[Grimm d20] Yeah, let’s roll for Attributes!

[Frank T]

Last weekend was NordCon. I played PtA again, which didn’t kick off quite as much as usual, and TSoY, which really rocked. And then there was Saturday evening. We had turned down Harald on the Roach because we were a little tired and kind of in the mood for full GM customer service. We, that is Nicole, Jörg and me. Nicole is my girlfriend, she hasn’t played much RPGs and only two or three times indie stuff with me. She’s a crack Diablo II player, however. Jörg is a friend and role-playing veteran I know from GroFaFo who has a record of AD&D, Shadowrun, 7th See, WuShu and PtA—and still likes all of these games!

So we’re looking at the black board, and I’m like: I shall not play Shadowrun. Jörg is like: I can GM WuShu. Nicole’s like: Oh no, I have to describe stuff? And then this guy shows up whom I know from gaming back at university. His name is Anwar, he’s a role-playing freak like Jörg and me, part of the German Tribe 8 team, and prefers the crunchy side of game systems. And he offers us to GM Grimm d20, where kids from our world get sucked into a world of evil, warped fairy tale. Character classes are “jock”, “dreamer”, “nerd” etc. And I’m like: Hey, why not, I never played d20, but the guys at the Forge always say it’s a coherent system and stuff, and you gotta have played d20 at least once in your life, right?

We gather one more player on our way to the table. We start making characters, and Anwar goes: You want to distribute points or roll for Attributes? And Jörg and I look at each other like: Oh fucking yes, let’s actually ROLL for Attributes! How old school is this? Anwar goes: And let’s not switch anything, either. And Jörg and I are like: No fucking way that anybody switches anything here! I end up with Dex my best stat and Cha my worst, and decide to play a dumb-ass country bumpkin jock. Jörg plays a hardened bully from the streets of the city, Nicole plays a normal kid with rich parents, and the other guy (forgot his name) plays an orphaned dreamer.

Then Anwar asks us to describe our characters, and we are going into the details of how our characters look, and I realize it’s been a while since last I did this at the beginning of play. And I have missed it, too! What follows are three hours of in-character dialogue, complete with acting out childish behavior, solid problem solving and a little fighting, too. We didn’t go into the depths of feats and what else you can do to maximize your effectiveness. But man, when I struck home with my hockey stick, and rolled a 6 for damage, and Anwar rolled his eyes and mimicked that squire going down, that was fun.

And Nicole was really buying into it. She never liked the acting part of role-playing because she felt slightly embarrassed to do it in front of other people. She also said later that she didn’t like the whole idea of playing kids all that much, but nevertheless, she was acting! She was all: “Screw that plan, let’s do this instead, and will you stop hitting each other?” It made me happy to see her engage that way.

We didn’t finish the adventure because Jörg and Nicole were getting very tired at some point. But we had a lot of plain, old school fun. Just like in the good old days. We should do that more often.

- Frank