Have you ever tried something out in game that at the outset sounded really bad? For us it started when one of our players found the old Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge netbook. It’s possibly the most useless RPG book we every came across but it got a few ideas flowing.
by Stefan Hundhammer at Flickr
Our first foray into the world of bad ideas was making all the characters retired. The idea being that they had the skills but not the body to use them in the same way they used to. It sounds like a complete non-starter doesn’t it? Warriors no longer being able to lift their swords and falling over from the slightest bump. Mages known everything there is to know about magic but not having a body capable of controlling and channeling the magical energies required to actually cast anything. Rogues that can’t climb up a set of steps never mind a drainpipe.
Where we took this story instead was well away from the combat. In fact I can’t think of a single round of combat that the players actively took part in. Oh sure there were fights going on but not one of them involved a player directly. Everything became about getting one over on the other players. Not in a nasty way of course but playing tricks or beating them at competitions became the common theme of sessions.
Over the years I’d actually forgotten about this campaign until I watched an episode of Still Game called ‘Cairds’ where the story closely followed one of the funniest sessions we played. Our characters had fell foul of the local band of young ruffians and being to weak to fight them off decided to pay someone to do the fighting for them. In order to get the cash for this however they had to fix a game of cards. It took the combined skills of all the players to come up with a workable plan and follow it through. From the mage’s mathematical skills being used for counting cards to the rogue’s sneaky card tricks they had that angle all covered but the problem was that it was only the slightly dim warrior that was allowed into the card game.
I think maybe I should steal borrow a few story lines from Still Game for another session like this.
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The first gaming session on 2009 is getting closer. Yes, yes I know its already February but these things take time round our way.
I’ve been harping on at my players online for the last month or so to get character ideas to me asap and for various reasons have failed. Of course this isn’t all my fault. Oh no it’s my players fault. It’s their fault that one of them knows about the setting and so goes through all the classes he’s wanted to play over the last few years until he settles on one. It’s their fault because one of the players is completely new to roleplaying never mind the system and doesn’t automatically know all the character classes/vocations/whatever like he should. It’s their fault that one of them works long hours, work out a fair bit as well as having a new baby.
Ok, ok it’s really my fault but then it was to be expected but I’m pleased to say that on Friday night during a showing of End Of The Line I took along the rulebook and managed to get them to pick a class. Now to finish off the last few details of the adventure to cater for those classes and we’re good to go!
While I’m at it I’d just like to apologise for the lack of updates. The real world has managed to get in the way again and I’ve spent the last week staring at a blank application form for the latest round of posting in my work. Come 1st April my job won’t be mine any more so it’s all hands on deck when it comes to filling in those forms. Hope to be back properly very soon!
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It’s been a slow weekend here at The Dice Bag. I’m off to Sweden for a few days this coming week so I’ve had a lot of prep for that but every time I thing about roleplaying I keep getting the same image in my head and I have a slow chuckle to myself.
I’m told everyone has moments like this during games but I swear I’m sure it’s only me that gets hit with them.
The prime example is the memory that keeps coming back to me this weekend. It was a Saturday afternoon, I was 15 and and staying over at my friend Frank’s house. We didn’t have a game planned for that weekend so I was working out a quick single-shot game based Terry Pratchett’s Discworld that had been published in a short lived RPG magazine. The plan was to get some characters drawn up and run the game once one of our other friends turned up later that night. Anyway there was a knock at the back door and who should enter but Frank’s cousin who had been our first DM all those years before. He was on leave from the army again and had heard we were about and so he’d brought his Rolemaster books and our characters along to see if we fancied a game that night. We settled down with our bottles of juice and our sweets and waited for him to start the game.
Frank’s cousin always played with the strangest music playing in the background. This night we were in for something different though as he put on his most prized possession. He carefully placed the tape into the player and when he pressed play Jim Morrison was giving us a spoken word tour of his drug addled brain. Several joints later our DM was struggling to keep the game from becoming real in his head and constantly stopping mid-sentence to let us hear his favourite bit of the tape. Usually when our illustrious DM was in these states we enjoyed the ride as we usually ended up with homosexual dungeonmasters from the cartoon that could chop their head off and heal it back up without magic or other weird and wonderful things that only drugs could produce. In this case we just sat staring at each other as he worked himself into a fever over the meaning of every second line on the tape.
We were just getting to the point in the game where you would usually start tooling up and getting ready for the final monster when the sound started to break up. Our DM sat bolt upright, spun around to the tape player and burst into tears. The machine started to eat his precious tape and he was in tears as he tried to press the eject button with little success. Frank tried to help and after a few more minutes they both just gave up and our DM collapsed onto the floor in the foetal position crying to himself. There was nothing we could do for him so we left him to it and went through to watch some TV. We were two 15 year old boys that spent our weekends playing Dungeons and Dragons. We had no social skills so I’m not surprised we left him to it. We went back through to the kitchen about 30 minutes later to find him asleep on the floor so again we left him to it.
About an hour later Joe turned up so we retired to Franks bedroom and started the one-shot game I’d been writing. It was great fun and when you have skills such as ‘hang upside down from chandilier and swing axe’ you can’t go wrong. About half way through the game our dopehead DM came and joined us. You would never have thought that a few hours previously his world had ended. He was laughing away and really enjoying the game and to this day I do not think anyone of us has actually mentioned the tape incident to him whenever we’ve came across him.
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