Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1590209" data-attributes="member: 18377">What sort of personal accounts are you hoping for? Accounts of playing RPGs as a story-telling game? Like this?:Back in about 1987 I was playing in a Pulp-adventure genre campaign set in the USA in the 1920s, and as a result of a setup that was too complicated to remember, let alone explain, the PCs ended up in a house with the lights out, guarding a young woman who was being sought by fiendish Tong members. There was a noise from the ground floor, so my character (Biff Davis, granite-jawed fist-swinging red-blooded hero) took his .45 and went to make sure the young woman was safe, while the other PC (Lord Harrington, eccentric British antiquarian and explorer) went downstairs with his .455 Webley revolver to investigate.Harrington found an open window in the kitchen, was jumped by a couple of fiendish Tongka, got into a scuffle, and fired three shots, incapacitating both of his atackers. Biff heard the shots.Now, Harrington's encounter with the Tong had already been played out, and I knew that Harrington had emerged unscathed and victorious. But Biff had no idea of that. Nevertheless, the sensible thing to do would be to stay with the woman or to take her along: it was after all she who the Tongka were seeking. To have Biff stay upstairs would have been a cynical abuse of out-of-charcter knowledge: Harrington wasn't in trouble, but for all Biff knew he might have been. So I was just about to have Biff sneak down the stairs with a .45 in one hand and the romantic interest-cum-McGuffin's hand inthe other when I had an epiphany. By making a mistake at this point I would be observing genre convention and also giving the GM a choice of how to have the adventure continue. So Biff said to the girl "Wait here!" and hurried off to check on Harrington. When they got back, she had been kidnapped.Instead of playing out a rather dull siege in which we gunned down and beat up lots of fiendish Tongka, we got a dialogue with a major villain, a chase, a detective montage, and a rescue, which were (a) more varied and interesting, and (b) more in keeping with the genre. That epiphany led to a long-term change in my playing style, as I realised that it isn't necessarily the most fun to have a character who is highly competent, can count on succeeding in all his or her endeavours, and who always does the cleverest thing I can think of. Sometimes it is more fun to play a character with weaknesses and limitations, and who has to cope with the fact that his first attempts commonly fail. If, that is, you have the support of a GM who is playing the same game, and of mutually-agreed genre conventions.</blockquote>

Verification