It’s August and that means that the annual #RPGaDAY ‘question a day’ is here to celebrate “everything cool, memorable and amazing about our hobby.” This year we’ve decided to join in the fun and will be canvassing answers from the ENWorld crew, columnists and friends in the industry to bring you some of our answers. We hope you’ll join in, in the comments section, and share your thoughts with us too… So, without further ado, here’s Day 7 of #RPGaDAY 2017!
#RPGaDAY Question 7: What was your most impactful RPG session?
Michael J Tresca: I played D&D on a camping trip with a friend and her three kids this summer. Along with my two kids (six players in total), we played through the entirety of an adventure I designed, wrote, and illustrated, from maps to paper miniatures. The monsters were made of candy, and the kids were eager to defeat the monsters because then they were rewarded with the appropriate candy. It was an epic game across three days, and because it rained on and off, we kept the kids busy when they couldn't play outside. It's the first time I've ever designed every element of an adventure exactly the way I wanted to (a DM's dream) and the effort paid off. Everyone had a blast!
Angus Abranson: It’s hard to say what have been my most impactful RPG sessions. There have been highlights, and lowlights, but I’m not sure any have really changed the way I approach the next game in a major way. I could say my first ever RPG session, playing Keep on the Borderlands with my cousins was impactful as it launched me into not only a fantastic hobby but also my professional life and has introduced me to new friends from all over the world. The RPG session that probably had most ‘impact’ though is probably a charity event we did back in 1987. On the back of the incredibly successful DragonAid in 1986 (think the BandAid concerts but with a record breaking non-stop RPG session) a group of us decided to run DragonLancealot – a 50 hour non-stop RPG session playing through part of the Dragonlance Adventure series for charity (Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London). We ran a couple of weekend events to both get used to playing for long continuous amounts of time and also to trim down applicants to get to a core team of 8 or 10 players, including a DM and a substitute DM if the main one crashed during the event. Following the official Guinness Book of Records Guidelines of being allowed a 5 minute break for every hour played (during which time we could leave the table) and only being able to pass notes to the ‘support team’ for food, drink and medicine a hotel in Victoria donated a room for us to use and we were off! It was great, albeit very tiring fun and we raised thousands for charity. I sadly didn’t make the 50 hours as I ate something that disagreed with me and ended up bailing around the 36 hour mark.
Wade Dyer (Design Ministries: Fragged Empire): This actually happened earlier this year. I was GMing a game for a gothic horror RPG I was working on where I had a short campaign planned that would involve my players tracking down a mad-lord who had been serving a Fiend. But on the very first session my players went off the rails: murdered a person (who was justifiably evil) in front of small crowd of people at a party, kidnapped the lady of the house, drenched the lady in sewage and made her walk home in the middle of the night.
I went home fairly angry after that session. Not because my plans had been messed up, but because a particular player had (possibly) ruined the fun of the night for everyone else. I was tempted to have the city authorities capture and prosecute the wayward player, but instead I let him get away with his actions and I turned the lady that they had kidnapped into the main villain of the campaign. This NPC ‘hated’ the players with the rage of a thousand suns for what they had done to her and her friend. In the end, this was one of the best short campaign I had ever run because I made it all about the players choices.
Lynne Hardy (Cogs, Cakes & Swordsticks; Achtung! Cthulhu): That would be a Company of Crimson LRP, where the character my character was falling in love with murdered his sister because she'd become a vampire and then promptly went insane with the guilt. Total party meltdown as the sister had been a ref plant in the party for a very long time with no one suspecting a thing.
Michael E. Webb (Alliance Game Distributors, Game Trade Magazine): I was 11 and had just discovered Red Box D&D. My best friend and I were being run through an adventure his older brother prepared for us. But he had us involved in crafting the story as well. "You enter the old manor house - there is a fireplace ahead of you in a great room, a large chair facing away from you. What do *you* notice in the room?"
It got us thinking descriptively instead of just absorbing his descriptions. And prepped us both to be better GM's in the future.
(I said "the fire is roaring, but there is no heat")
T.R. Knight (Freelance Editor): The most impactful RPG session in my gaming hobby has to be the first time I DMed for my wife and daughters. I was nervous running an adventure for them, but really enjoyed the evening. Little did I know then that it would spawn a passion for RPGs in one of my daughters who is now running her own D&D 5e campaign for her friends, draws gaming inspired artwork for shirts, and loves to spend time chatting with me about adventure and campaign writing.
Uli Lindner (Space: 1889; Clockwork Publishing): A night of Das Schwarze Auge early in our first year of gaming, during which we had no adventure to begin with for the first time, but still loads of fun. It taught as all about how to improvise.
Mike Lafferty (BAMF Podcast; Fainting Goat Games): I was in a pretty dysfunctional D&D campaign in the mid 90s (pre 3rd Ed). One night after a session I was talking with another player and we were surprised to find out we were both feeling the same way – that the game was off the rails and no one was having fun anymore.
It was eye-opening in a lot of ways to realize that it wasn’t just me and that there must be a better way to roleplay. Striving to avoid sessions like that has informed my inclinations as a player, GM and game designer.
Marc Langworthy (Modiphius; Red Scar): Again, there are so many to choose from! Back in the days when Vampire the Masquerade 2nd Ed was fairly new, a good friend ran a game of Hunters Hunted that had us playing mortals hunting the vampires. The entire campaign was great fun – and deadly - although one particular session stands out; a high-speed car chase led to us actually pulling a sofa and some chairs into the middle of the room and acting out the drama right there and then. No dice, just pure storytelling and reaction.
Stephanie McAlea (Stygian Fox Publishing; The Things We Leave Behind): A game of Blade Runner (BRP homebrew) where a replicant who wanted to sing one last song plucked the heart strings of the PCs to such a degree that they didn’t want to ‘retire’ him. One player
had tears in his eyes.
Rich Lescouflair (Alligator Alley Entertainment; Esper Genesis 5E): During my longest running Shadowrun game, my players were in an alternate timeline where the tiny decisions they made in the beginning of the campaign were changed. They were so amazed at how much of an impact they had on the world, it made them play the rest of the game with deep regard for each of their decisions.
Mike Myler (EN Publishing, Legendary Games): Robo-Hitler on Crucible City. It cannot be forgotten. I am still humbled by it.
Federico Sohns (Nibiru RPG): I'm almost always the narrator in my RPG sessions. Often, the most impactful ones would be those in which a character dies. Character death is something that many groups try to stay away from, due to very valid reasons. With that said, generally, the people I play with see characters and their development as just part of a greater plot, adding to the overall drama of the story. If a character death can be pulled off in a very dramatic way, it can prove to be one of the most immersive and significant experiences on the table. Of course, your job as a storyteller is to make it so, and to do it in a meaningful way.
Martin Greening (Azure Keep, Ruma: Dawn of Empire): Everyone has their “best roleplaying session ever” stories. For my group, it was the one time we played Castles & Crusades. Being a group of power gamers, most of us, including the perennial dwarf player, chose to play half-orcs since they get +2 Strength. One player chose to play a human bard, who was the only one with enough Intelligence to speak more than their native language. Fortunately, the bard chose to speak Orcish as well. Two things made this session truly impactful and special to us. Somewhere along the line we decided that Orcish = Spanish. No idea where that came from, but the only word the half-orcs knew in Common (English) was “Menemy” (enemy). This in and of itself led to some interesting hijinks, but the real kicker for the session was all due to the Castles & Crusades character sheet, at the bottom of which was a Last Will and Testament. During character creation, we decided the bard was the father of all three half-orcs. What we didn’t realize until about half-way through the session when another player glanced at the bard’s character sheet, he wrote as his will “Tell their mothers I’m sorry.”
Simon Brake (Stygian Fox): An afternoon set aside to play a Call of Cthulhu scenario, with my phone on hand to play slow suspenseful music, and then to switch to more ominous music once the investigation stepped up a gear, and then to more fast paced music when the investigators were forced to run away from the creatures in the woods. We had the lighting dimmed just right, and the pacing of the story went nicely, with the investigation slowly revealing more and more disturbing clues, until eventually they confronted the great evil. One investigator flung himself into swirling rapids to escape, one investigator was hunted down and disappeared, whilst the third investigator ended up face to face with the mythos, cracked, and went over to the dark side if only to avoid being killed himself. It was a great and satisfyingly dark ending to what was essentially a one-shot, and exactly the sort of disturbing tale I’d wanted to subject my players to.
Ken Spencer (Rocket Age; Why Not Games): Years and years ago I ran a BRP game world hopping game. During the campaign, our heroes ended up on a flying roman galley over the sands of Mars (you might be familiar with the last part if you read the Roma Universalis articles I wrote for Pyramid magazine). During several sessions, the PCs got to know the crew of the mercenary galley they were traveling with. Well, being a terrible bastard, I ran with that, and soon the players were involved in the lives and stories of these NPCs. When the inevitable happened, by which I mean a group of world hopping Nazis attacked the ship, all the NPCs, one by one, died heroic and tragic deaths. The players were stunned but performed their roles well, and much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair followed. One even stepped outside after the scene, tears in his eyes, and threatened to kick my ass if I ever did anything like that again. That's not the impactful part. No, it was that that sessions saw the birth of a villain that has popped up in several games, in many different incarnations. That day saw von Strasser enter my game world, and he has never left.
Darren Pearce (EN Publishing; Savage Mojo): My most impactful RPG session was probably way back when I used to run Warhammer FRP. My players saved a whole village that hated them, they threw themselves in the way of an advancing Skaven horde even though the village despised the PCs for what they had to do earlier. They triumphed too, so that was a bonus!
****
Originally created by Dave Chapman (Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space; Conspiracy X) #RPGaDAY os now being caretakered by the crew over at RPGBrigade. We hope you’ll join in, in the comments section, and share your thoughts with us too!
#RPGaDAY Question 7: What was your most impactful RPG session?
Michael J Tresca: I played D&D on a camping trip with a friend and her three kids this summer. Along with my two kids (six players in total), we played through the entirety of an adventure I designed, wrote, and illustrated, from maps to paper miniatures. The monsters were made of candy, and the kids were eager to defeat the monsters because then they were rewarded with the appropriate candy. It was an epic game across three days, and because it rained on and off, we kept the kids busy when they couldn't play outside. It's the first time I've ever designed every element of an adventure exactly the way I wanted to (a DM's dream) and the effort paid off. Everyone had a blast!
Angus Abranson: It’s hard to say what have been my most impactful RPG sessions. There have been highlights, and lowlights, but I’m not sure any have really changed the way I approach the next game in a major way. I could say my first ever RPG session, playing Keep on the Borderlands with my cousins was impactful as it launched me into not only a fantastic hobby but also my professional life and has introduced me to new friends from all over the world. The RPG session that probably had most ‘impact’ though is probably a charity event we did back in 1987. On the back of the incredibly successful DragonAid in 1986 (think the BandAid concerts but with a record breaking non-stop RPG session) a group of us decided to run DragonLancealot – a 50 hour non-stop RPG session playing through part of the Dragonlance Adventure series for charity (Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London). We ran a couple of weekend events to both get used to playing for long continuous amounts of time and also to trim down applicants to get to a core team of 8 or 10 players, including a DM and a substitute DM if the main one crashed during the event. Following the official Guinness Book of Records Guidelines of being allowed a 5 minute break for every hour played (during which time we could leave the table) and only being able to pass notes to the ‘support team’ for food, drink and medicine a hotel in Victoria donated a room for us to use and we were off! It was great, albeit very tiring fun and we raised thousands for charity. I sadly didn’t make the 50 hours as I ate something that disagreed with me and ended up bailing around the 36 hour mark.
Wade Dyer (Design Ministries: Fragged Empire): This actually happened earlier this year. I was GMing a game for a gothic horror RPG I was working on where I had a short campaign planned that would involve my players tracking down a mad-lord who had been serving a Fiend. But on the very first session my players went off the rails: murdered a person (who was justifiably evil) in front of small crowd of people at a party, kidnapped the lady of the house, drenched the lady in sewage and made her walk home in the middle of the night.
I went home fairly angry after that session. Not because my plans had been messed up, but because a particular player had (possibly) ruined the fun of the night for everyone else. I was tempted to have the city authorities capture and prosecute the wayward player, but instead I let him get away with his actions and I turned the lady that they had kidnapped into the main villain of the campaign. This NPC ‘hated’ the players with the rage of a thousand suns for what they had done to her and her friend. In the end, this was one of the best short campaign I had ever run because I made it all about the players choices.
Lynne Hardy (Cogs, Cakes & Swordsticks; Achtung! Cthulhu): That would be a Company of Crimson LRP, where the character my character was falling in love with murdered his sister because she'd become a vampire and then promptly went insane with the guilt. Total party meltdown as the sister had been a ref plant in the party for a very long time with no one suspecting a thing.
Michael E. Webb (Alliance Game Distributors, Game Trade Magazine): I was 11 and had just discovered Red Box D&D. My best friend and I were being run through an adventure his older brother prepared for us. But he had us involved in crafting the story as well. "You enter the old manor house - there is a fireplace ahead of you in a great room, a large chair facing away from you. What do *you* notice in the room?"
It got us thinking descriptively instead of just absorbing his descriptions. And prepped us both to be better GM's in the future.
(I said "the fire is roaring, but there is no heat")
T.R. Knight (Freelance Editor): The most impactful RPG session in my gaming hobby has to be the first time I DMed for my wife and daughters. I was nervous running an adventure for them, but really enjoyed the evening. Little did I know then that it would spawn a passion for RPGs in one of my daughters who is now running her own D&D 5e campaign for her friends, draws gaming inspired artwork for shirts, and loves to spend time chatting with me about adventure and campaign writing.
Uli Lindner (Space: 1889; Clockwork Publishing): A night of Das Schwarze Auge early in our first year of gaming, during which we had no adventure to begin with for the first time, but still loads of fun. It taught as all about how to improvise.
Mike Lafferty (BAMF Podcast; Fainting Goat Games): I was in a pretty dysfunctional D&D campaign in the mid 90s (pre 3rd Ed). One night after a session I was talking with another player and we were surprised to find out we were both feeling the same way – that the game was off the rails and no one was having fun anymore.
It was eye-opening in a lot of ways to realize that it wasn’t just me and that there must be a better way to roleplay. Striving to avoid sessions like that has informed my inclinations as a player, GM and game designer.
Marc Langworthy (Modiphius; Red Scar): Again, there are so many to choose from! Back in the days when Vampire the Masquerade 2nd Ed was fairly new, a good friend ran a game of Hunters Hunted that had us playing mortals hunting the vampires. The entire campaign was great fun – and deadly - although one particular session stands out; a high-speed car chase led to us actually pulling a sofa and some chairs into the middle of the room and acting out the drama right there and then. No dice, just pure storytelling and reaction.
Stephanie McAlea (Stygian Fox Publishing; The Things We Leave Behind): A game of Blade Runner (BRP homebrew) where a replicant who wanted to sing one last song plucked the heart strings of the PCs to such a degree that they didn’t want to ‘retire’ him. One player
had tears in his eyes.
Rich Lescouflair (Alligator Alley Entertainment; Esper Genesis 5E): During my longest running Shadowrun game, my players were in an alternate timeline where the tiny decisions they made in the beginning of the campaign were changed. They were so amazed at how much of an impact they had on the world, it made them play the rest of the game with deep regard for each of their decisions.
Mike Myler (EN Publishing, Legendary Games): Robo-Hitler on Crucible City. It cannot be forgotten. I am still humbled by it.
Federico Sohns (Nibiru RPG): I'm almost always the narrator in my RPG sessions. Often, the most impactful ones would be those in which a character dies. Character death is something that many groups try to stay away from, due to very valid reasons. With that said, generally, the people I play with see characters and their development as just part of a greater plot, adding to the overall drama of the story. If a character death can be pulled off in a very dramatic way, it can prove to be one of the most immersive and significant experiences on the table. Of course, your job as a storyteller is to make it so, and to do it in a meaningful way.
Martin Greening (Azure Keep, Ruma: Dawn of Empire): Everyone has their “best roleplaying session ever” stories. For my group, it was the one time we played Castles & Crusades. Being a group of power gamers, most of us, including the perennial dwarf player, chose to play half-orcs since they get +2 Strength. One player chose to play a human bard, who was the only one with enough Intelligence to speak more than their native language. Fortunately, the bard chose to speak Orcish as well. Two things made this session truly impactful and special to us. Somewhere along the line we decided that Orcish = Spanish. No idea where that came from, but the only word the half-orcs knew in Common (English) was “Menemy” (enemy). This in and of itself led to some interesting hijinks, but the real kicker for the session was all due to the Castles & Crusades character sheet, at the bottom of which was a Last Will and Testament. During character creation, we decided the bard was the father of all three half-orcs. What we didn’t realize until about half-way through the session when another player glanced at the bard’s character sheet, he wrote as his will “Tell their mothers I’m sorry.”
Simon Brake (Stygian Fox): An afternoon set aside to play a Call of Cthulhu scenario, with my phone on hand to play slow suspenseful music, and then to switch to more ominous music once the investigation stepped up a gear, and then to more fast paced music when the investigators were forced to run away from the creatures in the woods. We had the lighting dimmed just right, and the pacing of the story went nicely, with the investigation slowly revealing more and more disturbing clues, until eventually they confronted the great evil. One investigator flung himself into swirling rapids to escape, one investigator was hunted down and disappeared, whilst the third investigator ended up face to face with the mythos, cracked, and went over to the dark side if only to avoid being killed himself. It was a great and satisfyingly dark ending to what was essentially a one-shot, and exactly the sort of disturbing tale I’d wanted to subject my players to.
Ken Spencer (Rocket Age; Why Not Games): Years and years ago I ran a BRP game world hopping game. During the campaign, our heroes ended up on a flying roman galley over the sands of Mars (you might be familiar with the last part if you read the Roma Universalis articles I wrote for Pyramid magazine). During several sessions, the PCs got to know the crew of the mercenary galley they were traveling with. Well, being a terrible bastard, I ran with that, and soon the players were involved in the lives and stories of these NPCs. When the inevitable happened, by which I mean a group of world hopping Nazis attacked the ship, all the NPCs, one by one, died heroic and tragic deaths. The players were stunned but performed their roles well, and much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair followed. One even stepped outside after the scene, tears in his eyes, and threatened to kick my ass if I ever did anything like that again. That's not the impactful part. No, it was that that sessions saw the birth of a villain that has popped up in several games, in many different incarnations. That day saw von Strasser enter my game world, and he has never left.
Darren Pearce (EN Publishing; Savage Mojo): My most impactful RPG session was probably way back when I used to run Warhammer FRP. My players saved a whole village that hated them, they threw themselves in the way of an advancing Skaven horde even though the village despised the PCs for what they had to do earlier. They triumphed too, so that was a bonus!
****
Originally created by Dave Chapman (Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space; Conspiracy X) #RPGaDAY os now being caretakered by the crew over at RPGBrigade. We hope you’ll join in, in the comments section, and share your thoughts with us too!
