RPGaDay 2018, Week 1

So between Gencon and post-convention activities, this got a little away from me. But here's the first roundup post for this year's RPGaDay stuff.


Day 1: What do you love about RPGs?

Short answer? The collaborative storytelling, creating a shared experience for a group of people.


Day 2: What is the first thing you look for in an RPG?

Genre, mostly, as well as what sorts of characters are expected. Is it a loose action-adventure where the characters treat the laws of physics as guidelines? Is it a tense thriller where the characters are rugged survivors? That sort of thing. I need an idea of what the game feels like to play.


Day 3: What gives a game "staying power"?

The ability to always have 'one more story' you can tell with it. This could be a setting with lots of possibilities to run different stories and ideas, or a setup that allows for a single group of characters to continuously go on having new experiences for who knows how long. I mean, setting's always going to be a major factor, though sometimes the mechanical realities of how characters advance (does the system stop or become unwieldy at '20th level' or some equivalent) and such apply as well.


Day 4: Most memorable NPC?

This is gonna be a weird one, but the first character that comes to mind when I think of my NPCs is Kranosh, from a game of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I ran so many years ago. He was a demon who could pass for human, with an accent and cultural quirks that could pass for a Greek immigrant if you didn't look too closely. He ran a pizza parlor that became a regular meeting spot for my player characters (despite the presence of a blatant analog to the Bronze). Part of what stands out about him is that I'd initially set up his high school-age son to be an ally and friend to the PCs, but they latched onto the father instead so I ran with it.


Day 5: Favorite recurring NPC?

That's a tricky one. Like, there are characters I've created that would have been great recurring NPCs but didn't quite make it to that point because of reasons like a game ending unexpectedly, or because (and I know this is a really specific example) first-edition Promethean was kind of a road show and thus it became difficult to keep ties with specific characters.

I'm actually kind of having to stop and think about characters I loved to play who were recurring, and -- oh, wait, I got one. Oh yes.

(Also, it occurs to me that I could be answering these questions from the viewpoint of a player, about other peoples' NPCs or what have you, but because of my gaming patterns I tend to think of these questions from a GM/ST perspective first.)

So in my Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, while seeking out the Cave of Secrets that gave the chronicle its name, the group came across a Bone Gnawer Ragabash out in the woods by the name of Roy McMahon, deed name "Don't Dig There." Roy was friendly. He was helpful. He even offered to get rid of the gun and silver bullets they took off a fomor!

He was actually a Nuwisha!

He turned up again on a semi-regular basis over the course of the chronicle, more than willing to help the Garou but also interested in testing them at times. But he was, as a proper Nuwisha, interested in teaching my player character pack important lessons. Lessons like "Don't give a gun full of silver bullets to somebody you don't know well, because even if he isn't a BSD or something like that, he might be planning on letting you find the Macguffin first and then shooting you in the back of the head so he can take credit for the discovery." No, nobody got shot over the course of that lesson, but it did make the group stop and think for a minute. Which is all he ever really wanted.

But yeah. He was aggravating and amusing in equal measure, and deep down isn't that true of most of our favorite characters, PC and NPC alike?


Day 6: How can players make a world seem real?

By really inhabiting it. By giving their characters day jobs, making up friendships with their neighbors, deciding when/how/if their character gives back to the community. Even in a murderhobo game of D&D, it is -- or at least it should be -- possible for a character to adopt a little corner of the setting and make it their own, maybe occasionally sending a few gold pieces back to the down-on-their-luck farmers who let them camp in a barn or something like that. I once played in an Eberron game where my character (a rat shifter) lived in a shifter neighborhood in Sharn (it helped that the Sharn book went into an absurd amount of detail about the city and its inhabitants) and I really enjoyed fleshing out the fact that he was an active part of the community there.


Day 7: How can a GM make the stakes important?

By making it personal. This can mean involving an NPC they've had time to bond with, or even just someone that the group latched onto out of character even if they haven't had the time to interact in-character. In a Requiem game I ran a while back, for a 'shit just got real' moment I had the villain (a strix) kill and possess the corpse of Billy Bricks, a hunter with a long history with some of these players. He'd previously appeared in a Hunter: The Vigil LARP I ran several years ago as a useful and informative ally with his own particular set of skills, quirks, and mysteries. He was literally the first NPC the characters of that LARP met, if I recall. And he'd been a useful contact to the characters in the Requiem game as well -- or so they thought, until a tip turned bad and they confronted him to discover his yellow eyes and the rotting hole in his chest that had been carved out with a shotgun. (I think this was also their first face-to-face meeting with the strix, but I'd have to check my notes as well.)

In case it needs to be said, it got the desired effect.


And there we go for the first week! See you for the next one of these in a few days!