Prodigal Son: The Campaign Trail

Part Twelve:

    As I am building up to run another game, this time introducing my fellow Dork’s wife to the hobby, I’m putting some thought into the immediate needs of the game, but also in what I might want to do in the near future.  The realities of adult life, which I’ve gone on about in previous postings, make the hobby of tabletop roleplaying something of a challenge. 

    So, I’m in the same pickle I’ve been in with gaming for a decade or so.  How do I manage to gather people together on a regular basis?  This comes down to several questions, and I’m sure I’m not thinking of half the important ones.  Obviously, what night of the week?  I prefer to game at night.  It’s like going to the movies for me.  Not that I don’t go during the day on occasion, but I simply prefer night visits.  When it comes to games, I don’t mind a board game or a video game during the day, but there’s something about that post-dinner time that feels better.  Perhaps it goes back to telling stories around a camp fire?  I don’t know.  But, what night of the week?  My personal choice is Sunday.  I’ve always found Sunday night to be one of the best for running a game.  Less people have to work Sunday nights, too, which helps.  But there’s a certain nameless factor that has always worked for me.  And, if I’m going to be running a game, I prefer not to do so after a day of work.  It’s just one of those things.  It’s hard to concentrate and bring my A-game while I’m trying to decompress from a stressful day on the job.  Not to mention, I haven’t had time for last minute adjustments or re-reading my notes for the night’s game. 

    Then you’ve got a group to assemble.  Not every game is for every gamer, and not every gamer is for ever group (and vice versa).  Personalities that would be fantastic for a game like Paranoia or Ghostbusters might be dreadful for Everyway or Empire of the Petal Thrown.  Someone who is scatter-brained and likes pranks or tomfoolery can work great in the right kind of game.  But they can be a distraction, and a downright detraction in another.  Someone who is very serious and rules conscious could be an excellent addition to a game of Ars Magica or Earthdawn.  But that same person might squirm in their seats or chafe under the free-formed mechanics of Everyway or Fudge. So having an idea of what game you might be running and who your group of players will be is a good idea. 

    Right now, I’ve got four serious possible players, but I don’t have a solid idea of how, or if, they might gel.  Nor do I really know what game might be best for the group, or some variation of it.  I have some ideas of things I’d like to run, but nothing set in stone.  And, I don’t know if said players would be able to get together on the same night, regularly or not.  And how regular should a game be?  I know of people who have done once a month (usually longer sessions).  But I frankly don’t like playing any less than every other week if it’s an ongoing game.  Even that’s pushing it, because if you miss a week, that can throw things off quite a bit.  But, it’s hard for people to commit to a regular night every week.  I’m not sure what the balance is.  I guess it depends on the group.  My thoughts right now come down to a few options.

    First, there’s simply trying to get together for a regular game night.  Perhaps every couple of weeks.  This would involve various games, from board games to video games, and perhaps the odd one-shot roleplaying game, probably something of the ‘beer and pretzel’ variety.  So called beer and pretzel games are the sort you don’t need to put a lot of thought or planning into, are mostly done just for a laugh, and completed in an evening.  Paranoia is probably the single greatest example of this sort of game.  Macho Women with Guns, Ghostbusters, and Tales from the Crypts are some others. 

    A second option would be a more traditional attempt to get players together either every week, or every other for the exclusive purpose of roleplaying.  This is most conducive to ongoing games, or to longer but still finite games, or mini-campaigns.  For a weekly game, I’d want a core group of no less than three and no more than six players who can be relatively sure of attendance.  And on those occasions when too many players, or the wrong ones are missing, the group can fall back on a board game, beer and pretzel game, or even something like watching a movie.  Making this an every other week game wouldn’t change things too much, except that missing a session could put as much as a month between games, which makes continuity more difficult.  And from experience, this always seems to happen at the most inopportune time, like on a cliffhanger or in the middle of something important. 

    A third option I’ve been thinking about lately is a bit odd for me, but might actually work.  That is, running a game every week, but with a revolving crew of players.  This would only work for certain games or style of games.  The most obvious choice for me is Ars Magica, a game designed around having a large cast of characters, many of whom don’t take part in every scenario.  So long as I could maintain 3 or for players every week, with as many as 10 or 12 people actually ‘playing’ the game, it could work.  I’ve seen it done.  In fact, one of the best games I was ever in was an Ars Magica game that had about 12 or 13 players at its height, though there were rarely more than 6 players on any given night.  And with a game like Ars Magica, having ‘guest’ players is easy as pie.  Ars Magica is not the only game that might work, simply the most obvious. 

    Of course, one of the most important things to do, or to worry about is keeping players wanting to show up.  People are less likely to have things “come up” if they’re really enjoying themselves and looking forward to the game.  I know when I’ve been in a really good game, I’ve skipped out on other obligations in order to go to the game.  But when I’ve been less interested, I’ve skipped sessions at the drop of a hat.  So, I think the trick is to get the players invested in the game, to get them fully engaged.  This can certainly be a challenge, but I think a worthy one.  I’ve tried, to varying degrees of success, several tricks over the years.  Again, using Ars Magica as an example, the ‘lab notebook’ always served as a way for me to stay involved in the game, even during the weeks between sessions.  I’d get out of a game on Sunday night, then spend part of my study hall each day for the rest of the week writing about what my magi was doing while not out adventuring.  I created whole subplots in my lab notebook, about various experiments and activities in and around the covenant that went on between myself and the gamemaster, occasionally coming into play during a regular game session.  I’ve tried to use journals in other games, but have found players extremely resistant to it.  Perhaps seeing it as some kind of homework, as opposed to a fun way to continue the game beyond the few hours of actual tabletop play.  A friend of mine ran a game where a player used to do a painting of something important from one session to bring in for the next.  Another player used to make authentic food.  I’ve heard of people composing songs, poetry, and even writing short stories.  I had suggested for one game (Fading Suns), that people bring in designs for ships, weapons, or creatures with brief explanations.  The ones I really liked would make it into the game. 

    There are countless ways to encourage player engagement, and I am always curious to hear more.  I don’t think you can have too much.  And some games are better designed for it than others, it seems.  The Pool (and the variation, The Puddle) for example, is a game where successful rolls actually allow the player to guide the story for a while.  To what degree could vary by game, but this can really make things interesting for both players and gamemasters, especially GMs more used to having a strict grip on the story.  But this gives the players not just a say in what their character do or say, but in the very progression of the story and shaping of the world.

    I recently acquired a science fiction game called Diaspora which uses the Fate system (which uses some elements Fudge).  In it, you not only make characters together but create the very setting you’ll be playing in.  Each player (you might not even know who the GM will be at this point), creates a star system within a ‘cluster.’  Then the group figures out how they’re all connected, not just physically by ‘slipstream’ routes, but by economics and culture as well.  Players taking an active part in creating the playing field their characters will be inhabiting.  I would think that would be pretty engaging and encourage them to become more invested in the game, their characters, and the future of the story and setting.  It’s an interesting idea, and I’m very interested in giving it a try.  It doesn’t hurt that Diaspora is in a nice semi-generic, Golden Age, mostly hard science fiction setting, along the lines of Asimov or Niven. 

    Instead of simply accruing experience points for stat boosting, I think taking an active role in creating better stories would be fantastic for players and GM.  As a gamemaster, I’ve always worked best with plenty of active feedback.  The worst games are the ones where people simply show up, go through some dice rolling exercises, then leave.  Did they enjoy it?  Did any of the work I put in really mean anything?  What reason do I have to put hours of work into the next session?  Games like that tend to not last very long.  What’s the point?

    So, in building a group of players for this return to gaming, I have many questions, and many challenges.  But, I know from the past that the hobby can be most rewarding.  I formed great friendships and great memories around those many tables, rolling dice, dreaming big, and telling great stories.  And I had a lot of fun. 

-Matt

Prodigal Son: The Art of the Rip-off (aka: Inspiration)

Part Five:

    This week, I want to talk about something that’s very important to roleplaying.  Inspiration.  Or, as might sometimes be more accurate, outright theft.  From day one, I’ve been lifting ideas from films and books and just about anything else I can get my hands on for ideas.  As a game master, I’ve taken plots from TV shows, events from history, and monsters from movies.  I once ran a Babylon 5 game where I took Event Horizon almost word for word.  My players hadn’t seen it, so they didn’t know where I was going.  It worked out very well.  I’ve used creepy images from David Lynch films to help set up mood.  Whatever I could get my greedy little hands on, I’d take and rework into something usable for a game.

    It was actually this hunger for ideas to use in games that helped me become more of a film buff.  I started to appreciate a wider variety of film, partly because I could find little useful nuggets in the most unusual of places.  And awful movies that many might simply dismiss could still produce gems.

    This sort of ‘inspiration’ isn’t anything new.  Shakespeare did it.  Akria Kurosawa did it.  And Quentin Tarantino made a career out of doing it.  The art comes not in the act of theft, but in what you make of it.  I bring this up this week, because, I’ve just struck gold.  As readers of this column will know, I’m trying to get back into roleplaying, and thanks in large part to the monstrously frustrating harlot, scheduling, I have yet to be able to even sit down and make up a character with my first player.  It’s getting a little ridiculous at this point.  However, a few days ago, while not getting together with Brad, due to something coming up, I ended up watching something that gave me a really swell idea.  And suddenly my plan to just run him through a simple, pre-published one-shot from the back of the Call of Cthulhu basic book was dropped.  No.  Now I’ve got what I think is an awesome idea, that will work very well as a one-shot, but could also expand into a mini-campaign with some extra players added if that becomes an option.  All spawned from watching one thing, and really liking a couple ideas from it.

    I’ve run with those stolen ideas, and created a story that has NOTHING to do with the original.  Or very little, anyway.  Not only adapting it to fit with the Cthulhu mythos, but changing era, adding an extra weird bit of science fiction, and connecting it directly to the character idea Brad came up with.  Frankly, I’m now much more excited about running this game.

    In film, you can see this a lot.  I mention Akria Kurosawa, because a movie frequently cited as the source of many remakes and/or rip-offs is his awesome Samurai picture, Yojimbo.  But what few realize is that Yojimbo is itself based on the excellent Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest.  A lone, mysterious man wanders into a corrupt, nearly dead town, run by two warring factions.  Then he plays each side off the other, bringing the whole thing to a boiling point.  It’s a great story, and one can see how it could so easily translate into feudal Japan (Yojimbo), the American Old West (A Fistful of Dollars), a run-down future(Omega Doom), and a sex charged fantasy world (The Warrior and the Sorceress).  And eventually made it back to something more closely resembling its source (Last Man Standing).  Each of these films took a basic idea, stripped away the trappings of setting and culture, and made a new film.  Sure, some of these are absolute crap.  But the story remains sound.

    Now, because the nature of a roleplaying game means you can’t map out exactly how things will go, transferring a plot directly doesn’t quite work.  But, you can take the ‘set-up’ or even some of the same key ingredients.  So, for example, take a film you really enjoy, say The Thing.  You want to use it, but you’re going to be running an Ars Magica game.  First, consider what some of the key elements of The Thing are, and what makes it so cool.  First, there’s isolation.  The film is set at an Antarctic research station, and there’s a storm rolling in.  Doesn’t get much more removed than that.  Second, there’s the creature itself.  An alien that was frozen in the ice gets loose and infects/consumes people, making itself into near perfect copies in a bid to survive and spread.

    But how would that translate into a magic rich Europe at the end of the 12th century?  Well, isolation could be fairly easy in a land with small population and little in the way of long distance communication.  But you could take this one further, especially if you really like the snow motif.  Set the game in the Alps, or perhaps in half-pagan Scandinavia.  Perhaps at the beginning of a long winter?  And the Thing itself.  What about that?  Frankly, I think brining aliens into Ars Magica would be a mistake.  It sure wouldn’t work for me.  Not to say aliens in the Middle Ages wouldn’t work.  But it’s not something I’d want in Ars Magica.  And the creature seems too insidious to be a simple magically monstrous creature.  It doesn’t seem to be the right style for the fairies.  But, it actually works in a similar way to the Infernal.  So, perhaps this Thing, found under the ice when an ancient stone box is dug up, is a spawn of Hell, actively trying to infect mortal men with its corrupting evil, taking their faces to lure in more unsuspecting folk.  Now, you’ve got the basic story of The Thing, but set in the Mythic Europe of Ars Magica.

    Not every film, or book, will work quite so easily, and some will work better for certain games than others.  Creatures, items, or other details can sometimes be easier to translate.  Like, if you’re running a game of Star Trek, it wouldn’t take much to drop a Predator in, either directly, or modified as you see fit.  Nor would it be very difficult to translate the character of Adolf Hitler.  Change his species, who he preaches hate against, and what he wants to conquer, and you can still use his life story, with details changed, as the source of a compelling and particularly vile villain.  Or, what if you’re running a Traveller game, and you really want to drop your players on the planet from Pitch Black.  Again, it’s not hard.  And if you don’t want anyone to guess, change a few details.  Perhaps, it’s a swampy place, not a desert.  Maybe the temperature is too cold for the creatures during the night phase, and it’s only with the dawn that they begin to wake up.

    In changing little details and figuring out what effect that might have, you are often inspired with many other cool ideas that help make the story your own.  So, while I may start by saying “I’m going to use the ‘squid’ tech from Strange Days.”  I then have to ask what if I put this into an existing Cyberpunk 2020 game.  Well, the tech would certainly seem to blend in pretty handily, but if you add the ability to hack, or be hacked into the equation, as well as the virtual world and 2020’s version of the internet things could take a very different shape.  Boost that tech forward a few years, to the point where you’ve got squid-heads in every alley, overdosed on people’s memories.  Where you’ve got war correspondents sending back their impressions of battle, right up to and including their own deaths, so real you can feel the bullets hitting.  And where even someone without any jacks installed could still be doing some corporate espionage.  In fact, the squid units could totally remove the need for hardware jacks, making people with them seem old-fashioned and antique.  Maybe even second class.  You could have a whole underground of hackers still trying to keep up the old hardwired systems.

 
    I guess my point for this week is, never ignore what could be a potential source of good ideas, and when you’re putting together scenarios, never be afraid to steal.  Just do what successful film makers and playwrights have been doing for generations.  First steal from the best.  But don’t be afraid to steal from the worst.  Then make it your own.

Prodigal Son: My Return to Gaming

Part One

    I’ve liked telling stories since I can remember.  So, it’s no surprise I started to write them down.  I think I first started trying to write in fifth or sixth grade.  I had this idea about really tiny people in a big world.  Sort of like Honey I Shrunk the Kids mixed with The Lord of the Rings.  My mom had always encouraged me to read, and my dad helped me develop my love of science fiction which would become a near obsession for a long time.  And from that fertile field, I reaped many an idea.  I would talk endlessly about them, until finally my dad told me about roleplaying games, and how they might be a good way to channel my creativity and try out some of my ideas.  I already kind of knew about roleplaying.  As a very small child, my brother had humored me by letting me play in his D&D game (I was a lizard man, and I kept eating people…I guess I’ve always been a little warped).  But my father reintroduced me to gaming with The Basic Roleplaying System and Worlds of Wonder.  This was the same core game mechanic used in the classic, venerable Call of Cthulhu.  The system was very simple and very intuitive.  Percentiles are pretty easy to figure.  You have a 50% skill in sailing.  Roll the dice (two ten sided dice to give you percentiles) and try to get 50 or under.  Simple.  Oh, sure, there were other things you could plug in, more advanced rules, special powers, blah, blah, blah.  But once I had the basic idea down, I ran with it.  I quickly started recruiting my friends into a small gaming group, and we began our wonder filled trips into the imagination.

    Fast forward a few years and my oldest brother opened his own game store, and gave me a job.  I was in heaven.  I suddenly had the opportunity to sample many different games, many different gaming groups, and many different gaming philosophies.  I had conversations with other players, and with other game masters (or dungeon masters, or referees, or what have you).  My worlds opened up and my skills both as a player and a game master improved and went into new and unexpected directions.  I even began to feel confident enough to run games for experienced, and much older, players (at about age 19, I had players ranging from around 14 to 45), and to tackle games I had believed to be too daunting for me (Call of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, and more).  I found many different games to love, a few to hate (Dungeons & Dragons…Rifts…I’m looking at you guys!), and I forged many friendships (some that last to this day, despite vast distances).

    But the years went on, the industry changed, the economy changed, the clientele at my brother’s shop changed, and yes, I changed.  As much as I loved gaming, and as much of my life as I’d put in to the shop, I had to move on.  I didn’t leave gaming behind.  I set up a room in my house and continued to run Fading Suns (still a favorite of mine).  But that eventually fell apart, as these things do.  It had a good run; something in the range of two years of fairly regular weekly sessions.  My games became more and more sparse.  I’d play something here, run something there.  But, not being surrounded by games every day or meeting gamers every day, I just didn’t have the access to the network I once had.  This was still the early days of the internet.  It was common, but not as ubiquitous as it is today.  And even when I was finally online and active, most of the fans of the games I liked were scattered across the country and even the world (why was Fading Suns so popular in Germany, when almost nobody played it in the States?), and almost nobody lived within a reasonable travel distance from me.

    Finally, as some friendships ended and others began, schedules became more and more difficult to work around, gamers started settling down and having kids, and I hung up my gaming hat.  Oh, I didn’t know that I had done it.  I didn’t admit it to myself.  But as months turned to years, I eventually realized that I wasn’t gaming anymore.  At some point, I got into reading graphic novels, and suddenly, I found my game books getting boxed up to make room for trade paperbacks of Hellboy and Conan.  Oh, sure, my GURPS historical supplements were still out, so I could grab one of their well researched overviews of various cultures if I needed an interesting tidbit, or needed to know who the Egyptian god of rivers was.  But more and more, they were packed away, put in a closet, and if not forgotten, ignored.

    Over the years, I’ve had occasional spurts of gaming interest.  I meet someone who is interested in playing, or I have a particularly cool idea.  And suddenly, I’m typing away furiously, getting all my ideas down as fast as possible; reading over a few game books to re-familiarize myself with a system or a setting.  I map out a few sessions, and maybe think about where the game might go if it works out and players want to keep going.  Maybe I’ll ask a few other people if they’re interested in getting in on a game.  But then life gets in the way.  Schedules conflict.  People get married.  People move, jobs change, kids show up, etc.  And after a couple months of trying and failing to get things together, the fire dissipates, I get interested in something else, something that is actually happening, like a new graphic novel, or a new TV series, and the hope of playing a game, or running one, goes away again.  It has now been nearly a decade since I gamed regularly.  About half that since I last played or ran anything at all.  I moved to Virginia from my home state of Maine a few years ago, and every now and then have thought about, even attempted getting a game together.  Nearly two years ago, I got so far as to have people make up characters and design a ship for a Star Trek game, that if my memory serves me was a pretty cool idea.  But, again, life got in the way, and the iron cooled, and I was never able to get it hot again.  Numerous times over the years, I’ve got a hankering to run Ars Magica, which is sort of the Holy Grail of gaming as far as I’m concerned.  It’s a massively demanding, but equally rewarding game of epic scope.  But it takes a certain type to run and to play.  I think I can run it (I have to a limited degree a couple times before).  But I have yet to find one, let alone four, six, or eight people to play.  However, of all the games I’ve run or played, it is the one I most frequently come back to, even if it’s all for nothing, to design characters, scenarios, and the like.  Maybe, one day, I’ll make it happen.  I’m still young, sort of.

    This is where I was at, a few weeks ago.  Sure, I know a few people who might be into gaming, but not enough, or not in the right place to get a group together, or not interested in the same things.  Then my former roommate and frequent partner in crime came to me with a lifeline of sorts.  He had two people, plus himself and his wife, who might be interested in doing a little roleplaying.  All four novices.  The initial idea seemed to have been an attempt at reading about or playing D&D, a game I particularly dislike.  Though I might be desperate enough to try it.  I countered with a few ideas of my own.  Some games that might appeal to non-gamers.  And, somewhat secretly, I rubbed my hands together.  The chance to mold gamers; to direct them into the sort of gaming philosophy I like…  Well, maybe.  In this day and age, trying to get people together for a regular, weekly game night seems to be harder than finding the Gold Monkey.  Heck, getting people together for a single gaming session is hardly a picnic.

    But for the first time in quite a while, people are expressing an interest in something that has been close to my heart for a long time.  That special mix of traditional storytelling, improvisational theater, and game that is roleplaying.  As much as I say ‘I’m a writer’ in my heart, I am now and always have been a gamer.  Gaming has changed, and what I like has fallen out of fashion.  Online gaming has somehow snapped players away (I’ll never get that, as the interaction and imagination just aren’t there, even in the best examples).  Social pressures have always hurt, holding gaming perpetually in the realm of super-nerds.  And the consolidation of so much of the gaming industry into the hands of one multi-headed hydra of a company (Hasbro) has killed a good deal of the creativity and variety of the early 90s’ Golden Age, when new and experimental games were hitting the market all the time, and people had enough disposable income to try them out.  But people have always loved a good story.  And who among us hasn’t heard a story and said to themselves, ‘that’s not what I’d have done.’  So long as that remains true, there will be a place for roleplaying games.  Even if it is a quiet, removed, often overlooked place.

    I’ve been away for many years.  Never quite giving up.  Never quite forgetting.  But away, none the less.  I hope this is the story of my journey back.  Back to something that has given me so much joy, spawned so many memories, made so many friendships, and yes, been witness to an occasional heartbreak.  I’m not returning to my youth.  I wouldn’t want to.  But I do want to rediscover an old joy, and perhaps bring it to some new friends. 

-Matt