The Blog of Roon

In this week’s Game WISH, we are to talk about three sorts of props and why we use them.

Well, the obvious example is miniatures. I’m not a painter, so I don’t get the ego-boo from artistic endeavor that the painters do. I do appreciate the use of minis in game play, however. Cuts down on arguments over combat tactics. (“You sure you want to do that? Five attacks of opportunity coming at you, look at the board.”) It seems less important in other games (e.g. Ars Magica) than in D&D, which is heavily spatial—you need to know where that lightning bolt went. I could be wrong about this, however; it may be simply a question of the amount of combat in a particular campaign.

I like GMs who use props to create setting and character. This can be as simple as pictures from travel magazines, or as elaborate as elaborate costumes (which, I hasten to say, no GM I’ve had has ever tried). Music can be a prop, properly chosen. A well-drawn map. There’s no need for the GM to rely on voice alone.

As for my own characters—I can get myself in trouble with props. Afletana undertook not to speak (except to pray) until a certain condition had been fulfilled. I had thought that achieving fulfillment of the condition would be easier than has proven the case; she’s still silent. I had been using a dry-erase board to represent her slate and chalk (I looked all summer at yardsales for a proper chalkboard and could not find one).

That did not work out well: too slow. Afletana with her elf-lady’s upbringing could write well; in fact, I rather imagined her trained in several different scribal hands (elves live long enough to survive a good many lettering fashions), and used that to some effect in writing about her. Unfortunately, a key feature of her training and medieval literacy in general is use of abbreviations. Afletana, in other words, could write a great deal faster than I, her player, could. This got to be a problem in live play.

How did I solve it? Pure bloody anachronism, that’s how. I brought my laptop to game sessions, located an appropriate not-quite-uncial freeware font, and typed into my text editor. Worked not half badly.

Even so, when that campaign gets going again I think I am going to have her pray to be released from her promise. All this is just awkward enough to need to end. (Plus, a bit of worthwhile drama, I think—the rest of the party is very accustomed to her silence. I look forward to them finding out how much she has to say.)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 14th, 2002 at 8:50 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.