#RPGaDay2019: Days 19-25

Monday 19th - "Scary"

I've played a few games where the hairs on the back of my neck have stood up and I've needed to take a moment to calm down after. The first was in the Renraku Arcology, and the most recent the Deadlands Asylum. Both sent real shivers down my spine, but I'll relate the Arcology one here, as it happened after the point I had notes.

Kamaya made it back into the Arcology to try and rescue her friends. They were still holed up in more or less the same place, waiting out the situation. She got bored and wanted to find out what was going on, so crept off through the ceiling vents. At one point she ended up in a toy shop, where a wall of dolls turned their glowing eyes on her and, in a chorus of sing-song voices, called her by name to come and play. The image was so vivid in my head it still gives me the shivers.

Tuesday 20th - "Noble"

This one's easy! Svetlana is the first character I've played who earned herself entry to the world of nobility, first by right of conquest - "reclaiming" part of the stolen lands for Brevoy - then earning more titles by hard work as an adventuring, and finally marrying the king.

Really looking forward to getting back to her (though on the other hand, I'm so distracted by Ziggy during our games at the moment that part of me is worried, because I want to give her more attention than I'll be able to.)

Wednesday 21st - "Vast"

One of the things I love about our Exalted game is how vast it feels, yet also how much it feels like we can affect things, like we have choice and agency and will shape the world for the future. It's an interesting balance and one I believe the players need to take some responsibility for in order to maintain it. I know how hard GM's work to breathe life into worlds. Players should respect that by acting responsibly with what the GM gives them. Which of course doesn't mean they can't have fun - "responsible" and "fun" are not synonyms - but the best games come, I think, when the GM and players work in tandem to create and believe in the characters and world, and I think that's happened in our Exalted game and the vastness - in time as well as space - of our version of Creation.

Thursday 22nd - "Lost"

I lost the first RPG group I was a part of. They were mostly guys a few years older than me, and one of them decided (pretty much without consulting me) that we were dating, and I was pretty naive for 18 and went along with it, and then he broke up with me and made out that I'd broken his heart and I know one person in the group I really admired absolutely accepted that without question (they'd been friends for many, many years so I have no anger towards her, but I miss her), and I found it easier to melt away than face it, and then I met Husbit, and then I went off to uni and made more friends both times, and it just became easier.

I regret it, though. I feel the loss of those friends. They got me through hellish teenage years and introduced me to something that remains one of my favourite hobbies.

Friday 23rd - "Surprise"

In Exalted, there's a bit coming up where I took my GM by surprise, to the point he paused us and excitedly and rapidly typed a bunch of notes. It was a pretty thrilling moment, to make the GM stop and think again about how things will unfurl. I don't want to give too much away (the things to look for are the next message my character sends to the Emissary, which he made a point of ensuring was noted, and what Taji insists be done after Hak has intervened), so instead I'm going to talk about the time a different player surprised a different GM in a game I wasn't even in, a moment that has passed into legend among certain of my friends. (The player was Ben, the friend who had me join his Space Munchkin game to introduce some of his non-RPG friends to RPG's.)

They were playing some superhero game, and Ben's character was the descendant of Arthur, King of the Britons. Had the sword Excalibur and everything. The game was set in the US, though, and the characters were ostensibly American. The game had been going on for some time when, for reasons lost in the mists of storytelling, the party ended up flung back in time to the American War of Independence. They were recruited by an American general and one job was as lookout, waiting for the news that the British were on their way then lighting lanterns to pass the message on. Ben was on duty the night an out of breath rider arrived, bearing the warning. 

"Ok," says Ben, and sends the weary man to get a rest.

"What are you going to do?" Asks the GM.

"Nothing"

"Nothing?!!"

"Nothing"

...

"Did you miss the bit on my character sheet where it says 'King of the Britons'?"

The GM never quite forgave himself for not seeing it coming (but made sure the repercussions were felt when the players returned to their own time. 

Saturday 24th - "Triumph"

We have a house rule in our Pathfinder group that if you roll a 20 for a critical and a 20 to confirm, you roll again and if it's a third 20 then it's an auto-kill. It's only happened once, and I was the one rolling. I roll a statistically improbable amount of 1's so it felt an even bigger triumph.

We'd got into a fight and were being badly beaten. There were 3 significant NPC foes and we'd gone in overconfidently (players, overconfident? Never! I hear you cry)  

Sunday 25th - "Calamity" 

It used to bother me when calamity befell my characters, but now I appreciate it as a method of enhancing storytelling. Sometimes, I want to know that things will come out ok for the characters in the long run (Svetlana, for instance), but often I'm happy letting it drive the story onward. I think a lot of this comes from that episode in Exalted I'll be writing up when I get time, the one I already mentioned briefly under "surprise".