|
Inspiration is a fickle mistress.
For this month's random thought, I'd like to tell a little story about how a friend, a sneaky spider, and a time machine saved my game.
When I was a kid, I played a bunch of roleplaying games. We had a somewhat small group, and we were pretty good friends. We didn't do anything too weird, but we were always ready for something new (I remember waiting excitedly for a week until the next game after I picked up my first Rifts book). One of the main things that we did, though, was roleplay. If we were interested in just combat, we had plenty of video games for that, or more board game-style things, like the original Warhammer or Battletech. I remember fondly when my friend Chris started our first World of Darkness game. We had no idea what we were doing, so we just made up characters that seemed fun to us. One thing that stood out was that I can remember only one combat in that first game, and no one on either side was hurt.
I'm not saying that I don't like combat in games, just that sometimes it seems to overshadow other, more fun aspects of playing a role.
Poof to present. I joined a roleplaying group at the behest of one of my coworkers. He was the main chronic GM for it, and it was a pretty large group. I noticed off the bat that things were a bit different. People liked the roleplay, but it focused more on combat (easier to handle in large groups, I guess). After a while, I decided to try my hand at running a game for that group. I decided to turn it into a social experiment. I was going to run a game that had a minimal combat system, really flexible rules, a somewhat unknown power level as most of the players didn't know the rules, and see if I could get it to work.
In memory of my experience, I decided to run a World of Darkness game. I picked Mage. I knew that a bunch of the group like faeries, so I decided to allow Changelings in, although I warned people that the game would be mostly geared towards Mages. I didn't allow were-creatures because I lacked the books, and I didn't allow vampires because I didn't want a character to be stuck doing nothing for half the time. I set it in 1800 England, partly because I like that time period, but also because there were no books for the game that specifically handled that time. You could find a Ren-style Mage book, and a modern one, and I used those as a guide to set up the world between those two eras. I didn't want anyone in the group to go out and buy books and understand the system right off the back. I wanted them to learn about magic in the game as their characters did, since magic was a mystery to the characters themselves.
I set up a timeline. I'm not a plot-driven GM. I don't force the PCs into anything, nor do I provide hooks. The only exception is the beginning. I'll give them something to start them off. Then I make up the world, make up all of the NPCs that the PCs can interact with, and set up two separate lines of events. One contains events that will happen regardless of player intervention. That's not to say that they couldn't affect something, but without a major effort on their part (or despite a major effort), it will come to pass. The second group of events are echoes of what the group does. If they kill a noble, I'll figure out when the authorities will reach whichever clues and work it from there. NPCs are doing their own things at the same times as the PCs, the results of how the PCs interact with the world causes other interesting things to happen, moving the game along.
I had people make characters, everyone made a mage. The NPCs were awesome, major forces were at work that could keep the players busy. I came up with a hook for each of them to send them to the fictional town of Barrington, and was ready to start this game.
It didn't really work out. It was way too much to handle. I wasn't used to playing in such a large group (we could hit 15 people on high attendance nights), let alone running one. I couldn't pay attention to everyone at once, and in this group I had to take people outside to keep out of character information out of the ears of other players. This left the experience pretty broken up as the rest of the group had to wait for me to finish doing something for one or two people.
Some games went well, especially when the group was stuck together with each other. There was one point when they became ensnared in a magic ghost town, and for a few sessions everyone pulled together and the game went great. It didn't last, though, and I had to come up with a quick solution. I invited a co-GM to help. I had never done this before, and it didn't work out so well at first. I went through a couple of GMs, the first was great at running games, but didn't know the rules well enough, and the second knew the rules, was a skilled GM, but became a bit overwhelmed by the group.
The third, though, worked out perfectly. I filled him in on what was going on in the game and he stepped right up to the bat. We think on the same wavelength, I can pick up most of his plots and he can get mine even if we didn't get a chance to talk about it, and the game itself was only interrupted by a few couple minute GM calibration sessions. If someone needs to do something privately with the GM, one of us can continue running for the main group while the other handles it, and we can split the group up a whole bunch of ways and still be able to handle it. The difference in the game was amazing. Instead of being somewhat stressful, it became fun again, and I started looking forward to it. The game was saved, although there was a matter of keeping interest in the game.
What about the spider and the time machine? This is where they come in.
I think I've prattled on enough for this time, though, maybe I'll come back and write some more.
|
