a girl who also participated at my table and from their interactions they could almost be mistaken for a couple, if not close friends. Then one day, while checking the player RSVPs for the next game I noticed a pair of messages from our problem player who expressed outrage at missing the chance to sign up for the game several weeks in a row and wanted to boycott my game for "forcing players to stay up early to sign up for the game" A fact I never enforced and was something other players started for fun. To top the incident off, this was something he immediately escalated to the table wide discord chat and even alerted the comic shop owners and other event coordinators needed to be halted immediately, without even conversing with me to the side on his opinions or ideas to see if the matter could be resolved. This eventually lead to me taking an entire week's session off the play time to talk to my players about expectations and concerns they wished to voice in person to make sure the game was running smoothly, and remind everyone the signups were not mandatory for a midnight RSVP.
At the time I hoped this would be enough, but this player had other plans brewing for me.
Barely a month after the party powwow to figure out the opinions and wants of the group from the game's session I got 2 different discord messages simultaneously. The first came from our Problem Player saying he was getting threatening messages from another player and he wanted that player charged with assault for sending those text messages and for the player to be removed from the table. At around the same time I received a different message from another player at the table who was close friends with the one female player in my group. He wanted to inform me that he had caught our Problem Player hitting on the female player while out at a bar and trying to get either a kiss from her or help walk her to her car even after being informed that she had a boyfriend. This new player confronted the problem player and made it clear he should back off from hitting on the girl any further or he would regret it.
This was the scenario I was made aware of 2 hours before the Wednesday game started. After getting the information from both sides and presenting it to the comic shop it was decided the Problem Player and the other player who threatened him would be banned from the shop, and at the same time the female player decided to back out. In a single night my player participation was gutted and having to play detective and intermediary of the whole ordeal left me too emotionally drained to continue, and also left me with the realization that the problem player had left me with feelings of close association between him and Boetian, which caused the first massive break in my posting schedule and end to Chapter 5. It also left me in a position where any direct interaction or addressing of Boetian in the story left me envisioning the problem player's face and actions over anything i tried to write about, which killed my mood.
3) Why bring all this up now?
Tabletop Troubles was the first story I've written for any online community that wasn't based on some rp I did with other people or concept I pulled from a video game reworked into a story. I had a lot of fun outlining and writing each chapter, especially with the idea to play the D&D game with the characters which lead to various moments that felt really close to the narrative style of a lot of the D&D I had run or played over the same period of time. To have that story written but not finished, in any circumstance has left a huge amount of pressure on my mind due to failing to finish the story and releasing it, along with guilt about telling people I have been working on the story even when the rough draft documents were lost and gathering dust when I realized I couldn't salvage Boetian's character from the lingering dislikes I had from the problem player.
I had to finish the story, or at the very least, released what I have on it so I can move on to work on other stories and settings without this lingering regret.
-|-
What does the future hold?
Honestly, I don't know. There are a few stories and settings I have bee slowly chipping away at even when I wasn't fully committed to it just yet. I'm sure some of you have seen the many adoptables I have acquired from Random-bard that make mention to either Micro Kit of Macro Zoo. Both of these are worlds I am working on expanding and eventually posting stories for in the future though i don't have a set date yet.
There is also a vast array of narrative settings I have been sitting on for almost 4 years now that I may consider putting some time into writing out when motivation strikes me, but hopefully things should go much more smoothly from here.
Thank you all for the time. The Rough Draft of Chapter 5 should be comin g in the next 2 days, so keep your eyes peeled.
This journal has been sitting unfinished on a word document for nearly three years. The entire contents of that document has been scraped save the title and I will cut right to the chase. For those of you who grew interested in the Tabletop Troubles story and have been hoping I've just been on some long hiatus before the story's final reveal, this journal is for you.
Will Tabletop Troubles Ch 5 ever fully release? No. The proper story is dead and will not be finished.
Will Tabletop Troubles get anything to close out the story? Yes. I plan to release the first draft and outline for Tabletop Troubles Ch5 within the next few days to at least provide some narrative closure.
If you were only interested in the main topic listed above, now is the ideal stopping point. The rest of this Journal will address the 'Whys' of it all, and what will be coming up next in the long line of future plans.
1) Why did this story have such a massive delay for Chapter 5?
Tabletop Troubles was a rather ambitious story that not only involved a wide array of characters but also the daring motivation to make the D&D side of the game as close to the actual medium as possible. To those ends, all the races and creatures encountered in the story as the challenging moments in the game are actual creatures from D&D itself and a few third party sources. On top of this I had made each D&D character that the story characters would use. And whenever a skill or combat check or anything came up, I would actually roll the dice and run with the results. Beyond those results I wrote the character's reactions to the scenario. These facts are true for every chapter of Tabletop Troubles but for Chapter 5 it had the final set piece encounters. A few random encounters and a massive boss fight that required a lot of outlining and tracking of dice rolls beyond the story itself and it could of made the finale be an awesome fight or a tpk depending on how the dice fell.
Translating dice rolls to a story took time, and I didn't have a lot of time during my days, so a lot of my writing actually took place during the down time of D&D sessions that I DMed or Co-DMed with a number of in real life tables and friends. Naturally, writing in those conditions makes it incredibly easy to absorb outside influences that may change or adjust how the writing is perceived or handled in regards to the final execution. It was because of these exposures that one of my characters was unfortunately tainted by real life drama: Boetian. This drama with one of the players makes it nearly impossible, to this day, to separate the character from the player and if I made any attempt to work around or fix this issue it would require a complete rework or rewrite of Chapters 1-4. It was for this reason Chapter 5 was kept in hiatus.
2) Why was Boetian unsalvageable?
To understand that I will have to break down the drama that happened during the Wednesday night D&D games I used to run at a comic shop before the world was thrown into disarray and a certain pesky disease was spreading everywhere all at once.
My Wednesday night game was a game where I was the DM for the D&D module: Dragon heist. We had a wide array of players that, due to store policy limiting the number of players at each table players had to RSVP ahead of the game night in order to make sure they got a seat before they all fille dup and they would have to miss a week or more depending on their luck. While I encouraged making sure players signed up in time before following games, a few players got it in their heads to compete to see who could get the closest to the opening registration time which was 12:00 AM the night after game night. Players being players, this competition tuned into a full on event where all my players would stay up late, or wake incredibly early, to RSVP their spots as soon as possible.
Enter our problem player. This player had a similar mindset and some actions to how I had written Boetian, despite the character existing well before the player came into the picture. With his confident attitude, and fixated mindset he knew what we best he was integrated at the table as a fighter and didn't like to delay around for RP events to occur so long as he got his combat in. While at the table he was openly friendly with a girl who also participated at my table and from their interactions they could almost be mistaken for a couple, if not close friends. Then one day, while checking the player RSVPs for the next game I noticed a pair of messages from our problem player who expressed outrage at missing the chance to sign up for the game several weeks in a row and wanted to boycott my game for "forcing players to stay up early to sign up for the game" A fact I never enforced and was something other players started for fun. To top the incident off, this was something he immediately escalated to the table wide discord chat and even alerted the comic shop owners and other event coordinators needed to be halted immediately, without even conversing with me to the side on his opinions or ideas to see if the matter could be resolved. This eventually lead to me taking an entire week's session off the play time to talk to my players about expectations and concerns they wished to voice in person to make sure the game was running smoothly, and remind everyone the signups were not mandatory for a midnight RSVP.
At the time I hoped this would be enough, but this player had other plans brewing for me.
Barely a month after the party powwow to figure out the opinions and wants of the group from the game's session I got 2 different discord messages simultaneously. The first came from our Problem Player saying he was getting threatening messages from another player and he wanted that player charged with assault for sending those text messages and for the player to be removed from the table. At around the same time I received a different message from another player at the table who was close friends with the one female player in my group. He wanted to inform me that he had caught our Problem Player hitting on the female player while out at a bar and trying to get either a kiss from her or help walk her to her car even after being informed that she had a boyfriend. This new player confronted the problem player and made it clear he should back off from hitting on the girl any further or he would regret it.
This was the scenario I was made aware of 2 hours before the Wednesday game started. After getting the information from both sides and presenting it to the comic shop it was decided the Problem Player and the other player who threatened him would be banned from the shop, and at the same time the female player decided to back out. In a single night my player participation was gutted and having to play detective and intermediary of the whole ordeal left me too emotionally drained to continue, and also left me with the realization that the problem player had left me with feelings of close association between him and Boetian, which caused the first massive break in my posting schedule and end to Chapter 5. It also left me in a position where any direct interaction or addressing of Boetian in the story left me envisioning the problem player's face and actions over anything i tried to write about, which killed my mood.
3) Why bring all this up now?
Tabletop Troubles was the first story I've written for any online community that wasn't based on some rp I did with other people or concept I pulled from a video game reworked into a story. I had a lot of fun outlining and writing each chapter, especially with the idea to play the D&D game with the characters which lead to various moments that felt really close to the narrative style of a lot of the D&D I had run or played over the same period of time. To have that story written but not finished, in any circumstance has left a huge amount of pressure on my mind due to failing to finish the story and releasing it, along with guilt about telling people I have been working on the story even when the rough draft documents were lost and gathering dust when I realized I couldn't salvage Boetian's character from the lingering dislikes I had from the problem player.
I had to finish the story, or at the very least, released what I have on it so I can move on to work on other stories and settings without this lingering regret.
-|-
What does the future hold?
Honestly, I don't know. There are a few stories and settings I have bee slowly chipping away at even when I wasn't fully committed to it just yet. I'm sure some of you have seen the many adoptables I have acquired from Random-bard that make mention to either Micro Kit of Macro Zoo. Both of these are worlds I am working on expanding and eventually posting stories for in the future though i don't have a set date yet.
There is also a vast array of narrative settings I have been sitting on for almost 4 years now that I may consider putting some time into writing out when motivation strikes me, but hopefully things should go much more smoothly from here.
Thank you all for the time. The Rough Draft of Chapter 5 should be comin g in the next 2 days, so keep your eyes peeled.
Adytum
~jutah
Honestly, this is completely understandable. It was an enjoyable series and a very fun concept, but I can absolutely see how these events would sour the experience and kill motivation. Unfortunate to be sure, but moving on may very well be the best choice here. With some luck your creative spirit will be rekindled after leaving this one behind! I wish you the best in your future endeavors.
