DMing with Charisma

Who would be on your dream team of people you used to game with?

The people from the last legs of the Great Tower of Oldechi were pretty close to an ideal gaming group. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen six players interact that well for that long and have that much fun doing it. We had a party who leaned incredibly evil, in a railroad-heavy campaign, in a setting with few if any long-term consequences, in a system that put handcuffs on almost every aspect of play, and they still knocked it out of the park for months without an ounce of complaint or table drama.

That said, I am happy with both of my current groups. Perhaps I could cherry-pick from those and the Tower group and form a perfect gaming Justice League. But that doesn’t always work. Again, gaming is a social hobby, and the society at the table was perhaps the best thing about it. I can’t say “removing Cid’s player and replacing him with somebody else would make the group better” because the consequences are so unknowable as to make the thought experiment meaningless. I can only say “I’m certain this group is great, because I’ve seen them play”.

What makes a successful campaign?

Everybody had fun. That’s it. My most successful campaigns were fun throughout, and my least successful were ones where either I felt the players weren’t having fun or I didn’t have fun myself. The same goes when I’m a player.

Of course, I prefer having a good story arc through the campaign. And I like it when the good guys win in the end, whether or not I’m one of them. And I like it when it’s clever, so we’re not just going through the motions while throwing jokes at the setting, but not so clever that it’s just an excuse for the DM to prove his or her intellectual superiority. And I prefer a consistent group of characters so we can see them interact and grow over time. But all this is secondary. I’d rather have a monster-of-the-week, cliché-ridden, saw-it-coming campaign that’s entertaining than a story-driven, smart, keeps-me-guessing campaign I can’t stand.

I guess what I’m trying to say is Sailor Moon is a better campaign than Evangelion. That’s how I’m going to describe it from now on.

What game is your group most likely to play next? Why?

Pathfinder, because I promised them we would. The Zelda campaign ended earlier this month, and that group is taking a break for a month and coming back to the next chapter in the Eight Arms universe. It’s a campaign I wanted to run a few years ago, but I was burnt out enough that I moved it back and switched to the relative simplicity of 4E.

After that? It depends. I have three or four campaigns I want to run in two or three systems. It’s a matter of what my players have patience for. Are they willing to try a system none of us have ever done, like BESM? Do they want something less crunchy, like Fate or an Apocalypse game? Are they too enamored with that surprisingly meta “the players are magicless characters fighting off the inevitable tide of high-magic play” idea that really needs a system like D&D? I’m not sure what we’ll be excited about the next time my turn rolls around.

Do you prefer hardcover, softcover, or electronic books? What are the benefits of your preference?

I like hardcover the most for its tactile properties and the satisfaction I get seeing it on my shelf. A thick softcover can serve the same purpose, though most of the softcovers I have are shorter, flimsier books that have a hard time staying open on a page. But as I get more books, I find myself gravitating more to electronic copies. In my earlier campaigns I made sure to bring every book I would need for a session, which meant I was limited by the number of books I could carry to our FLGS and how many I could fit on the table at once. Electronic copies remove that limit.

I think the biggest advantage of electronic over physical is searching, especially multi-book searching. I don’t have to review five tables of contents to find out which Monster Manual has the moonrat (it is, of course, Monster Manual 2: the Book of Goofy Ideas), and I can quickly find everything that deals lightning damage if I’m looking for something that fits my theme. But I don’t have a PDF reader that allows easy tabbing, and rulebooks are all but designed to have you flipping back and forth between pages at the opposite ends of the book to understand something. Until I have a program that lets me view PDFs, see my table of contents and bookmarks at the same time, and split my view so I can see two pages at once, a physical copy is just more convenient when I’m doing a deep dive.

What aspect of Roleplaying Games has had the biggest effect on you?

Probably the community aspect. I got into tabletop gaming when I went to college, where the only person I knew on campus was a roommate I barely knew from high school. Joining the campus gaming club introduced me to the local gaming store, and between them I had social circles that still stand. Those friends were pretty key in keeping me sane enough to finish school, which was responsible for my current job, and giving me a reason to move to the town where I currently live. Cooperative tabletop gaming probably affected every part of my life aside from my family.

Contrast that with online gaming, where I don’t still talk to a single person I met via MMO. I’m not exactly sure why that is. It may be because an MMO is a single entity; when a campaign ends you can run another with the same or different people in the same or a different place, but when you stop playing an online game you leave the entire community behind. It may be because online gaming is mostly antagonistic, even if it’s against a computer opponent, so there’s less focus on the society of the table and more focus on who’s pulling their weight. It may be because of the limiting factors behind having a pre-built game, which gives us less room for contributing to it and thus less of that personal expression necessary for building a rapport as friends. It’s probably a combination of this and other things. Suffice it to say that while I cut my teeth on video gaming and I still play games online, they haven’t touched my day-to-day life nearly as much as tabletop has.

What is the most amazing thing that you know a game group has done for their community?

Our game groups tend not to interact much with the community outside of the game store we frequent. “Helping local stores, especially restaurants, stay in business” is a pretty lame answer. But there is the brick.

One of my early games as a player was a Mage: the Awakening campaign in college. Since we were all young and hilarious, our mismatched group of characters decided to express our irreverence by forming a cabal of professional pranksters, using magic to sneak into places and play tricks on people who deserved it. The campaign continued for some time after I left, and the Warriors of Inconvenience had a great many adventures I’ve only sort of heard about after the fact.

Around the end of the campaign, an adjacent section of campus underwent renovation. To help with costs the school sold bricks, which they would inscribe with whatever donors wanted. The group pooled their money and paid for one, so this stands as an eternal testament to both their strong desire to help their school and their strong desire to confuse anybody who happens by:

I don’t get to name enough pictures things like “warrior_brick.jpg”.

What story does your group of players tell about your character?

We don’t have that many stories about me as a player. Usually we tell stories about my NPCs like the Warden, one of my most successful attempts at building dread, or Pechora, the goldfish with the memory of a goldfish. My player stories are usually about how miserable my luck is, like when an enemy paralyzes me for the entire fight during a surprise round, a controller deals exactly one hundred damage to me with a critical hit, or I miss with every single attack during a pitched final battle (coincidentally, those were all in the same campaign). It’s gotten so bad that unofficially I’m allowed to roll 5d6 and drop the two lowest whenever we build characters.

The most persistent story relates to one of my first sessions in a Mage: the Awakening campaign. I was playing a vapid pop star, and I found myself in a limo with an NPC who I think was my manager and also a vampire, or something. I had occasion to make a phone call to somebody, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I roll to dial the phone.
DM: You really don’t have to—
Me: Too late, already rolling. *clatter clatter*. That’s…one success and two ones. So that’s a botch.
DM: Uh—
Me: *mimes picking up a phone* Hi! Yeah. Yeah…okay. *hands phone to DM* It’s for you.
DM: *takes phone* Hello? Yeah…I know… *closes eyes, shakes head* I know. *hangs up*

Contrast that with another player, who rolled to press an elevator button and had raucous success. The GM ruled he “pressed the button just enough to activate it, but not so much that it stresses the spring”. That group in particular, whom I’ll discuss a little more tomorrow, had and still has a bevy of hilarious results from critical success and failure.