I knew this day would come
Jun. 20th, 2018 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrFor years, I pretended to myself that I would never take this final step. I mocked others while knowing in my heart of hearts I would one day join them. But today, at last...
I played a tabletop roleplaying game.
And it was fun.
For context I stopped making fun of roleplaying like...15-20 years ago, and was never very serious about it. But despite mostly being at peace with my flip-floppy nature part of me is glad most of the people who knew me then don't really do blogging any more. I'M SORRY MY FELLOW NERDS I WAS YOUNG AND FOOLISH.
The reason I always thought I'd hate roleplaying is
(1) I hate feeling like if I screw up a choice it will ruin everything forever, especially if it will affect other people
(2) improv acting has always made me anxious, I can act and write but not at the same time
(3) I've seen other people roleplay badly and it set off my second hand embarrassment.
It was only recently that I realised I could get around these by
(1) playing a game where the goal was an interesting story rather than winning
(2) Only actually acting when I felt like it, and otherwise describing things OOC, or discussing what I should do next with the other players
(3) assuming that if I was in the game too I would be too invested to get embarrassed, especially if noone was doing silly voices or whatever.
And so I took this approach and it worked great!
Anyway:
I joined a group that started up on a non binary discord I'm on. We decided to start with a simple GM-less campaign: a Follow heist following Roll20.
Except Roll20's voice chat didn't work for everyone so we did that over discord and just used Roll20 for the shared character sheet/game notes. Even that was kind of janky, Roll20 is not fantastic, but we got by.
We all found Follow a bit too directionless but had enough fun that we're all interested in playing again, maybe with something with a GM next time. All the other players there today had GMed before and have ideas for things they want to run, so we'll see what ends up being decided on. They're a bunch of 20 something non-binary Australian game devs on the east coast, so we have enough in common to naturally get along reasonably well. There were only 4 of us this time but another two were just busy today.
How the game played out:
Once we'd picked "heist" from the game types we then had to pick the specific kind of heist and some things making it difficult. We settled on an inconveniently huge and recognisable painting (specifically, a single huge canvas covered in uniform gold leaf)
Everyone had to create a major and minor character using a set list of types and motivations. For my main character, George, I chose to be an "unlucky criminal" motivated by "wealth"- imagining a shifty and incompetent get-rich-quick type. We then had to decide a thing our main character wanted from the main character "to our left" on the character sheet, which led to us deciding George had screwed up jobs with two of the others due to his greed, so badly that one of them was now majorly motivated by a desire for revenge upon him. Something I have learned from computer RPGs is that if I roleplay my character as a screwup, I don't get anxious about making mistakes. They just add to the veracity :D
My secondary character, Peta, was a security guard at the museum being blackmailed by one of the other characters to let the team inside.
Once that was set up we went through the steps of the heist, starting with "Break In". For each stage each character in turn ran a "scene" with the other characters to progress the plot. We all found this a bit difficult, since without a GM we were all very much making it up as we went along, trying to figure out what would be a logical next stage in a break-in that would make for a fun scene. I still had a lot of fun, and even managed a few moments of genuine improv IC dialogue, but am glad I wasn't expected to do that constantly. In the final scene George and the Inside Man character bumped into a security guard and George pretended to be a French Art Expert doing a night time survey of the architecture of the museum in advance of an exhibition.
Despite everything seeming to have gone well, the success roll said we failed and had to lose a character. So after some discussion we decided Peta got caught having left the door open and got yelled at, noone realised it was a breakin but the heist was still ruined. Peta decided it was all too much and quit, blackmail or no blackmail.
And then I was VERY tired, as was another person, since it had been 2 hours. (To be honest one reason I volunteered Peta to go was I liked the idea of having less characters to control) I'm not sure we'll continue the heist but it was still an overall very positive experience, and I look forward to more roleplaying.
I played a tabletop roleplaying game.
And it was fun.
For context I stopped making fun of roleplaying like...15-20 years ago, and was never very serious about it. But despite mostly being at peace with my flip-floppy nature part of me is glad most of the people who knew me then don't really do blogging any more. I'M SORRY MY FELLOW NERDS I WAS YOUNG AND FOOLISH.
The reason I always thought I'd hate roleplaying is
(1) I hate feeling like if I screw up a choice it will ruin everything forever, especially if it will affect other people
(2) improv acting has always made me anxious, I can act and write but not at the same time
(3) I've seen other people roleplay badly and it set off my second hand embarrassment.
It was only recently that I realised I could get around these by
(1) playing a game where the goal was an interesting story rather than winning
(2) Only actually acting when I felt like it, and otherwise describing things OOC, or discussing what I should do next with the other players
(3) assuming that if I was in the game too I would be too invested to get embarrassed, especially if noone was doing silly voices or whatever.
And so I took this approach and it worked great!
Anyway:
I joined a group that started up on a non binary discord I'm on. We decided to start with a simple GM-less campaign: a Follow heist following Roll20.
Except Roll20's voice chat didn't work for everyone so we did that over discord and just used Roll20 for the shared character sheet/game notes. Even that was kind of janky, Roll20 is not fantastic, but we got by.
We all found Follow a bit too directionless but had enough fun that we're all interested in playing again, maybe with something with a GM next time. All the other players there today had GMed before and have ideas for things they want to run, so we'll see what ends up being decided on. They're a bunch of 20 something non-binary Australian game devs on the east coast, so we have enough in common to naturally get along reasonably well. There were only 4 of us this time but another two were just busy today.
How the game played out:
Once we'd picked "heist" from the game types we then had to pick the specific kind of heist and some things making it difficult. We settled on an inconveniently huge and recognisable painting (specifically, a single huge canvas covered in uniform gold leaf)
Everyone had to create a major and minor character using a set list of types and motivations. For my main character, George, I chose to be an "unlucky criminal" motivated by "wealth"- imagining a shifty and incompetent get-rich-quick type. We then had to decide a thing our main character wanted from the main character "to our left" on the character sheet, which led to us deciding George had screwed up jobs with two of the others due to his greed, so badly that one of them was now majorly motivated by a desire for revenge upon him. Something I have learned from computer RPGs is that if I roleplay my character as a screwup, I don't get anxious about making mistakes. They just add to the veracity :D
My secondary character, Peta, was a security guard at the museum being blackmailed by one of the other characters to let the team inside.
Once that was set up we went through the steps of the heist, starting with "Break In". For each stage each character in turn ran a "scene" with the other characters to progress the plot. We all found this a bit difficult, since without a GM we were all very much making it up as we went along, trying to figure out what would be a logical next stage in a break-in that would make for a fun scene. I still had a lot of fun, and even managed a few moments of genuine improv IC dialogue, but am glad I wasn't expected to do that constantly. In the final scene George and the Inside Man character bumped into a security guard and George pretended to be a French Art Expert doing a night time survey of the architecture of the museum in advance of an exhibition.
Despite everything seeming to have gone well, the success roll said we failed and had to lose a character. So after some discussion we decided Peta got caught having left the door open and got yelled at, noone realised it was a breakin but the heist was still ruined. Peta decided it was all too much and quit, blackmail or no blackmail.
And then I was VERY tired, as was another person, since it had been 2 hours. (To be honest one reason I volunteered Peta to go was I liked the idea of having less characters to control) I'm not sure we'll continue the heist but it was still an overall very positive experience, and I look forward to more roleplaying.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 01:42 pm (UTC)Thank you :)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 02:01 pm (UTC)*lightbulb*
Wow that sounds like a great approach! Thank you for sharing your process. And I am so glad you had a good time!
no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 06:22 am (UTC)Glad to pass the idea on :) Two podcasts of people roleplaying I have encountered which push this in interesting but very different ways are Friends at the Table (serious storytelling with a tendency towards the tragic) and The Dragon Friends (silly and sometimes questionable humour)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 03:04 pm (UTC)Thank you :)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 06:19 am (UTC)Yes, listening to The Adventure Zone and other podcasts like that helped give me a good grounding in What RolePlaying Is And Can Be to get started with.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-12 04:11 pm (UTC)Yeah there's some rough moments, especially early on. But they are definitely willing and able to make fools of themselves :)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 06:17 am (UTC)Ha, thank you, I will bear that in mind :)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-25 05:01 am (UTC)Do you think you'd negotiate for a shorter session next time, even if it leaves the point hanging a bit more?
no subject
Date: 2018-07-12 04:07 pm (UTC)I'm going to see how I do now it's not so new and scary, but yeah if I have to will ask for shorter sessions.