By Kerey McKenna.
As I covered in Part 1, Role Playing Game (RPG) books contain a treasure trove of lore, inspiration, and game mechanics to weave elaborate games and stories for a small group of participants. Considering that spectating other people’s RPG sessions via podcast or vlog has recently become very popular, the stories created in these gaming sessions are entertaining increasingly larger groups of people. However that’s a bit beside the point since my goal was to entertain myself and a small group of friends via web conference while we all remain indoors. Games in which we remain indoors are going to be what we are all going to be playing for a while.
I put out a call to other people who would be interested in playing and got responses from my two friends Melissa and David. Before the game session proper, we had a quick meeting via video conference to brainstorm a bit about what kind of adventurers their characters would be and how those strengths, weaknesses, and eccentricities would be expressed mechanically in the game system.
Melissa wanted to play a steampunk gadgeteer who had a bit of “Weird West” flavor to them. After spitballing some ideas, we came up with Hazel, a character that was exploring the world looking for the entrance to the “Hollow Earth,” a notion that reputable scientists in this world scoff at even though it would fit right in with their pulp-inspired universe. She is quite adept at both engineering and target shooting, so much so that when she lost a hand in an accident she incorporated a hidden revolver into the prosthesis. She also carries with her a bulletproof umbrella of her own design.
David seized upon the idea of making a character like Tarzan or Mowgli, a lost child raised in the jungle by animal guardians...but he wanted his feral foster parents to be sillier than apes or wolves. After kicking around some ideas around like Canadian beavers or Australian kangaroos, we decided that his character Reginald was an orphaned aristocrat raised by a flock of previously undiscovered extant giant terror birds. Brought back to civilization, the lost aristocrat becomes a popular curiosity among the upper crust and now he seeks to go to Mars to fly higher than either his human or his bird parents ever did.
Part of character creation was then giving numerical weight to the characters attributes. I don’t want to get too into the weeds on the mechanics of this but for those that are interested I used the Savage Worlds RPG system. To make a long story short, when a character wants to do something in the world, aim and fire a weapon, sneak past a guard, or learn the latest rumors going around the underworld, they roll dice to see if they succeed or not. These dice range from a four-sided die all the way up to a twelve-sided die. At character creation, the attributes that make a character, such as their intelligence or their skills like firearms, athletics, and diplomacy are assigned different kinds of dice. Low-sided for their weaknesses or skills they had little to no training in, and larger dice for skills and talents they are stronger in. Hazel the gadgeteer gunslinger had high intelligence and was skilled in abilities like marksmanship and engineering. Reginald the boy raised by giant birds had high number dice in skills like martial arts, athleticism, and intimidation but was unskilled in talents from the outside world like engineering or firearms.
The use of dice in RPGs (and especially dice other than six-sided dice) came about from a tradition of elaborate tabletop war games. Success or failure by roll of dice simulated the chaos of the battlefield: that sometimes strong battalions could fail or an underdog militia could have their day. To perform an action in this particular gaming system, say repairing a malfunctioning steam engine, characters are trying to roll a four or higher using their pertinent die. Hazel the mechanic with her eight-sided die in repair/engineering has a five out of eight chance of rolling that four or higher so the odds are in her favor. However she could roll a one to three, representing that the solution escapes her at this time, or she had dropped a tool and thus cannot fix the issue right now and must try again with a new roll on her next turn. Meanwhile Reginald, who knows nothing of machinery, would only be able to roll a lowly four-sided die with its paltry one in four chance of success. If he does roll that four, it appears that Reginald’s solution, giving the machine a good hard kick, brings the steam engine sputtering back to life by pure dumb luck.
While my players would be adventurers, I would be assuming the role of running the game as the Game Master or “GM.” Depending on what system or game you are using, the GM may be called anything from the Director, Storyteller, Umpire, or, in reference to Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Master (DM for short). That last one always sounded a bit too kinky for me to use personally but it’s pretty ubiquitous to the hobby at this point. The GM’s ultimate purpose mechanically is to present the players with a challenging scenario for them to have adventures in. Then, under this overarching goal, are various sub-duties and skills. The GM creates the starting point of the story or uses a story from the RPG book. The GM is then responsible for narrating what happens in the world, what the characters see, hear, smell, and touch, etc., and how their actions affect the world. The GM manages and interprets the game rules from the book and makes rulings on how the characters can get their desired outcomes. The GM also role plays other characters that the players interact with, friends, foes, monsters, random bystanders, shop keepers, etc. (These “non player characters” are referred to as NPCs). Finally the GM is making dice rolls on behalf of those NPCs as they interact with and even oppose the players.
For my game I had decided to run a short adventure of my own instead of a scenario directly from the game book. The premise was based on something I had half remembered from a chapter in a pulp adventure novel I read as a teen: the heroes would be trapped by a villain on a private train. The villain is playing their own version of The Deadliest Game, and each car of the train contains some obstacle or puzzle the heroes must overcome to get to the next car. I also set this up as a bit of meta humor because in gaming circles when a GM isn’t giving their players enough options or agency in the adventure they are said to be “railroading” the campaign. To further hang a lampshade on this I made the villain of the adventure, Dameian Mountebank, “DM” and gave him the characteristics and affectations of a bad micromanaging Dungeon Master crossed with Snidely Whiplash.
Of course if there is a danger of Game Masters railroading their players there is the opposite issue of players derailing or at the very least complicating the story by accident or design. For example, one of my players, David, was once the Dungeon Master in a game of Dungeons & Dragons in which I was a player. During part of the story, our characters were trekking through the wilderness and came upon an apparently abandoned small village. David had put that village there and if we had searched it our characters would have discovered clues that would be helpful later in the adventure. But I insisted that the party ignore the village and keep going to a larger settlement so we would be sure to get to the safety of high walls before nightfall and the rest of the players agreed. This then put David in the awkward position of either allowing us to continue, possibly without crucial information, or having to contrive other ways for us to discover it later. I have never lived this down.
But player improvisation, like the story beats created by the random dice rolls, is what makes this format of storytelling and gaming so unique. For example Dave and Melissa started changing my campaign, for the better, during character creation. I had originally envisioned my scenario as a simple introductory adventure that characters with no prior relationship to each other could be dropped into and then become a group. To maintain that surprise, during character creation I did not tell my players anything about the scenario their characters would be facing. As Melissa, Dave, and I brainstormed their characters, completely unprompted, the others started coming up with reasons why a gunslinger gadgeteer would be hanging around a feral aristocrat fostered by giant birds. Together, on the fly, they came up with a sort of prologue where Hazel had gone on an expedition to Reginald’s jungle island, reasoning that reports of wildlife thought extinct would lead her to the Hollow Earth where they would presumably have taken shelter from the great extinction eons ago. Reginald, impressed by Hazel’s ability to bring down large game with her firearms, agreed to reclaim his human family name and return to civilization. Now Hazel serves as a minder to Reginald as he re-integrates into human society and hopes that his notoriety will help fund further expeditions to prove that Earth and Mars contain vast underground habitats capable of sustaining humanoid life.
Now with the heroes created, we agreed to meet via webconference the following week to play through my scenario. And just how did the heroes fair against this dastardly murder train? Did my skills as a Game Master meet the satisfaction of veteran RPG hobbyists? What happens when man raised by birds encounters flash photography for the first time? For those answers and more, stay tuned to Nerds Who Read, for the final installment.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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Photo Source(s): Stargazer’s World
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