Posts filed under 'Roleplaying'
I haven’t had the opportunity to post nearly as much as I’d like, lately, because I’ve been preparing to audition for a musical. It’s been two decades since I last trod the boards, but with a community theater a ten-minute walk from my house, a good friend who’s an avid participant, and the fact that they’re putting on The Scarlet Pimpernel, inspired by the entertaining novel that basically kick-started the masked super-hero genre . . . well, I really couldn’t resist.
Over the past two weeks, my friend and I repeatedly rehearsed our audition song (”Our Children” from Ragtime, another great musical based on a novel), which cut somewhat severely into my gaming time. Sunday afternoon and last night, though, we finally had our auditions.
I think I did well, and I suspect I’ll be cast. (I’ll know by next Sunday at the latest.) I don’t think I’ll get my dream part (the villain Chauvlin) because some absolutely terrific contenders, active in theater more recently than 1988, tried out for the leads, but I do hope for a fun part with a real chance to act, sing, and dance.
To tie this all to gaming, I will state that I think I’m a much better actor than I was in high school, despite not having performed since then, and I attribute the improvement entirely to tabletop roleplaying games. Having taken on the roles of antagonists, love interests, monsters, and other colorful characters over the years, I’ve gained both confidence and competence in assuming roles whose personality is wildly different from my own (although I admit to having a sort of internal cast, now; I should write about that sometime).
It will be interesting to once again perform from a script instead of winging it. Here’s hoping I can bring whatever character they give me to more vivid life than I do the various inhabitants of my made-up tabletop worlds . . . but I’ll sure miss the excitement of an unfolding storyline with an ending unknown to any participants!
November 6th, 2007
I admit it: I’m a great big cheater. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I ran a tabletop RPG session without making up a tremendous portion of “what happens” on the spot. Whether I’ve spend two weeks preparing detailed maps and NPC profiles or scribbled a couple of notes in the bathroom while my players are waiting in the den, I have to lie and cheat to give my players the enjoyable adventures they expect.
I always find it fascinating to hear of GMs who can’t wing it, or who feel that there’s something morally irresponsible about winging it. As Ominus says at Game On :: Aleph Gaming blog in a post on Personal Rules for Narrating, the story isn’t the GM’s, nor is it the players’. A GM who lacks the agility to handle the inevitably unpredictable narrative flow that emerges when a group of people get together to create a collaborative story has no business behind the screen.
The trick, though, is not to let the player’s know when you’re winging it and when you’re not. I suspect my players know (certainly my wife does) that I have had to make up NPCs, locations, and events of whole cloth who go on to be central players in a campaign.
I tread upon the rules, too, when the situation merits. I lie about die rolls all the time, make up special rules situations that my players (who generally don’t know the rules very well) know nothing about, and sometimes fail to keep track of NPC health, letting the opponents die mostly when I feel a combat has gone on long enough to be dramatically entertaining.
And I say this as someone who takes some real pleasure in the simulationist elements of our hobby!
As an amateur magician, I’ve learned that my audience genuinely wants to know how magic is performed but will also be sorry if they do find out. Magicians don’t just keep their secrets in order to prevent others from performing the same tricks. Frankly, most people don’t want to do the tricks anyway. No, magicians keep their secrets because when the audience knows the secret, it’s the magic that vanishes, not the Statue of Liberty.
My players want to believe their characters adventure in a living world, full of vibrant NPCs and events that would happen whether or not they take a hand. They know I use narrative sleight-of-hand, mirrors, and invisible thread. But as long as they don’t know when I’m using it, they’ll have a good time.
Of course, we GM magicians must suffer for our art. This post at the Treasure Tables blog discusses the need to retcon, an inevitable consequence of improvisation.
As Sir Walter Scott states: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
And, that goodness, as J.R. Pope adds: “But when we’ve practiced for a while/How vastly we improve our style!”
October 26th, 2007
Still enjoying taking my time in LotRO, I did something about a week ago I’ve done once before but didn’t expect to do again: I re-rolled a character to create almost exactly the same one.
I enjoy a certain brand of roleplaying in MMOs, one that’s compatible with actually playing the game and that favors emergent narrative. As such, I tend to create characters and envision their personalities and histories with a few bold strokes. I choose the character’s class based on what I’d like to play, the character’s race based on what can play my class of choice. If I have a choice of races, I’ll choose the one I haven’t played before, since in most MMOs each race gets to experience some different content, at least at the beginning of the game.
When choosing my character’s sex, I generally alternate between male and female. I like playing characters of both sexes. No, I don’t choose female characters because of the appearance of their posteriors, nor for any prurient reason whatsoever.
But as my female hobbit burglar reached level 17 and I began grouping more and more, I realized I just didn’t want to deal with the reaction to my obviously male voice in voice chat. I know most people don’t have a problem with men playing female characters, and I know people actually expect male voices for female characters. And I even know that hobbits of both sexes actually look pretty much identical in LotRO.
But I didn’t want to add another element to the already immersion-shattering effect of voice chat.
That alone wouldn’t have been enough reason, though. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’m tempted to achieve the “Undying” title available to those who achieve level 20 without once being defeated. With my first burglar, I died rather stupidly in an easily survivable situation at level 13. I got over it pretty quickly, but when I came up with a second reason to re-roll (changing my character’s sex), that was enough justification.
Now I have a bit of a quandary, though. As I said, I enjoy characters of both sexes. Will my concerns about voice chat doom me to creating only male characters henceforth? Will I get over those concerns and freely create female characters in the future? Will I avoid voice chat even when it’s just so useful (such as for dealing with the fellowship maneuvers key to the burglar class)?
Playing cross-sex characters is a big issue in MMOs, an issue that goes way beyond the scope of this blog post. But has anyone out there ever made a similar decision? Has anyone’s choice of character sex—or other character attribute—been influenced by the prospect of voice chat?
October 10th, 2007
We kicked off our new Buffy campaign (set in the Spanish colonial town 170 years before the show started) with a character creation session. This was the first time any of the players had experienced Unisystem, and they appreciated the super-graininess, used as they are to GURPS. One player has never, ever played a roleplaying game before, so it was her first time experimenting with the concept of character creation. (Seriously, for the first time ever, she touched a die that had more than six sides.)
She absolutely shined. She’d come up with an interesting background (daughter of an American Protestant missionary family, venturing through unsettled Indian territory to the Spanish town of Valle del Sol), and she’s agreed to play a “potentia” Slayer, partly because not one of my three established players wanted to take the role of Slayer proper.
I did find one problem with the graininess: the players all gravitated toward a heavily overlapping set of Qualities and Shortcomings. The two combat-oriented players appear almost identical (although one is a werewolf). The two non-combat characters (one a potential witch, the other a Watcher who happens to be a man of the cloth) are similarly similar.
With this crew, though (my wife, a couple who’ve been the core of our gaming group for a while, and the new woman), I don’t anticipate this being too much of a problem. Oh, we’ll have two or three people rolling for lots of skill checks, but they’ll come up with different plans and deal with situations differently. With a bit of clever GM manipulation, I think I’ll be able to give everyone good screen time without too much trouble.
That said, I want to hear any suggestions anyone has for fostering “niche protection” in a system that’s mildly hostile to it!
We had a quick play session after character creation was finished. Normally, I have a good idea of everyone’s character a week or more in advance, so I found it quite challenging to place and integrate everyone’s characters into the plot believably. In the end, I felt a bit off.
My wife tells me, though, that if I hadn’t said anything, no one would have noticed. And G— (the woman of the couple) sent me an IM this morning gushing about the game. So I won’t worry.
Instead, I have to figure out how to schedule a follow-up session, along with sessions for the fantasy campaign, the pirate campaign, and the Lost-inspired campaign I’m running. As well as get-togethers for all the great board and card games I want to play.
October 1st, 2007
On vacation, I had time to read the core rulebook for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game
. I picked it up because a friend who has never played a roleplaying game in her life but who seems like a good candidate absolutely loves the Buffyverse.
In fact, our very first session will take place this Friday. Introducing a new player to roleplaying is fun and exhilarating. This woman is friendly, fun, and creative. She loves good stories and acts in the community theater. Unless the utter geekiness of our activity sends her screaming, she should be a wonderful addition to our group.
I like the Buffy system. This is my first encounter with Unisystem, but from what I can tell it will be a genuinely fun game system that actively supports the genre. The very grainy rules (one skill covers all melee weapon use) mean that players can focus on doing the cool stuff they’ve seen on TV without worrying about a dozen possible techniques for any given weapon. (Note, I absolutely love games that let you worry about such things. GURPS is my system of choice, after all. But that sort of detail has no place in Buffy.)
The text itself does a pretty good job capturing the feeling of the show (the name of that one melee skill: “Getting Medieval”), although sometimes I thought it got a bit heavy handed. Yes, it’s clever to use Buffyspeak in the text, but sometimes every single sentence in a rules-heavy paragraph seems to drip with Whedonesque wordplay. Funny and fun, but not all the time.
This Friday, we’ll spend most of our time creating characters. I’ll need to refamiliarize myself with the rules (I get lots of great players, but none of them ever seem willing to read the damn rules, even though doing so would make our games richer) and put the finishing touches on our introductory adventure.
Before I do, though, I’d like to ask anyone who plays or has played the game one question: How important are the various supplements? I have one player set to take on the mantle of the Slayer, one who wants to be a reluctant witch, another who can’t resist the alure of a lycanthropy, and the last who’s eager to play a Watcher. Will we be missing out on lots of great rules of we don’t have the The Slayers Handbook
and the The Magic Box
within easy reach?
September 26th, 2007
In her games, my daughter loves rules.
One of the fundamental components of any game is rules. Without rules, you may have a fun activity, but you don’t have a proper game. That’s why we RPG geeks have (and gloat over) elaborate tomes of arcane rules addressing even the most improbable situations. Sitting around and telling a shared story may be fun, but most of us find it more fun with rules.
My brother and I used to make a game of shared storytelling on long car trips. Eschewing die rolling and combat tables, we nonetheless invented guidelines for whose turn in was to spin yarns about the brave Mercemer Brothers (the heroes of many of our tales, adolescent boys who foiled almost all the villains’ plots through the judicious use of M80s, which we somehow envisioned as the pinnacle of personal explosive devices). Of course, the storytelling could be surrendered voluntarily, but it had to be given up if one player exceeded five minutes or repeated an event without sufficient variation.
And understanding and exploiting rules grants a degree of pleasure itself, of course.
As I’ve already discussed, my two-year-old prefers games of “pretend,” as I suspect most two-year-olds do. These proto–roleplaying games may involve walking in circles around the first floor and calling it “going on vacation” or making sure that her toys are looking in a particular direction or “talking” to one another.
But already they’re starting to have rules.
Oh, I don’t pretend to understand her rules, but she’s got ‘em.
For instance, in a recent game of “follow me around the house,” S— gave me one of her plastic dinosaurs. “You have to hold it like this,” she said, grasping the one she reserved for herself by the tail and holding it as a sort of saurian pistol. I complied, and we completed two circuits of the house.
“Now hold it like this,” she said, switching her grip to its head. She started to lead me around again but caught me letting my arm hang at my side. “No, you have to hold it right!” I complied, and the game continued.
As an example of a non-roleplaying game, I recently found S— and her friend sitting on opposite arms of the sofa in the den, taking turns calling out the names of objects they could see.
“Wall!”
“Pillow!”
“Kitchen!”
“Farm set!”
“Arm!”
“Farm set!”The girls laughed and laughed, but their laughter increased when one of them shouted something out of turn or had to pause to think of something. They began giggling hardest when they started making up words completely. And if you saw them, you’d know that it’s the same sort of laughter that erupts from any player in a good-natured pick-up game when a challenge is missed.As I said, I don’t exactly know why she makes these rules. Is she simply asserting authority? Somehow, that doesn’t feel right. Instead, it feels as if she wants to really make a
game of an activity. Adding arbitrary challenges (holding the toy correctly) and mandating turn-taking adds fun to the fun.
Talking about emergent behavior in response to rules systems is always interesting, but at the moment I’m finding it even more interesting to watch the emergence of rules systems themselves.
September 11th, 2007
A wave of toys washes across the floors of several rooms in our house when, at high toy-tide, our daughter diligently unpacks the chests and shelves filled with her favorite things. At first glance, these waves may seem chaotic, but look closer. S— has arranged her “people” (mostly Fischer-Price Little People, with a couple of Weebles and her beloved Purple Man DDR figure mixed in) in a graceful fractal arcing from one corner of the coffee table to another. Each is facing the same way, and they’re all “watching” a pile of toy birds “sleeping” on the sofa in a pile that alternates bird and blanket, a sort of impromptu toy napoleon.
On the other side of the room, I pick up a discarded toy cow—or maybe it’s not discarded. “No!” wails my toddler, “It’s talking to the otter!” I look down. Sure enough, the cow was positioned face-to-face with a toy otter. I was unwise to interrupt their conversation.
When S— goes to sleep, the toy-tide recedes. Plastic teacups go back on shelves in the toy kitchen, stuffed animals assemble in the toy chest, and the sofa transforms once again into a place to sit rather than a stage.
Among all these toys, though, there aren’t any that qualify as “games.” Oh, she plays games of pretend with them, and as I posted in the first part of this series, I hope this will lead to a lifetime love of roleplaying games. But she doesn’t have any games proper.
For the most part, manufacturers don’t make too many games for toddlers. Crazed parents will hand over thousands of hard-earned dollars for toys stamped “educational” on their packaging, but the littlest kids just don’t play games. Only after about a year of life to do they even have enough perception, language, and motor skills to start imitating what they see their parents and friends do for fun.
But on one rainy day on my recent vacation, I got to see four kids aged two to four (my daughter on the young end) playing actual, commercial games. These games are actually targeted at older kids, and in fact not one was played strictly according to the Rules. But then, what game ever is?
The three games they played were:
The fishing game—purchased by the parents of one kid because the nearby pond permitted fishing, so they thought they’d bring the fun indoors—proved thoroghly entertaining. On, only one kid (the youngest) had anything approaching the motor skills to actually catch a fish by the official method, but all of them (even the skilled one) had a grand time carefully inserting the hook into the mouths of fish as they passed. Or simply grabbing a fish of an appealing color. In the end, though, they treated the game more as a toy which had a skill element than a real game.
The homemade fishing game that I brought over—which my wife made from wooden dowels, rare earth magnets, string, paper, and paperclips—proved much more popular. Sure, we had only two rods, and the “fish” were pictures and bits of greeting cards. But the fun of fishing for a picture of my daughter or a reindeer with a magnet dangling from a string was something the girls were better able to do, was more relaxing, and was much more rewarding (”I got a horse!” “I got S—!”)
They treated the Peanut Butter & Jelly card game as a toy instead of a game, too. Instead of trying to build a particular sandwich, the kids just shouted out when one dad would call, “Who wants peanut butter?” or “Who wants bacon?” The littlest kid wanted them all, of course, but in the end the girls assembled some remarkable sandwiches. My daughter decided to treat her sandwich (meticulously free of meat products, coincidentally; maybe she’s picked up on our family’s vegetarianism without understanding it) as a toy and pretended to eat it for several minutes after the other girls put theirs away.
Zingo! came the closest to being played as a game. Basically “bingo with pictures,” the game drops two sturdy tiles with images that may match the squares on each kids cards. The girls each took one card for themselves and one for their dolls, and they happily laid matching tiles on pictures as they showed up. The precocious youngest girl quickly memorized both sides of her cards (the green side apparently leads to less “competition,” but both sides have images), and we laughed as she flipped each card over whenever a chip with a picture she remembered on the other side came up, dumping any that she’d placed on the front.
None of the girls played to win. None of them felt the slightest bit of competitiveness (which,
really, is a fine thing; toddler competitiveness can get ugly fast and is expressed mostly through
whining). But they did sort of play to fill their cards.
The youngest recommended age for these three games is four, and the girls definitely weren’t ready to play them as proper games. But as a gamer myself, and a doting father, I had a grand time watching them experiment with the beginnings of gaming.
After the last sandwich card and Zingo! tile was put away, they reverted to their favorite kind of game: roleplaying games. The oldest decided she was a teacher, and the other three—and their dolls—happily assembled as pupils and did what she told them. Or did something else. No one really minded, as everyone was having fun.
September 7th, 2007
Recently, my daughter played what I called her very first game. Since that time, she’s become something of a hardcore gamer, at least as much as a two-year-old is likely to be.
No, she’s not like this kid (featured in a story that smacks of bad parenting and a healthy serving of hot, steaming bullshit), but she does love to play games.
There are the obvious “pretend” games. This past weekend, for instance, she decided to pretend that we were going on vacation again. She packed bags (paper ones) full of her favorite toys, handed one to me and one to my brother-in-law, and led us in an endless march around the downstairs. She also enjoys making pretend food in her kitchen (which must be left where she puts it on the dinner table next to the real food or we are subjected to serious complaints) and pretending that things are not as they seem.
“This is a truck,” she declares, holding up a toy rabbit. And when corrected: “I want to pretend it’s a truck!”
This is all good practice for roleplaying games, of course, as is her budding collection of various dice. She found my dice collection very interesting long before it was safe to let her play with the little polyhedrons.
I remember one morning about a year ago when I came downstairs after a late-night game session with her. Back then, we took great pains to make sure that nothing that could fit in her mouth that wasn’t food got in her hands. Apparently though, in my exhaustion, I’d left 1d6 on the living room floor. I discovered the wayward cube in my daughter’s mouth, the lopsided grin on her face giving away the fact that she’d popped in something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
She has her own dice bag now (a satin bag that a small bottle of Godiva liquer came in, donated by my wife), and it’s full of several dice I don’t need. Even though I haven’t played D&D for years, I still have a notion that a set of dice requires, at a minimum, 1d4, 4d6, 1d8, 2d10, 1d12, and 1d20, so I made sure my daughter has all of those. They’re mostly dice I never pick up, but I did include several of the very first geek dice I had, clear crystal dice with numerals that I filled in with crayon sometime in the early ’80s.
While on vacation, we played quite a few games with her three friends who were staying in the house next door. There was, of course, some good pretend play, but they also had some purchased games that I’ll write about soon.
September 6th, 2007
I very seriously doubt I’ll still be playing WoW when the Warth of the Lich King expansion (newly announced by Blizzard) is released, but here’s a quick list of the interesting features:
- The first new WoW class since release: the Death Knight (a hero class; you can create a character with this class, starting at level sixty-something or higher, only after completing a quest with some other high-level character)
- An increase of the level cap to 80 and the profession cap to 450
- The content of Northrend, open to characters 68 and above
- Siege weapons in an outdoor PVP zone
Those, at least, are the features that are interesting to me. I don’t mind the increase in level and profession caps, as getting those up is supremely easy and presumably means there are new and interesting abilities to play with past 70 (and 375).
I like to content, so this ten-zone continent of Northrend may be fun. I didn’t wind up liking the Outlands all that much, apart from Nagrand. They felt too alien and strange to me, too different from what already existed in the game.
As for the Death Knight class, well, new classes are fun. I enjoy learning the mechanics of each class. But Blizzard has always been committed to making the classes truly unique. To do that with the Death Knight, they’ve had to invent what sounds like a fairly bizarre mechanic, with a new sword bar that has runes etched on it that get spent but can be re-etched after a certain time expires. Different, yes, but weird!
Also, I’ve never liked the mechanic of creating a completely new character simply because you’ve achieved something with a different character. It spoils my already very tenuous willing suspension of disbelief, underscoring the gamey side of things instead of the simulation, immersion, and roleplaying that I really like.
But more interesting options for PVP? That I can get behind 100%.
For more details, one great write up is at 1up. Check out their detailed write up here. Or just watch WoWinsider, where there will no doubt be hundreds of posts on the topic of the new expansion over the next few months.
August 3rd, 2007
| I don’t just like games; I’m a foodie as well. On Fridays, I publish a drink or cocktail recipe that I enjoy as an accompaniment to some sort of game. These aren’t necessarily drinks I’ve invented, but they are superior potations that gamers who tipple are liable to enjoy. |
This post continues my discussion of the great cocktail the Mai Tai, which began here.
The Mai Tai exemplifies something that can invigorate tabletop roleplaying campaigns with a sense of verisimilitude: namely, the fact that a single splash of an exotic ingredient can transform something ordinary into an extraordinary delight. Rum punch is nice, but no amount of paper umbrellas and miniature pineapples makes them miraculous. A simple splash of orgeat, though, and you can imagine you’re sitting on a beach in Tahiti.
In any campaign, throw in an ingredient that’s unexpected and rare (or at least apparently rare). Pages have been written on interesting hybrid settings, but this is something simpler. Instead of trying to install cyberpunk hardware in a high fantasy setting (which could be damn fun!), just add a little flavor of technology. Many settings now do this, like including mechanical “life forms”—that is, robots—to a setting
loaded with magic. Likewise, the world in the marvelous The Golden Compass
by Phillip Pullman takes a pretty standard Victorian setting and throws in “daemons”—externalized animae that everyone has—and creates a vivid and fascinating new world.
When inventing your own campaign, you can do the same. Instead of melding two genres, pick a familiar one and add a foreign element. One of the best ways to do this is set the campaign in your own home town, but add something strange. This not only assists in campaign creation (you already have pre-made maps, NPCs, and a good estimate of how to get around), it also adds a certain eeriness as players encounter mysterious things on familiar streets.
You could make your own town the locus for a vast conspiracy, with neighbors disappearing and sightings of men in black at the street corners. Horror works well, too. If classic black witchcraft is real and attracts the attention of dark powers, then when a neighbor starts dabbling, the PCs may have their hands full fighting off monsters from beyond—in the players own back yards!
And now, at last, the recipe.
Mai Tai
Ingredients
- 1 oz. light rum
- 1 oz. dark rum
- ½ oz. triple sec
- ½ oz. orgeat syrup
- ¼ oz. fresh lime juice
Instructions
Shake all ingredients in a shaker half full of ice. Pour over shaved or crushed ice in a cocktail glass. (I like to use a brandy snifter.)
Garnish with your choice of maraschino cherries, baby pineapples or pineapple slices, and orange slices. If you have one handy, make sure you use a paper umbrella to perfect the drink.
August 3rd, 2007
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