RPGaDay (Parts 11-20)

Since I’m doing these in batches of 10, it’s time to start working through the next sequence.

11. Wildest Character Name

I’ve had some crazy character names over the years. Sometimes offering them as a hint toward the type of character that I’m playing… there was “Sir Ashley Williams, Keeper of the Third Sacred Boomstick, and Scourge of the Undying”, it actually took players two years to work out that I had basically named the character “Ash” from the Evil Dead series.

One of the more interesting character names I used was for a character who walked into a LARP with no name. Based on the first conversation exchange the character, they became known as “No Kick Mushrooms”.    

There’s plenty of others, but these two come to mind first.

12. Wildest Character Concept

As mentioned, “No Kick Mushrooms” was a LARP character, and was a tiny goblin inhabiting a bio-organic power armour suit that was roughly human sized. This was modelled by using a painted green doll with a customised goblin head, and mounting it on my chest, under an armoured chestplate. The remainder of the costume was designed to look like pneumatics and clockwork.

In a non-LARP context, the wildest concept I played for a while was a sentient swarm of nanotechnology. That game didn’t last long, mostly because I’m usually the one running games, and the other GM decided that he rathered play than run things.

13. Describe how your play has evolved

When I started playing, back in the 1980s, I had already been hearing about games that had been running for 5 to 10 years. I wanted to be a part of one of those epic games that just kept going and going. From then, and ever since,

I’ve never been a part of a tabletop game that has run for longer than 2 years. It’s only ever been LARPs that have lasted longer.

I guess that being a part of the LARP community has distinctly taught me that the game doesn’t have to be about me. It’s fine to be the supporting character in someone else’s story, and sometimes it’s possible to have more fun balancing supporting roles in the stories of multiple other characters, acting as a catalyst to combine those stories into something bigger than their parts. 

14. Describe a failure that became amazing

In the Palladium game RIFTS, rune weapons are some of the most epic and powerful equipment available. I gave one of my players the opportunity to gamble for their character to gain a rune weapon. This was using a character that had been regularly played in weekly sessions for over a year, a character who had developed quite a bit of history and was quite significant in the campaign. He was literally given a 50/50 chance of either gaining the rune weapon or being removed from play forever. This was done by coin flip.

He lost.

We decided that the character was stuck doing “menial chores for Satan”, and he kept popping up in other campaign for the next few years, tying together plot lines and adding a sense of consistency to many otherwise disparate games and campaigns. Twenty-odd years after the event, people are still talking about the guy who does “menial chores for Satan”, and apparently he’s been showing up in other people’s campaigns in the decades since too.

15. Describe a tricky RPG experience that you enjoyed

The first time I LARPed , I didn’t really know what I was  doing. It was a World of Darkness ongoing LARP campaign, and I was playing a werewolf…but the only people I knew in the game were playing vampires, and the werewolf players were insular and didn’t accept me as a part of their clique. As an isolated werewolf, who was trying to do the right thing, it was hard.

In the end, I just embraced the idea that this character was destined to be corrupted by vampire blood, and that they’d follow a downward spiral through the rest of their story. For three years we kept thinking this character had reached rock bottom, but in every situation we found that there was further darkness and depravity to explore. This character ended up being the big bad villain to one year’s season of storylines, but was never killed. A vampiric werewolf infected by the Vicissitude virus, and attended to by demon worshipping magi. Certainly not what I was intending when the character started.   

16. Describe your plans for your next game

I have no idea when my next game will be, but I’m suspecting it will take place once I’ve moved house to the country areas of Australia and have started my teaching job. That means I don’t know who I’ll be gaming with, whether I’ll be running a gaming club for high school students, for other teachers who are into gaming, or whether I run into an existing group of gamers.

My plans and preparations at this stage have generally revolved around developing a few sectors for “The Law”. These plans have involved placing locations, populating those locations with assorted characters, then linking those characters together through a relationship map. This includes clustering characters together into cults, corporations, street gangs, and secret societies, it also means establishing key objects that they might want, and understanding how the environment might change politically and socially when certain character actions occur.

I suspect that these plans will probably see publication as a supplement for “The Law” before they ever see my tabletop.    

17. Describe the best compliment you’ve had while gaming

A few times at conventions, I’ve been fairly packed with players for my sessions, with potential room for people to join as a pick-up game if they need to. One of he greatest compliments I’ve ever received in gaming is when a player has already payed for a session of my game, and then as paid money to play my game again even when other games are available at the convention.  

18. What art inspires your game?

What art doesn’t?

This is one of those questions that has many answers depending on the type of game being played. I used to love the simple lines and vibrant colours in the art of Chris Foss, and that informed a lot of my sci-fi gaming, but arguably not as much as the artwork of HR Giger.

At the moment though, I’m more inspired by the artworks of the artists around me on G+ and various other social media platforms. Folks like Matthew Adams, Dyson Logos, Stuart Robertson, Bradley K McDevitt, James Shields, and so many others.

  

19. What music enhances your game?

Again, it all depends on the game. I remember a great series of games set during the Vietnam War, with a soundtrack of classic rock and roll hits of the era.

One of the best game soundtracks actually came from one of the Battletech computer games of the mid 90s. That game came on a CD-rom, but if you put the CD into a standard CD player it was possible to access the audio tracks, including a series of heartbeat tracks which were presented in order on the CD according to the speed of the heartbeat. This meant I could put the CD on constant single-track repeat, then simply shift the disc forward of back a track depending on the intensity of the situation. High tension, fast hearteat…low tension, slow heartbeat.  

20. Which game mechanic inspires your play the most?

Anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time knows that I love the “Otherkind Dice” mechanic, so much so that I’ve been using it as a direct inspiration for a number of the games that I’ve written over the years. I think gaming is best when it makes the players confront difficult decisions, and this mechanism makes almost every situation a narrative dilemma that has serious ramifications on the ongoing story. Choose to succeed with a cost, or fail without a cost…both are interesting choices.