RPGaDay 2018, Week 2

Alright, doing my best to get this out promptly. Here's days 8-14 of this year's RPGaDay, reposted in a convenient spot.

Day 8: How can we get more people playing?

I think, first and foremost, more needs to be done to emphasize games that aren't D&D (or something built out of its DNA, like Pathfinder). It's to the point where, when trying to explain roleplaying games to someone, you really can't do so without invoking it. There are lots of people streaming their home sessions of lots of games, but the only ones anyone not already part of a gaming circle might notice are the ones where you get a bunch of actors with familiar faces/voices doing stuff like Critical Role. Whenever a TV show does an episode about roleplaying games (more on this in a moment), it's basically always D&D or some clone/parody of it. I'd love to hear about a TV show that does an episode like that where they're playing literally anything else -- Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Apocalypse World, whatever. But I think we can get more people interested and playing by making sure they know there's more to all this than randomly generated Tolkien fanfic.

Also, we need fewer TV shows doing a 'D&D episode' where the joke is 'these people are dorks for liking this game' or 'this game is actually really ridiculous and the appropriate response is either to take it too seriously and look like a jackass or point and laugh.' Even The Librarians, a show written by openly geeky people and full of references intended to appeal to other geeky people, did an episode like that. (even Gravity Falls' own D&D episode leans this way a bit at first) I mean, yes, often times RPG sessions can get ridiculous, but that's because the players are usually having a fun time with each other and goofing around, not because we're struggling with some secret shame about our hobby. Fewer episodes like that and more like the episode "Monsters & Mana" from the sixth season of Voltron: Legendary Defender.


Day 9: How has a game surprised you?

I'll be honest, I don't really have a good answer for this one. Nothing's really coming to mind, either in those rare circumstances as a player or as an ST/GM. It's not that I'm never surprised, but usually if something does surprise me it's something that a player did and for some reason that's just not feeling... appropriate for this one. So, let's start digging through the alternate questions list.


Alt Question: Most memorable character retirement

Okay, so this is one from a long-ass time ago, and there's a bit of a twist in it.

So, many years ago, I was part of a LARP called 'Night Lair.' It was a Classic WoD LARP (started back when there was only the one Whatever of Darkness), multiple-game line crossover game. To be frank, it was an often-times incoherent mess of twinkery and bullshit above and beyond most stories of such games. So I played a Glass Walker Galliard named Cousin's-Boyfriend's-Roommate, an urban legends expert. One session, in what was meant to be foreshadowing for an upcoming arc, the shapeshifters all got a vision of a recurring villain -- this monstrous cybernetic werewolf killing machine -- guarding a valuable klaive in a cave somewhere. Now, as the vision didn't come with an in-character disclaimer of 'this is a thing to deal with later but this is the Storyteller's best way of setting up this plot point ahead of time,' we all took off to try and get this thing.

It was a harsh fight, and my character died of his wounds after sacrificing himself to save another character and make sure they got the klaive out okay. The villain in question was overpowered and, to be honest, there were a bunch of rules treated as vague guidelines and my character was struck down when his odds of survival probably should have been much better. But I was fine with it, as we were shaking up the lineup of Fera available and I was going to be creating a character of a different breed as part of becoming a Narrator for that corner of the game. So I wrote an in-character post for the game's forum, heavily inspired by (some would say shamelessly ripped off of from) John Wick's "No Regrets" story from Legend of the Five Rings, depicting the character returning to the Glass Walkers' ancestral realm to meet the father who died before he was born and prepare for the soon-to-happen final battles of the apocalypse.

But part of what makes that 'retirement' so memorable is that the Storyteller, racked with guilt over the fact that my character died in such a lopsided fight (again, I was fine with it, as he went out like a hero), retconned a scene establishing that his Mage PC had met with my character in the past and knew him -- so that he could ask another Mage PC, a Marauder played by his brother, to use over-the-top magick to resurrect my werewolf from the dead. Again, he was fine where he was, he didn't want to come back, and I was going to be busy playing a different character anyways, but the Storyteller just had to fix his 'mistake' and thus my character's heroic death was cheapened so I could just put him on the shelf to play something else.

I'll be honest, I don't miss that game.


Day 10: How has gaming changed you?

Honestly, I'd say it's less 'changed' me and more 'revealed who I am.' It's let me explore my creativity and storytelling tendencies. If I've changed at all as a result of gaming, it's likely been through the influence of people I met while gaming.

That said, it's really difficult to self-diagnose this sort of thing, so who knows.


Day 11: Wildest character name?

Well, maybe it's because I was just talking about him the other day, but that would probably be the Glass Walker Galliard I played in that LARP. I'm actually blanking on his 'civilian' name, which was extremely mundane, but his deed name was "Cousin's-Boyfriend's-Roommate," reflecting his interest in urban legends. Also, it let me slip in a Spaceballs reference, which is always appreciated.

(Yes, I know, this isn't that 'wild,' but I generally don't do 'wild' names.)


Day 12: Wildest character concept?

As much as I hate to do so on such a potentially interesting question, I need to go to an alt question for this one. By my nature I generally don't do 'wild' character concepts, and I almost never get to play games (as opposed to run them) anyways. Any characters I'd consider wild enough to talk about are ones that I've thought of but never played, and that just feels like cheating.


Alt Question: How do you prepare for an extended campaign?

I start by sitting down and brainstorming, literally writing stream of consciousness stuff out. I lay out the story elements I want to focus on, and basically have a conversation with myself in which I flesh out and decide what else I need to start -- lists of NPCs, individual smaller story hooks, etc. Once I've identified my needs, then I start doing research, or setting aside time to write up NPCs, or whatever.


Day 13: Describe how your play has evolved

Okay, even if I knew how to analyze that, I couldn't even begin to articulate it. Alt question time.

Alt Question: Narrowest escape?

I dunno about 'narrowest,' but I am reminded of the time I ran an Aberrant game and had the player characters escaping from a facility that was about to explode. Taking a page from something else (I can't remember what off-hand), I decided to distribute dice for the characters' rolls as they tried to flee, set up a song on a music player ("Smash," by Offspring), and explained that basically the music was playing in the background as they ran. They had until the end of the song (just under three minutes) to roll, I wanna say, 20 successes. This was entirely an OOC construct: they could roll literally as fast as they could toss dice, count successes, and pick them up to do it again. (As a test, I did it myself, just rolled an average dice pool over and over again to see how many successes I'd accumulate in the allotted time, and then rounded that up to the next multiple of five to give them some wiggle room)

It was a pretty narrow escape for one of the characters, but all in all it was a very fun encounter.


Day 14: Describe a failure that became amazing

Okay, this is easy, because this one is a story we still tell locally.

As I've mentioned in the past, I ran a Hunter: The Vigil LARP many years ago. At one point, I was starting to run low on plot ideas and was considering a bit of a reboot (namely, people retire characters and start fresh with a more streamlined game faction-wise). But one of my players, Zac (who's still in my games) was playing a Lucifuge and using his powers to try to close up a weak spot leading to the Inferno. He decided to risk a Willpower, which gave greater rewards for success at a much greater punishment for failure (either we'd forgotten that you couldn't do this on an Endowment roll or we didn't care, I can't recall which).

He failed, which became a dramatic failure, which I described as the weak spot being ripped open into a Hellmouth for just long enough for a handful of full-blown demons to escape before they could close it. Those demons escaping and wreaking havoc probably gave us an extra six months of plot before I did the reboot.