30 Days of Stuff: Day 20
"Day 20 → A hobbie of yours" [sic]
So, which hobbie -- sorry -- hobby -- will I pick? Being pedantic about spelling? Procrastinating? Shouting at Flashforward every time the plot MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!? (Sorry, had a particularly bad episode -- in both senses of the word -- tonight.)
Can you stand the antici...pation?
Well, you all know I'm into science fiction and fantasy, so I'll pick a particular subset of that. Roleplaying games. Not the fun, sexy kind (though last Tuesday's was a bit racy, what with wardrobewitch and the satyr! And then there was captainlucy and the centaur...)
But no, I mean fantasy roleplaying games. No, not that sort of fantasy. I mean a tabletop roleplaying game. No, we don't get up on the table -- look, it's all explained here.
Briefly, you play a character in a fantasy or science fiction setting. Well, there's no reason it has to be such a setting. It could be a "mundane" game; a murder mystery or a war setting. But the games mostly appeal to SF&F fans, so the games usually incorporate those elements. There's a scenario which you play your character through, like improvisational acting. There are numbers to describe how good each character is at a number of things (usually written on a "character sheet"), and (usually) dice to provide a random element. One player (usually called the GM, short for "Game Master") runs the game; they set up the scenario, narrate descriptions, play the other characters you meet, and arbitrate the rules. In tabletop RPGs, you don't generally act out what your character does; you just describe it, and only conversations are actually acted out.
So I first discovered RPGs when I was about 12. I'd bought one of the Fighting Fantasy books, and quickly got hooked. Then talking about them with a friend, he mentioned this game he had called "Dungeons and Dragons". So that was me introduced to RPGs, but it was often hard to get people together to play. So our school started a roleplaying club (I don't know whose idea it was, but a number of the older kids were already D&D fans). I played for a while, but I was intrigued by the idea of playing a character. And the rest of the 12-year-old boys generally weren't. They wanted to kill stuff and get treasure. They would backstab other members of their group for the XP, and a larger share of the treasure. And that got really old, really fast. Many roleplayers tell similar stories -- either they, like me, tired of those silly little boys and their nonsense, or they were those silly little boys, and realise now how immature they were. (I was born 50 years old, and have been aging backwards. When I reach 50, there will be a quantum inversion field effect. Or something.)
So after a year or so, I chucked it in. I wasn't interested in that; I wanted to play characters and tell stories; sure, the game aspects interested me too, but there were other games I could play if I wanted to get one up on my friends.
Then, years later, I was in university. I was persuaded to join the roleplaying club there (the Dragonslayers), and so I went along, figuring I might as well give it another go. I played in a session of D&D (well, AD&D, but who cares?) which was OK, but not wonderful. I was happy enough to come along again the next week, though. But as it turned out, the GM didn't appear (well, he later claimed he did, but was late. But none of us saw him; as I said, "You turned up late and didn't think to check the bar?") so the rest of us went to the bar and just chatted. I only knew one of these people before, but we mostly got on well. One of the guys suggested that next week he could bring along a game he had. "It's called Vampire, and you all play vampires", he explained. Well, who doesn't love vampires? (This was long before Twilight!)
So next week, we made up characters for Vampire: the Masquerade. I was particularly pleased to see that it called itself "a storytelling game" and encouraged the players to really roleplay their characters. Another thing that helped was that the game was set in the real world -- more or less -- which made it feel much more real, and meant you automatically knew far more about how things worked, what you were likely to be able to get your hands on and how much it might cost, and where things were in relation to one another than you possibly could know about a thinly-described fantasy world.
The rest is history. But history can be interesting, so briefly; I fell in love with Vampire. The same company brought out more games using the same setting -- the World of Darkness. Werewolf, Mage and others. I bought them all, and played most. I particularly love Hunter: the Reckoning (the End is Nigh, and some humans have been chosen to fight the coming darkness. Imbued with strange abilities by an unknown force, you can help humanity inherit the earth -- but how? Should monsters be killed, or negotiated with, or redeemed, or just defended against? And are they even really the true enemy?) Sadly, in 2004 they ended that game line, starting a new World of Darkness. Some people really like it. But it's just not the same.
The first game to challenge my love of Vampire was another from the same company, which actually predated Vampire, and had been one of its inspirations. A game of medieval wizardry called Ars Magica. It had actually grown out of someone's D&D house rules, and much later the 3rd edition of D&D took some of its principles on board. I still love it, but it's not for everyone.
Currently I'm running my other favourite game, Call of Cthulhu. Based on the so-called "Cthulhu mythos" of H.P. Lovecraft and others, the player characters are unusually powerless in this, being (usually) just normal people with no special abilities. That's because this is a game of cosmic horror, in which weak and feeble humans are ultimately doomed in the face of forces so alien that understanding even a fraction of the truth about them will bend your mind, and anything approaching true understanding will shatter it. Fun for all the family!
It's a strange idea for a game, really, but it works. Mood is everything; you need to be able to make the players feel afraid for their characters (and if you're doing really well, the players will feel a genuine frisson of fear; like reading a good horror story), while simultaneously feeling that they can't just leave well alone. They should feel the need for answers -- even while knowing that those answers may destroy the characters they've grown attached to. Plus, there's lots of tentacles. Tentacles are good.
Perhaps because the Cthulhu mythos is so dark, it generates a lot of humour. Cthulhu plush toys, musicals, colouring books, and -- of course -- Lolthulhu.
On the other hand, it generates wonderful atmospheric art, like this. And this.
So, which hobbie -- sorry -- hobby -- will I pick? Being pedantic about spelling? Procrastinating? Shouting at Flashforward every time the plot MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!? (Sorry, had a particularly bad episode -- in both senses of the word -- tonight.)
Can you stand the antici...pation?
Well, you all know I'm into science fiction and fantasy, so I'll pick a particular subset of that. Roleplaying games. Not the fun, sexy kind (though last Tuesday's was a bit racy, what with wardrobewitch and the satyr! And then there was captainlucy and the centaur...)
But no, I mean fantasy roleplaying games. No, not that sort of fantasy. I mean a tabletop roleplaying game. No, we don't get up on the table -- look, it's all explained here.
Briefly, you play a character in a fantasy or science fiction setting. Well, there's no reason it has to be such a setting. It could be a "mundane" game; a murder mystery or a war setting. But the games mostly appeal to SF&F fans, so the games usually incorporate those elements. There's a scenario which you play your character through, like improvisational acting. There are numbers to describe how good each character is at a number of things (usually written on a "character sheet"), and (usually) dice to provide a random element. One player (usually called the GM, short for "Game Master") runs the game; they set up the scenario, narrate descriptions, play the other characters you meet, and arbitrate the rules. In tabletop RPGs, you don't generally act out what your character does; you just describe it, and only conversations are actually acted out.
So I first discovered RPGs when I was about 12. I'd bought one of the Fighting Fantasy books, and quickly got hooked. Then talking about them with a friend, he mentioned this game he had called "Dungeons and Dragons". So that was me introduced to RPGs, but it was often hard to get people together to play. So our school started a roleplaying club (I don't know whose idea it was, but a number of the older kids were already D&D fans). I played for a while, but I was intrigued by the idea of playing a character. And the rest of the 12-year-old boys generally weren't. They wanted to kill stuff and get treasure. They would backstab other members of their group for the XP, and a larger share of the treasure. And that got really old, really fast. Many roleplayers tell similar stories -- either they, like me, tired of those silly little boys and their nonsense, or they were those silly little boys, and realise now how immature they were. (I was born 50 years old, and have been aging backwards. When I reach 50, there will be a quantum inversion field effect. Or something.)
So after a year or so, I chucked it in. I wasn't interested in that; I wanted to play characters and tell stories; sure, the game aspects interested me too, but there were other games I could play if I wanted to get one up on my friends.
Then, years later, I was in university. I was persuaded to join the roleplaying club there (the Dragonslayers), and so I went along, figuring I might as well give it another go. I played in a session of D&D (well, AD&D, but who cares?) which was OK, but not wonderful. I was happy enough to come along again the next week, though. But as it turned out, the GM didn't appear (well, he later claimed he did, but was late. But none of us saw him; as I said, "You turned up late and didn't think to check the bar?") so the rest of us went to the bar and just chatted. I only knew one of these people before, but we mostly got on well. One of the guys suggested that next week he could bring along a game he had. "It's called Vampire, and you all play vampires", he explained. Well, who doesn't love vampires? (This was long before Twilight!)
So next week, we made up characters for Vampire: the Masquerade. I was particularly pleased to see that it called itself "a storytelling game" and encouraged the players to really roleplay their characters. Another thing that helped was that the game was set in the real world -- more or less -- which made it feel much more real, and meant you automatically knew far more about how things worked, what you were likely to be able to get your hands on and how much it might cost, and where things were in relation to one another than you possibly could know about a thinly-described fantasy world.
The rest is history. But history can be interesting, so briefly; I fell in love with Vampire. The same company brought out more games using the same setting -- the World of Darkness. Werewolf, Mage and others. I bought them all, and played most. I particularly love Hunter: the Reckoning (the End is Nigh, and some humans have been chosen to fight the coming darkness. Imbued with strange abilities by an unknown force, you can help humanity inherit the earth -- but how? Should monsters be killed, or negotiated with, or redeemed, or just defended against? And are they even really the true enemy?) Sadly, in 2004 they ended that game line, starting a new World of Darkness. Some people really like it. But it's just not the same.
The first game to challenge my love of Vampire was another from the same company, which actually predated Vampire, and had been one of its inspirations. A game of medieval wizardry called Ars Magica. It had actually grown out of someone's D&D house rules, and much later the 3rd edition of D&D took some of its principles on board. I still love it, but it's not for everyone.
Currently I'm running my other favourite game, Call of Cthulhu. Based on the so-called "Cthulhu mythos" of H.P. Lovecraft and others, the player characters are unusually powerless in this, being (usually) just normal people with no special abilities. That's because this is a game of cosmic horror, in which weak and feeble humans are ultimately doomed in the face of forces so alien that understanding even a fraction of the truth about them will bend your mind, and anything approaching true understanding will shatter it. Fun for all the family!
It's a strange idea for a game, really, but it works. Mood is everything; you need to be able to make the players feel afraid for their characters (and if you're doing really well, the players will feel a genuine frisson of fear; like reading a good horror story), while simultaneously feeling that they can't just leave well alone. They should feel the need for answers -- even while knowing that those answers may destroy the characters they've grown attached to. Plus, there's lots of tentacles. Tentacles are good.
Perhaps because the Cthulhu mythos is so dark, it generates a lot of humour. Cthulhu plush toys, musicals, colouring books, and -- of course -- Lolthulhu.
On the other hand, it generates wonderful atmospheric art, like this. And this.