Renate von Adler
I played my first session of Dragonhunt yesterday. Much fun was had by me, though can’t speak for the DM. He says logs will eventually be posted; I’ll point to them from CavLec when they are. (Just in case you really can’t get enough of my fluff—ha!)
It’s funny how Game WISHes have colored my gaming: I noticed right away when Renate picked up a verbal tic. It was “Oh. Damn.” Which says something about how catastrophic events were for her.
(Actually, reading over the logs, “Oh.” might be closer—it seems to be what she says when she actively reconfigures her mental gears to accept a new bit of information.)
This is the first character I’ve played who is significantly younger than I am, in both chronological age and general life experience. Renate’s sixteen, and she’s utterly callow. Smart and skilled, but callow. I don’t think I personally was ever that callow (close, but not quite), but Renate’s life has heretofore been rather more sheltered, and her family considerably more whole, than mine.
It’s kinda out of my experience, though I have a few friends from my teenage years I’m drawing from. I have to be careful not to overdo it, if in fact I haven’t already. But I like Renate; for all her clothes-horsery and teenage histrionics, she’s a likable kid, affectionate and loyal.
The brief summary: Renate is second child of the baron of a postage-stamp-sized barony. He has excessively high expectations of her older brother the heir, who in yesterday’s session skipped town to avoid being formally named heir presumptive. Renate has gone off to find him, and along the way retrieve three heirlooms stolen from the family a little while back.
She drove an interesting and rather direct bargain with her father: if she finds the swag, he has to lay off her brother. Ah, the fairy-tale expectations of youth.
I’m hoping to use Renate to explore questions of class-based privilege, if opportunity arises. I want to see how she manages to learn how rare and fortunate an upbringing like hers is, and what she does differently once she figures it out.
Playing by chat turns out to feel considerably different from playing by email or bulletin board. The chief reason is simultaneity, DM and players all typing at once. Conversation tends to advance in lurches, sometimes along multiple tracks (which now that I think about it isn’t too horribly different from real life!), and occasionally a tossed-out gambit gets ignored because it arrives too late and the convo has already moved on.
Also, I can’t indulge in third-person description and thought-elucidation nearly to the extent I do in non-simultaneous games. Probably good for me; I have to use words and physical actions almost exclusively to characterize—show, don’t tell.
The setting is such that I feel okay sticking with a largely contemporary, naturalistic voice. Besides, it’s good contrast: Renate’s retainer is a shadow of the inimitable Jeeves, so her scatterbrained blather makes his precision stand out, different though she unquestionably is from the inimitable Bertie Wooster.
Looking forward to a fun game!
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