Author: Gareth

I’ll be honest, I’m not 100% sure what “tricky” means, in this context.

I’ll go with “challenging” — At GenCon 1992, there was a homebrew “Twin Peaks” event on the schedule. This was right after the second season ended (not to return for nearly 30 years), on a cliffhanger which featured Agent Cooper apparently possessed by “Bob.”

So it turns out that the event was, essentially, a systemless LARP — run as a direct continuation, and was a helluva lot of fun. The GM had me play Possessed Cooper. Another guy played the True Cooper, trying to escape the Black Lodge. About halfway through the event, that guy and I had an idea. We pulled the GM aside, and got clearance from him, and he loved it.

We figured that if this was on TV, both of us would be played by Kyle MacLachlan — but in the LARP, people knew that I was Possessed Cooper, and the other guy was True Cooper.

So we switched roles, without telling anyone. Just clues in how we played.

And we pulled it off. It was a lot of fun, and one of the most rewarding game experiences I’ve ever had as a player.

 
 

Today’s question: Describe a failure that became amazing.

Interestingly enough, this allows me to repeat a story that first appeared in #RPGaDay2014, day 13: “Most Memorable Character Death.”

In the mid-80s, my best friend and I sat down to play a game of Hero Games’ DANGER INTERNATIONAL. It was a Champions spin-off that was for playing un-powered action hero types: spies, private eyes, cops. soldiers, that kinda thing.

Dave (my best friend) was going to run me through a game where I was playing a DEA Agent. I was pretty excited about this, because in our games, I was almost always the GM, so getting a chance to play was great. We spent quite a long time creating my agent (remember: Hero System), and started to play.

David set the game in Miami, and had me looking for my partner, who had disappeared while on an undercover operation. No sooner had we started playing, than he partnered me up with representatives of the local police: Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs! (Yes, we were both fans of MIAMI VICE, which was at the height of its popularity at the time).

Rumor had it that members of the cartel that my partner had been investigating were holed up in a stilt house, out on the water near Biscayne Bay. So of course we hopped in the speed boat, and one Jan Hammer musical montage later, we arrived at the house. We split up, with Crocket and Tubbs taking one side of the house, and me the other. I neared the door, and kicked it in…

…and caught a face full of claymore mine. The door (the whole house, in fact) was trapped. Nobody was there. KA friggin BOOM. One unreasonably large handful of d6 damage dice later, my DEA agent was dead.

What we had thought was going to be a story about the exciting adventures of a rough-and-ready DEA agent, turned out to be only the motivational death in the pre-credits sequence of a Miami Vice episode.

This definitely qualifies as a “failure that became amazing,” because we still remember and laugh about this, 30 years later.

I hope Crocket and Tubbs got the bad guys in the end.
 
 

This week’s questions are all “Describe…”, so I suspect that these might be a bit more involved than the usual short answers.

Today’s question is “Describe how your play has evolved.”

I’ve been playing for nearly 40 years now, so to go into detail on that would take far more than I’m willing to expend on this (and would probably only be of interest to me, in any case). That said, I think I can organize my evolution of play into four general ‘eras.’

• The Genre Polymath: As I’ve mentioned before, I started with TOP SECRET, and six months later, D&D. Over the next few years, I devoured any RPG that I came across — I bought and read more games than I ever managed to play — and I played a lot. STAR FRONTIERS, GAMMA WORLD, BOOT HILL, TRAVELLER, MARVEL SUPER-HEROES, UNIVERSE, DAWN PATROL, etc. When I did play, we stuck to the rules as written — no fudging of die rolls, no real consideration of story over mechanics, etc.

• The Emulator: It’s pretty easy to mark the start date for this ‘era’ — 1983, with the release of Victory Games’ JAMES BOND 007, a game that opened my eyes to the fact that rules could be designed to be more than just mathematical resolution of events, but could actually be designed to emulate the feel of a genre. I found myself drawn to systems that took this approach, and my games began to emphasize the tone and trappings of a setting far more than before. Other games I played during this period were FASA’s STAR TREK and DOCTOR WHO, Chaosium’s CALL OF CTHULHU, and I brought the lessons of emulation back with me into games I’d played in a less-emulative fashion previously.

• The Storyteller: This is more of a culmination of the above ‘era” — with the arrival of VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE, I discovered an entirely new method of play that emphasized the story that was being collaboratively created through the play experience. Dramatic techniques crept into play, across the board — not just in storytelling-focused games. I began to use lighting and music to enhance game experiences, and started to play in comfortable surroundings, rather than via the typical “game table” environment. It was during this period that I started designing games professionally.

• The Collaborator: This is the ‘era’ I find myself in now. A realization over the past decade and a half that the play experience is enriched (for both players and GM) when the work is shared. Things that previously I would have considered the purview of the GM, especially worldbuilding, I find more rewarding to spread out among the playing group. Collaborative creation not only of the story being told, but of the larger world in which the story takes place. Players taking traditional GM roles in the creation of narrative elements which are then folded into the ‘reality’ of the game — that’s what appeals to me now. From on-the-fly NPC creation by the player declaring that they “know a guy,” to developing backstories of inter-character relationships that create setting elements and plot hooks to be brought into play — that’s what I like to have now, and I bring all of these elements into every game I play (and design, for that matter). I still read WAY more games than I play, but when I do now, it’s with an eye towards system elements which scratch that itch, which I examine to see if they can be imported whole into other games.

So yeah. This is WAY longer than I intended, so I’ll leave it there. Back to work! I’ve got games to design.