Help! Ending a Deathgrip on D&D

[Joshua Bearden]

I have since moved halfway across the US again. Internet searches for indie games turned up nil in this part of North Carolina. Pathfinder Society is active, however. I think I'll join a group and see if I can't spot and recruit some players that may have a pinko-indie streak in them. Perhaps a nascent indie scene is hiding just below the D&D-alike noise floor here. We'll see. Josh, wish me luck.

Good luck Ed!  Things started here with me merely attending open board game nights at a local (though not particularly friendly) gaming store. It was there that I first found some people willing to play Fiasco since it could be pitched with a time footprint similar to a fairly meaty board game.  One of our most enthusiastic and 'indie' players had never played D&D or any other RPG in her life.  She liked Fiasco, LOVED Kingdom and despite initial suspicion is super excited about our budding Sorcerer campaign.  (I'll post about this in Ron's Stuff).

Just saying there are people who are cool indie game players and don't even know it yet. Experiment widely with different games to find what brings them in!

[RangerEd]

Ron,

I like picking at scabs. I have a "turn into the discomfort" mentality that has served me well for years (Sun Tzu's know thyself stuff and what not).

Great question and one that I have been mulling over since the drive home after leaving the game early. I have two sessions that stand out as superbly enjoyable and somewhat telling.

One was a Vampire game in which my character had been observing a potential enemy vampire through a window in his opulent mansion. It was supposed to be a straight R&S mission, but after some shifty behavior, my guy squeezed the trigger on a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle attached to the bottom of the optical observation device (convenient placement, right?). All hell broke loose, and hilarity ensued as another player started whining about "the plan" and all that. One great, decapitating shot was the catalyst for chaos.

The second was a Pathfinder session in which my buddy had run out of prepared material unbeknownst to me, and was winging the hell out of it. It was spectacularly vibrant and fun as we bantered about visualizations of the imagined "here and now" while the game kept going.

The consistency in this sample set is emergent, unplanned story gameplay. The way each situation happened was by finding the edges of what he had planned and leaping into the uncharted story ground together. My buddy is great at it. Unfortunately, he thinks such play is a failure mode of sorts for gaming. Such style is only to be employed when one is caught unprepared and the various "plot containment devices" (his words) have also failed.

All me driveling on about story-now role-play techniques and games seems to have made him turtle-up a bit and double down on trapping characters within his preplanned plots. My character this past session was absolutely bound to the town in which his plot was to unfold. I tried to explore the edges of the box some, but he had the character caged quite well. I could not find a way to leap into the unknown without breaking character.

So, I am left to conclude that some magical thinking may have occurred on my part, but there are still those moments that truly sparkle, too.

Rafu,
I'll have to check out Bully Pulpit Games and try to get up that way some time. Chapel Hill is just over an hour's drive away.

Josh,
Will do. Thanks for the encouragement.

Thanks all,
Ed