The Gaming Bucket List

The Player's Bucket List

Some years ago I asked my players what their gaming "bucket list" was. I wanted to know what experiences they would love to have in a TTRPG to help me think up adventure ideas. Mine looked something like this:

• Have a character who built a castle in a couple of nights using stone shape, wall of stone, and fabricate.
• Command an epic Star Trek style space battle.
• Build a frontier Dominion into a mighty kingdom.
• Set off a Supernova
• Play a Barbarian that takes a crown by slaying a king.
• Play a character that invents multiple spells.
• Play a computer hacker that destroys a war ship or space station with a computer.

Its an exercise I recommend considering with almost any role-playing group. If you are going to play with these players lo g enough, putting the things they are looking for somewhwee in your world can pay off...  So long as you are willing to make them work at least a little to make it happen. 

The GM Bucket List

It was also an exercise I did at a time when I was really frustrated that no one else was stepping up to GM. It was built on wistful "Forever-DM" energy.

Since then I have moved in a very different direction in my gaming. First, I found some online groups where people were willing to take turns running the game. And second, I started looking at the OSR and indie games for something lighter and faster to play.

Now I have stopped worrying about what I want to do as a player. I have seen so many cool games, fun modules, and crazy ideas that I want to try that I instead have a bucket list of games and scenarios I want to do instead.

I recommend looking at your collection and putting this list together for yourself. What do you want to have run before you are done gaming? Right now this is mine:

• Run Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Misty Isle of the Eld, What Ho, Frog Demons?, and a few choice Trilemma and DCC adventures and a few select modules as a DCC RPG Game with a strong Original Masters of the Universe vibe.
• Run Hot Springs Island in AD&D2e or ICRPG 
• Run the ultimate Mystara campaign: Wrath of the Immortals, Adventures in Blackmoor, Temple of the Frog, Master of the Desert Nomads, and Castle Amber
• Run a multi-year campaign of a B/X Based OSR game that gets to dominion level.
• Run The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence mashed up with Cha'alt.
• Run The Ultraviolet Grasslands and Black City, only using Numenéra.
• Podcast Alpha Blue
• Find a few glutton for punishment for The God that Crawls and Tower of the Stargazer in Lamentations of the Flame Princess
• Run an extended PARANOIA campaign that goes until the original characters are all dead to the last clone.
• Have a semi-regular Fiasco game for a year or more.
• Play at least one satisfying game of Everyone is John
• Play a surreal Overlight campaign. 

Even if I don't get to run all of these, I can learn a lot about my tastes looking at these. I am clearly looking for strange sagas the scramble up science fiction and fantasy. I like games where dying is part of the fun on occasion, and I like to stitch a lot of adventures together.

This definitely helps me search for games - and groups - in the future.