It’s something I’ve never really thought about until now but the way I write and run my games is very much determined by my hatred for reading and writing. Over the years my doctor has thought that I may be dyslexic but we’ve never chased it up as it’s never really been that much of a problem for me.
My games usually revolve around letting my players rub with just about anything and the rest was improvised by myself. I’ve only ever prepared and written up very basic notes before games and almost never use bought adventures and I’ve never really linked this with the problems I have.
Does anyone else have these sort of problems and if so how do they get around them?
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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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So this months Blog Carnival is about gaming goals and resolutions. Uncle Bear is hosting this month and even if your getting a little tired of resolution posts you should check out the rest of his site and I can get lost in there! Everyone seems to have had the same idea of posting up a top three/five list of what they aim to achieve so I’m going to try and be a little different.
I got into this blogging game because a: I like writing and b: I like gaming. I never thought for a second when the idea first popped into my head that I’d end up as part of the RPG Bloggers Network or that I’d meet so many like minded people. Were I to live in the USA I’d make a point of attending one of the larger Cons in an attempt to meet these aforementioned folk but life is not that easy. I’ll just stick to berating them on Twitter or finding some way to trek across the city and throw fruit at Games of State’s windows.
So how does this post fit into the carnival this month? Well I think 2009 is going to be a year of collaboration. Someone pointed me in the direction of a blog post last night that hit a chord. With the worldwide recession hitting us there are no startups really making it big with big money backers but there are plenty of people with shared interests getting together, watching each others backs and getting things done. The The RPG Bloggers Network is one example and the CMF Advertising Network is another. A group of people with the same idea working towards the same goal and it’s working. Look at how well the RPG Bloggers Network has been received and how quickly it’s grown. I see great things coming from those guys in 2009.
Over on the RPG Bloggers Network Google Group (We really need to come up with a quick and snazzy acronym for that) an idea has been floated about a network wide collaboration. The aim of which will end up with a campaign setting for anyone to use. The specifics are still being discussed between those interested and those that floated the original idea but I think it’s going to be huge. Not only do we get to give to the community with our every post and the network provides us with many readers but we will all be able to contribute to something that we can give back to the readers. I can’t wait to get stuck into that project.
Even if this does not go ahead I’m hoping to bring in another writer or two to give my own campaign settings a good kick and get them finished and written up.
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