RPG Gaming

In my deep dark past, I was a heavy role playing gamer. Now... in my defense, I did live in a crummy third world country, with no television, no malls, and a tiny "youth center" arcade. Some people played sports, but I am Scandinavian and the hot Arabian sun burned me to a crisp when I tried to go outside.

Okay, I think that's enough excuses for my uncool childhood.

As an adult, I haven't enjoyed playing story-telling adventures. This probably has to do with a diminished quality of Role Playing Gaming peers. My last game was with a bunch of IT professionals, who were pretty cool, but we talked about that game for like a year before we actually did it, and I didn't have a very good time. The more "reliable" role-players weren't big into bathing and hygiene, so... I didn't really like being around them.

Nonetheless, my RPG background has had a long-standing effect on my personality and interests. The website probably gives that away. This section covers Role Playing ideas I have, but will never use. And it serves as a focal point for me to discuss Role Playing things.

Dungeons & Dragons

I played a lot of D&D as a teenager. I still buy D&D books with the intention of reading them and possibly playing a game. Typically, I keep a stack of RPG books in the rest room for reading. However, there are so many D&D books, and they get updated so often, and I spend so little time in the restroom, that I haven't been able to get an idea for how the game is played, anymore.

Paranoia

I have fond memories of paranoia. It was excellent comedy, and comprised my most entertaining Role Playing Gaming experiences. However, I was almost always the Game Master, so I can't actually claim to have much experience playing it. My friends, when I was a gamer, weren't generally great Game Masters, so the role usually fell on me. Which was cool, because I enjoyed being in charge.

Game Mastering / Dungeon Mastering

I almost always did the DMing or GMing in my games growing up. I didn't try to take charge all the time, but when my friends DMed, things just didn't go so well. Here are some thoughts I have on being a good DM:

Common Problems: One of the first times I mastered a game, my players didn't want to go on the dungeon crawl I planned. They wanted to find a different kind of adventure. Like a moron, I struggled to think of a spontaneous adventure. I could'nt decide on how big the village was, what was in the village, who was in the village, or what kind of problems they had. I was annoyed at my incompetence, so I decided to address my shortcomings.

I took a few evenings and weekends to design a handful of villages, make a big list of people with short back-stories minor problems, descriptions, rewards, and some narrative for "spontaneous" adventures.

I was never really unprepared for a side-story, a diversion, or a change-of-plans ever again.

Flexibility: One of the things that I find really obnoxious about a GM is a person who REALLY WANTS YOU TO DO SOMETHING. I hate it when a GM wants you to solve a problem a particular way, or find a particular treasure. This kind of behaviour takes a lot of freedom away from the players, and it can easily slow down a gaming section. The worst GM wants you to do something particular, and won't let you do anything else, but won't tell you what he wants. I had one crappy gaming session where we spent hours in an empty room looking for four +1 arrows. Another DM wasted an entire evening trying to make me fall off a cliff so I could get a magic item.

RPG is about story-telling. It's not about a DM reading from a book. The DM is technically supposed to provide a bit of framework and establish rules over how the story rolls out. The players are the people who are supposed to be telling the story. Everything else in gaming -- modules, miniatures, dice, and maps -- are a way of give the players something to react to.

Spine: One of the worst things about gaming is the rule weasel. Most GM's don't seem to handle these guys too well. "But it says right here in the player's handbook that...". Odds are that you probably don't want to play with these dorks in the first place, and the right thing to do is kick them out of the group. If you're not willing to do that, you need to slap them hard and let them know who's boss. Usually, when I get obnoxious and try to squeeze a rules weasel out of the group ("oh, you trip on your armored wardog. He's pissed, and bites you for 3 HP damage."), they straighten up.