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I am 42 years old. Dungeons and Dragons swept the
Nation when I was a newlywed some 22 years ago. I
remember when Pong was the newest video game, and when
Dragonslayer was a first run movie. My son does free form
RPGing on line, and my daughter and her husband both free
form, and play the more structured RPG games. Somehow,
though, the closest Ive come to any RPG game is playing
Ultima Online on the computer. Yet, through all these years,
the Role Playing games have always had some appeal to me.
Chris and AJ, whom you regular readers will know from this
site, recently bought me a copy of the RPG book for Stan
Sakais Usagi Yojimbo, based on one of the few comic books
that Ive read regularly over the years. However, having never
played an RPG of this type, its a little overwhelming trying to
figure out exactly how to start. While the instructions seem clear
enough, the nuances of such a game can be a bit daunting to a
rank newbie, especially if one doesnt have a ready stable of
other players just hanging around ready to jump right in. So this
holiday break, I passed the book back over to my son-in-law
Chris so that he could review the set up, get together a game
scenario, and hopefully indoctrinate me into the world of
RPGing. Soon, hopefully, well get together a group of us and
see how quickly I can get a character killed. I plan to chronicle
my journey into RPGing in this, and hopefully future, columns for
you all to share in.
We all start once upon a time as beginners. Our memories,
though, can be tricky. The joys and pitfalls of being a beginner
can become distorted with time. How it really happened may be
vastly different than how we remember it even a year later. The
"diaries" written at the time, though, can be more brutally honest
than we sometimes would care to have. My joys, my
frustrations, my successes and my failures will be on display for
all to read here. Perhaps youll find yourself identifying with the
steps I take, or else you might find my missteps amusing as you
wonder how I could make such a mistake. Either way, it is my
hope that you will enjoy "watching" as I undertake what many of
you have already done, and you can relive your early days
through mine.
Since I have not yet even played a game, the first "step",
then, has to be why I want to. Those of us who are either old
enough, or simply like old movies, can remember the Danny
Kaye movie, The Secret Lives of Walter Mitty. The story is
about a rather meek writer of pulp fiction who has a very active
daydream fantasy life. Being someone who enjoys writing fiction
myself, I identify with this character. Writing fiction is often
simply the process of "daydreaming" on paper (or on the word
processor). I may be wrong, but playing an RPG is a similar
endeavor, except that, instead of the daydream being all in your
head, its played out against other "dreamers" who project their
daydreams onto the story. My character reacts as I would have
him (or her) react, but the other players characters react not
how I would have them, but how they would have them. The
story then takes on an aspect of unpredictability impossible in a
solitary daydream. None of us knows exactly what happens
next, not even the Game Master. Additionally, the roll of the die
and the rules of the game prevent any one character from totally
controlling the storys unfolding. Different personalities and
random chance "steer" the unfolding story to where no one
knows beforehand. For the writer in us, it becomes the
opportunity to tell a story in a more pure sense, since the
characters are not all projections of ourselves.
I aspire one day to GM games myself; to write the basic
outline of the story, then let the story unfold as each player
responds in the way they think. But first steps first. One cannot
adequately run a game without having learned how to play the
game, and studied how an effective Game Master handles the
ongoing deviations and surprises. By the next entry into this
series, I hope to report on my first experience in those baby
steps.
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