Gaming Resurection - Post Mortem

[RobMuadib]

Hi All


As I mentioned I recently made some effort to get a gaming group together again, which was suprisingly easy, I managed to round up and start gaming with 3 other people, only one of which I knew as an acquitance, in like 2 days. (I had developed this assumption that it was a herculean effort to get a group together anymore, guess I was wrong.)

We had our first full play session today, we spent like 6 hours or so playing in Ken's basement, he has a nice little game room set aside. It like brought back so many memories, the fact that we were playing D&D 3rd helped I am sure.

Anyway, enough exposition, kicking in the door, I found myself suggesting/prodding for backstory elements and helping put together a little context for our party. Our DM, Dustin, was amenable to most of our/my suggestions. The fact that he was only partly prepared with anything helped. It turns out he has an original fantasy world he has put together, which we played in. He is even writing a novel based in it.:)

I helped our third player, Cliff,  make his character, and helped explained the basics of the rules to him. It kind of suprised me how quickly and easily I did this, good habit I guess. (Interesting note, Cliff is another young airman-type, I am like the only player their that has not been, or isn't currently air-force/military, though I am an Air Force brat.:) Air Force bases our pretty good sources of gamers it seems.),

This being his first time playing more or less. One of the interesting things was that in the interest of time, we made his character an Elven ranger using the pre-made character setup they have in the PHB's. Well, after we had whipped him up, Dustin was giving us some background on his world, and it turns out Elves were extremely rare, having basically wiped themselves out largely due to some dabbling in great magics and such. With many elves having inborn magical ability, and few "natural" elves left.

One other interesting bit I found myself doing was when Cliff was trying to think of a good "Elvish/Fantasy" name for his character Ken and Dustin read of several suggestion from various books. Cliff did come up with decent one himself, Vorn, which I seconded, both liking his idea, and wanting to encourage his involvement/participation.


So I suggested we run with this, having mine and Ken's character accompanying Cliff's elf through the area, on his as yet undefined quest to do something important Elven-related. This also fits into the past-cataclysm type situation where society was being rebuilt after major war with the "Armies Of Darkness". Leaving the area littered with ruins, and encroaching creatures and such. So There is the opportunity for some interesting "epic" story arcs in there.

Dustin seemed amenable to the idea, so looks like I will be able to encourage interesting elements that way, which is something I enjoy. I find I like to build a foundation for either a good narrativist spring-board, or a detailed edifice to explore. I guess I also was trying to engender some narrativist direction in Dustin, considering he mentioned this as a setting for the book he is working on.

Other ways I found myself chiming in was helping out in rules clarifications and resolution suggestions for Dustin (Since all of us were unfamiliar with D&D3rd, I less than the others of course.) Also, encouraging him to fudge or gloss over the rules to keep the game moving.

One other thing I found myself flat on was in-character role-play and discussion with NPC's and stuff. Guess I am rusty and a bit self-concious there. Overall it was alot of fun though. We had alot of table-talk and jokes too. Even going so far as to have a running joke. I guess Ken has another friend who is interested in playing, but can only attend irregularly, so we kind of made up a semi-npc character for him, a Cleric since none of us were.

Well, as is common we expected his character to end up dying alot or whatever, being that he was the semi-npc, so we ended up calling him Kenny, ala South Park. Going so far as to say he had like white robes and stuff as well as a long pointed hat in a semi-catholic style, as well as a hood pulled over him so he talked like Kenny in Southpark too. So he ended up looking like a cross between a KKK member and catholic bishop or whatever.

Oh, and since it was raining out, and we happened to have brought up
Star Trek Red-Shirts/Galaxy Quest, we had him wear a red cloak too. So his character ended up being a shared group character, with each of us taking turns acting out things he said, and awaiting our chance to do the you killed Kenny line. THe ironic thing is, he turned out to be the most effective character in combat.

So anyway, I felt things went really well, and am looking forward to next Sunday. Cliff seemed to have enjoyed himself as well, it will be interesting to see what kind of preferences he develops. I also took the time to note the play styles of everyone for when I start DMing after Dustin deploys to Saudi, though he will be back in October.

I am even starting to do some prep work to putting my beloved Calemboria into DnD3 terms, which will entail me dumping and tweaking several of the rules. Oh, one other thing I liked about DnD3, is that the more unified resolution system and the use of skills and feats makes it better suited as a "gateway" drug to other RPG's.

I even thought of maybe doing up my gameworld as D20 (Blasphemy, I know;) )

Anyway, wanted to share my observations of the game, and what it feels like to be playing a game after a long hiatus of nothing but design and theory filling my brain.

Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

This post interested me a lot, but it took a while to figure out what to say about it.

I guess the main thing is to express pleasure at seeing a statement like,
"I found myself suggesting/prodding for backstory elements and helping put together a little context for our party. Our DM, Dustin, was amenable to most of our/my suggestions."

As well as some of your points about what sort of encouragement or interaction leads to (in this case) Narravist play.

Also, you wrote,
"... I found myself flat on was in-character role-play and discussion with NPC's and stuff. Guess I am rusty and a bit self-concious there"

I've found the same thing with my own playing, every time I start with a new group. I've also observed it in some players every time we start with a new system, no matter how long we've been playing together. I think it's not a big deal, that everyone has their own gearing-up rate and that it's no indicator of how good/interesting they're going to be once they are in the proper gear.

Best,
Ron

[Zak Arntson]

I liked this post, as well. And I second Ron's "gearing-up time." I try to run a little RPG/Card Game before-hand to get us more in the game. Next Indie Gaming Monday I'm going to throw Pantheon around, or maybe SLURPS. After 30 min-1 hour of that, we should all be roleplaying enough to jump into the main game.

[Dave Versace]

At the risk of straying off-topic, I'll just third that "gearing up time" comment of Ron's as well. Last week I started a new game with two guys, both housemates of several years (one of them my brother). We play together in a ten-hour Sunday session every single week. Since 1992 I've been in only a handful of games that didn't involve one or both of them - hundreds of sessions - so it's fair to say I know their styles, preferences etc pretty well.

The system was CoC, with which we've played one or two long campaigns in the past. The setting was Delta Green, which was new to us but pretty easily summarised as "X-Files vs Cthulhu". I was using the canned adventure straight from the book so that we could ease ourselves into the setting.

And man, it was awkward! They sat their twiddling their thumbs and struggling with their characters, I got distracted easily and had this weird compulsion to undermine myself by apologising for every mistake. It literally felt like the first time any of us had ever sat down to roleplay.

Eventually we shook it off and got some rhthymn going, but if roleplaying is analogous to a band, I wouldn't have wanted to be our neighbours for the first two hours...

[DeadGirl]

All,

Referring back to the first two posts in the thread . . .

[Embedded quotation originally from RobMuadib]

I guess the main thing is to express pleasure at seeing a statement like,
"I found myself suggesting/prodding for backstory elements and helping put together a little context for our party. Our DM, Dustin, was amenable to most of our/my suggestions."

As well as some of your points about what sort of encouragement or interaction leads to (in this case) Narravist play.

It was so nice to hear of a player taking an interest in backstory development! Even with my gaming group, I find I usually have to prod all but one player to come up with a character background. And that one player is so into most of his characters that he writes short stories of his own volition.

So just imagine my glee when, at last Sunday's gaming session, all three of the players took off running with their character concepts. Each one filled in a complete background for his character that is intertwined with the others. They each figured out their character's motivations, goals, hopes, dreams -- they pretty much played the session themselves and only used me for the plot hook and a little bit of guidance.

We are meeting again this coming weekend, and I have never looked forward to running a game more.

~Kris