The Blog of Roon

Having fallen behind on Game WISHes, I’ll tackle a couple at once.

No, I’ve never played in a co-GMed game, though I certainly wouldn’t turn one down. (Well, okay, there was the one one-off in which a co-GM handled some of the cannon fodder, but that doesn’t really count.)

There are advantages to it. Roleplaying, particularly face-to-face, has the same problem as Greek tragedy—too many damn people on stage at once. Splitting the GM duties allows for more small-group and individual scenes.

Truth is, I’d like to be a co-GM. I’m not really cut out to be a good soloist, I don’t think. I’m not quick on the draw, not a good world-builder, not a good plotter, assuredly not a patient referee. What I do do, though, are the chores that GMs often profess not to like: creating, naming, and keeping track of NPCs; playing minor encounters with a fillip of added flair; chronicling and similar recordkeeping. And I like knowing the shape of the plot beforehand, something that is my besetting sin as a player, but lets a co-GM add all kinds of fun foreshadowing and omens and things.

I don’t get greedy over somebody else’s world or plot—I can generally be trusted to stay within bounds, though I do like to fill in details of language and social custom and so on, and I might get upset if that privilege were denied me.

Well, we’ll see, I suppose.

The next question is non-RPGs for gamers. Shan’t be original here; not worth the effort.

Munchkin. Excruciatingly bad puns. Highly weird combinations of stuff. Quick game play. Amusing treachery. Lots of John Kovalic art. I need say no more.

Illuminati. Take over the world!

Settlers of Catan. Easy to learn, but very strategic; a fine choice for a mixed group of roleplayers and non-.

Oh, and a bonus game: Apples to Apples. I have never played a game of this that failed to reduce me to tears of helpless laughter. It is that good.

The GM of Enclaves has gotten Delphine integrated into the action. Me being me, Delphine just dropped a bomb that the rest of the room is going to have a bit of difficulty responding to.

Delphine, as I believe I have remarked before, isn’t Tamasi, though I suspect she rather resembles a younger Tamasi, before Tamasi’s dreadful in-laws wore her down. She is less guarded, more open, gentler.

No less smart, though, certainly no less proud, and in her way no less fatalistic. Caught between the proverbial rock and hard place—sacrifice herself for whatever she’ll bring, or risk bringing her lover and his realm to ruin when They come and take her—she is proffering the only reasonable choice.

The rest of the room hasn’t answered yet…

Mel’s Enclaves game has a separate mailing list in which the characters hang out together in a completely non-game setting (at the moment, a ritzy dinner party). Goofball interactions, one-liners, you know.

She was kind enough to pull us up to the door of the restaurant in a limo and give us a flashy intro, so I went ahead and pulled out all the stops on Delphine’s entrance. (Well, all the ones I could pull without giving a few too many things away. I did drop hints. I always drop hints.)

The reaction was… most satisfactory. I am still grinning.

To be fair, Delphine is visually… unusual, as I explained earlier, which gives plenty of scope for messing with people’s heads. But it was still fun.

Oh, and… he took her up on it, yes he did.

First they murdered her household. Then they tried to kill her. Then they threw her into the shore-tide like a bit of flotsam, thinking they’d succeeded. Then the sharks came. Then she was rescued by a smokin’-hot young merman with a handy pod of dolphins (!).

Delphine kinda had a rough first day…

I like her, though. I like where she’s going. Given my history, I perhaps shouldn’t, but I do nonetheless.

Delphine is, as Tamasi was not, stunningly beautiful. It’s practically part of the setting. This is Amber, after all—all the women are stunningly beautiful and (almost) all the men are smokin’ hot. Something in the water, one presumes. Possibly because the GM and several players are female, I find my usual resistance to physical pulchritude in my characters much lessened. I suppose it’s that I can trust these folks to treat Delphine as more than a pretty face.

Me being me, though, I gotta be subversive somehow. I borrowed the body-art notion from Passions of the Tide; Delphine is quite covered in scarifications, face to waist. What the other characters think of this should prove interesting. Likewise Delphine’s utter lack of a nudity taboo. I mean, merfolk, clothes, why? Especially since, like Tamasi, Delphine is bioluminescent. So “dressing for dinner” means turning on the light-show, you know? And clothes would only get in the way.

Again, I can’t quite see myself doing this in a male-controlled game. This game, I think it’ll work. Most games, it wouldn’t.

She just made a small but unmistakable pass at her rescuer. Talk about things I normally wouldn’t do in a game… but it doesn’t bother me one whit. And I do hope he takes her up on it.

Well, phew. That’ll do for now. As long as the NCSU people don’t use IE5.

So now I can talk about stories. Stories are lovely things. Collective stories, when they work, are lovelier still.

Making them work is not easy. I don’t think it’s coincidence that most of the better fluff—in a literary, this-story-hangs-together sense—that have come out of my games have come from smaller games, or from side-avenues the main game never explored. It’s just downright hard to pull a story together when six or eight people are dragging it in different directions.

How to do it, then? Awareness, I suppose. Building a character who is incomplete, unfinished, to begin with, someone who has someplace to go and a better self to grow into. Ensuring that that character leans on the others to cover what she lacks, and allows herself in turn to be leaned on. Seeing the shape of the larger story, and helping that shape emerge.

Because the GM controls the world and many of the events in it, the GM is often thought to be uniquely responsible for the story-ness of a campaign. This is, of course, an overstatement. The GM can ruin a story, to be sure, dropping threads or keeping a campaign relentlessly episodic. Players can ruin it too, though, and all too often they do so by advancing their own character at the expense of everyone and everything else. The story that comes from an RPG must be collective, or it will not be a story at all.

The resulting stories don’t usually have the nice, neat structures that lit-critters love. They’re more like Arabian Nights confections, tall towers of untruth with weird spiral staircases within and without, resting on shaky foundations. They are, however, no less enjoyable for that.

I have been handed a lovely opportunity to reclaim what I liked best about Tamasi, despite the rough and abrupt end to her campaign.

The new character will become part of Ask Not of Amber: The Enclaves, run by the same GM as Galactic Renaissance, who kindly invited me to join and is putting up with a rather unusual character with uncommon grace.

Delphine du Vallonarete is not Tamasi, but she shares quite a bit of what made Tamasi intriguing. Fatalism, distrust mantled in propriety, noblesse oblige, managerial efficacy, a hidden talent or two, a bad marriage started too young that ended when her husband’s life ended.

And, of course, the whole merwoman thing.

Tamasi was (so to speak) out of her depth, a deep-mer in the shallows. Delphine will have to navigate an even harsher transition: she will become a fish out of water, a sea-creature who will have to live on land. I don’t plan to make it easy for her.

I just sent off a rather sanguinary intro to the GM for approval. This should be fun…