RPG a Day: Day 8

After taking a few days off for my birthday and to work on some other projects I’m back to answer another question, and I’ll return with another double tomorrow for the weekend!

Day 8: How can we get more people roleplaying?

I think the biggest hurdle that people have with roleplaying are a some misconceptions, ones that actually kept me from playing till later in life myself.

The first big misconception is that tabletop is only for the most nerdy people, that those who play it are completely anti-social and are portrayed very negatively. Even being a self-proclaimed gamer and geek in high school I thought of D&D and the like as something even too nerdy for me. The perception of this is starting to change as more people take on the hobby, and shows like Stranger Things portray it in a more respectful and less demeaning way.

I also think people don’t understand how freeing it is, how you can essentially do whatever you want, and it’s a great outlet for imagination. A common perception of tabletop is that it is very rigid, and its more like a video game with more math to do. That’s how I saw it for a long time, after I had finally decided to give it a try many years ago and the game I played was a simple dungeon crawl with no real roleplaying or opportunities to make decisions. It wasn’t until about ten years later that I tried again and realized how great it could be, and I could use my skills as an actor and improviser.

All in all I think that making sure people know what the game really is is what will get more players to the table.

RPG a Day: Day 7

Day 7:

How can a GM make the stakes important?

Today I’ll keep things shot.

One thing that has frustrated me when I was a player was feeling that my actions had no real consequences. If I saved residents of a town, only for them to be killed a couple sessions later that destroys the sense of stakes.

That’s why I always make the thing the players do matter, what they do affects them, sometimes negatively, and that gives the world a sense of stakes. Of course if players felt like they could live through any encounter then any real sense of stakes would evaporate. That’s why I will put them into situations that could potentially get a character killed. Sometimes even a near brush with death will have lasting consequences for a player.

Of course you can’t overdo it. If a put your players in life threatening situations and constantly kill them off it has the opposite effect, making nothing matter.

It’s a balance that must be found, but if you find it your players will be wholly invested in your world.

RPG a Day, Day 6

Day 6:

How can players make a world seem real?

As they say, the devil is in the details.

For me a really great tabletop world is a world where someone can ask a question and get an answer. A lot of the time this means having done a lot of worldbuilding, prepwork, and introducing NPCs with a fleshed out backstory. Sometimes however, this means being good at improvising. No matter how prepared a GM is a player will always do something unexpected, and a GM needs to improvise in a way that makes sense in context to the world.

Of course its not just the DM that needs to do this, players bring a lot to the table too, no pun intended. With realistic and developed backstories and relationships they add to the world and make it a more realistic place. For a game with an established lore, such as Star Wars, this can be easier, but more restrictive than a homebrew where the only limit is the imaginations of those at the table.

RPG a Day 2018

So I’m a bit late to the party, but through one of my favorite YouTube channels, Casting Shadows I’ve discovered RPGaDay. This is a community of people and answering questions about their expirences with tabletop roleplaying, for those that don’t know what that means, think Dungeons and Dragons and games like it. I’ve dabbled in this in the past, but over the last few months I’ve really dove headfirst into it, and play once a week, with three rotating games, one with me as a GM, the other two as a player. So without much futher adu I’ll get to answering some of these questions, and since I missed the first few days I’ll start by doing the prompt for both days for this weekend (4 and 5) to kick things off!

Day 4:

What was your most memorable NPC?

For this one I’ll pick an NPC I encountered as a player. This comes from my first campaign, a Final Flight Star Wars game where I play a young man from Naboo who discovers he is force sensitive and goes into hiding, ending up trapped on a mysterious planet. On the planet he met a variety of interesting characters including; the other PCs, pirates, and imperials. These imperials, for the most part weren’t harden Stormtroopers, but security officers on a trade ship, including one officer Lilo.

Lilo started off as a random NPC, introduced alongside a character named Stitch, but he quickly developed into a character caught between his duty and his mortality. He became a complex character and a great ally for the group, but particularly for my PC. He overcame his conflict to overthrow the imperial bosses who were torturing and sacrificing civilians.

After a long drawn out campaign where we finally escaped that terrible planet, and the player characters left divided and on a bitter note (in the game, in real life it was a blast) we all had solo adventures, getting his family off Courasont.

While it has been a while since I’ve seen Lilo we are nearing the end of our second arc and calls have gone out to many old NPC friends, including one I made to Lilo. With any luck he will be rejoining me and my allies to find a lost treasure on a dangerous planet!

Day 5

What is your favorite NPC?

With the questions for this weekend being similar I decided to do the second one from a GM’s perspective, and I want to talk about a character I made that quickly became beloved by my players.

Running a one shot heist the players were betrayed by a sketchy group of ruffians who tried to murder them and take their gold after selling the group some goods. When only one of the ruffians remained he threw up his hands begging for mercy, and I quickly chose a stereotypical 40s mobster voice for him.

He told the party his name, Islos, and they spared his life, in exchange for him working for them, and helping them complete their heist. A bond quickly formed between the players and the lovable scamp, who helped them get out of a few jams. By the end of the session he was essentially a member of the party.

I gave him a full character sheet for the next time we played, when the one shot was a quest to rescue him. The third session however would prove dire for Islos. The players were facing a mysterious wall with a mysterious stone obelisk in the middle deep underground. The only clue of how to move forward was etched on the stone in a long forgotten language. When the evil warlock of the group used iden tify he realized they needed a sacrifice to move forward, and he murdered Islos, which shocked and mortified the group. The other players won’t let him live it down to this day.

Eventually Islos’ body was placed in a tomb alongside the dwarven kings of millennia past, a fitting place for such a noble soul.

Infinity Stones and Dragon Bones- Ep 4.-MCU Fantasy Draft

Some friends get together for an MCU fantasy draft, a special collaboration with Nerd Incorporated and Dstrct6! The rules are simple, each player takes a turn picking one of the thirty MCU properties (movies and shows) until everyone has six picks. At the end we all vote on who ended up with the best movies and shows! 

Who do you think ended up with the best team? Was it the host Derick? How about Nerd Incorporated's Ariel? There are also Alan and Fred from Dstrct6. Last but not least from the bowels of internet fandom is michealshannonfan53.

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Infinity Stones and Dragon Bones: Ep. 3- "Avengers Infinity War"

A movie ten years in the making! For our third episode we're talking about "Avengers Infinity War," spoilers show up about halfway through, before that we talk about which MCU movies are essential, semi-essential, or skippable starting with Iron Man and ending with Black Panther.