Seeing both sides

It’s a strange experience to play an adventure you came up with.

(I once found myself playing a published adventure I had run before, and that was strange enough, but anyway. Fortunately I happened to be playing a precognitive...)

This time I had sufficient warning, having discussed the idea with the GM and having suggested running it myself during a session when the GM was unavailable.

(Not something I offer often, but this was for Distant Stars, a Star Trek like space opera setting with an episodic structure, where a great variety of possible one-shot adventures can happen and have no major effect on the series continuity. The idea was recycled from The Watch House as the Buffyverse is similarly flexible: since one of the PCs is a runaway from an alien noble family, shunt her and the other PCs into a timeline where she didn’t run away and is now princess of a solar system, with hilarious consequences.)

I did my best to provide helpful nudges only when the rest of the players were stuck, and suggested a couple of complications (and simplifications) to throw in. There were inevitable moments of thinking “I would have done that differently” of course, but it was entertaining to see how it unfolded, and most importantly the other players had fun with it.