Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 September 2009 17:52:14
It's been a long times since I updated this. I can either try to put together a massive post covering everything, or I can pick things up one at a time. Clearly the latter is easier so I'll tell you about what we've been doing with roleplaying games first.
Last night I tried to run a small tabletop role-playing game for my daughter and friends. The idea is more or less along the same lines as Dungeons & Dragons – everybody has a character, who has certain strengths and weaknesses, and they're conducted through a story with them as participants, during which a slightly annoying dice system determines what they manage to do and how they do it. It's basically like the old Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks I used to take on holiday, except that I'm the book. That makes me the Dungeon Master, or the DM.
The reason I wanted to do this: RPGs are good for kids' imaginations, and they're also pretty damned cheap to run – essentially you all spend a night sitting round a table with pens, paper and dice. This is not simple. I've tried running games before and it always turned out someone (i.e. the DM; i.e., me) needed a lot more preparation in place than I'd envisaged before these things will fly. That in mind I had to take some practical steps, so I went along to a couple of local games to get an idea of how it all hangs together. I'm not exactly socially gifted but gaming seems to attract those who aren't altogether happy about having to find a bunch of strangers to play with. I finally got admitted to a local game of Call of Cthulhu (or maybe it's Trail of Cthulhu) where I watched for a bit, then tried out my first ever character. He got killed the same night I introduced him. (Memo to myself: if everybody else is running away, join in.) I think a richer source of ideas is the Dungeons & Dragons group I joined next. I've had one game here (as a dwarf cleric) and that only a starter dungeon-crawl to get the rules agreed. But the main point of these endeavours is to see a proper DM running a game, and I'm amazed at how much work they have to do. We seemed more or less like a bunch of sheep he had to guide through the game, and I the sheepiest of all - the overarching problem of learning to run RPGs is that everybody who knows how to run them talks in gobbledegook, so I was glad to be able to ask questions.
I'm now pretty irretrievably hooked on this stuff as a player, but it's yet to be seen how I'll apply all this to our games at home. Last night's went pretty well, we used Faery's Tale which is aimed squarely at the small, whiny, freckled end of the market. Despite plenty of fun and several imaginative ventures off the track of what I'd planned, the faeries did manage to rescue Jack from the giant's castle, and the game ended with both in a deep magical sleep waiting for the next instalment.