DMing with Charisma

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.

What is the most impressive thing that you can remember another player’s character doing in a session?

In terms of raw spectacle, there was that time the blackguard climbed an ice-covered pole, holding a pig between her legs, so she could get the drop on an unkillable bug monster. But that’s really only impressive because she succeeded. If instead she’d just falled limply to the ground and gotten trampled, that wouldn’t have been a good story. I’m reluctant to give such an award to luck.

Instead, let me tell you about Slogg Sexipants. He performed the occasional task that only succeeded because he was a half-ton cleric, but his size also wasn’t what was impressive. What I really liked about him was that his AC was 7. This was an 8th-level character with no armor, a Dexterity of 6, and a Large size category. I think the player’s thought process was something like “Well, my AC’s going to be low. If I get full plate and magic items, then I can take huge mobility penalties and spend a lot of money to get my AC up to 21 or so, but at this level that’s functionally the same as AC 7. And the character I envisioned doesn’t have armor anyway. Instead I think I’ll just max out Constitution and tank hits with sheer mass.”

Not only was this an impressive dedication to character over mechanics, it freed him up to move over the battlefield with impunity. He assumed every attack was a hit and lived life accordingly, never worrying about what the attack roll actually was. This was also in an edition where healing occurred in raw hit points, not as a percentage of total, so it took a lot of his own healing to keep him running. But in exchange he got a massive character for a campaign about fighting massive monsters, and he finally got to break out the character voice he’d wanted to use for something like ten years. I can’t think of much more impressive than the tangible sacrifice he accepted and the intangible reward he got for it.

What is something you have done with your game character that you are the proudest of?

In the One Piece campaign, I played a masked ninja-like character whose power was that nine spirits lived inside him. They gave him powers and he could control them to a degree, but the cost was that after every rest a random spirit would take control of his body. It changed his personality, skills, and resistances, often to something that wasn’t mechanically optimal (switching to the spirit with +5 to Intimidate was great, except when another member of the party had a higher modifier even after my bonus) or narratively wise (and I insisted on intimidating everything, all the time, no matter who it was or what I wanted to accomplish). As a character and as an intentional counter to new-character syndrome, I was pretty proud of that.

For an individual moment with that character, the party got into a fight on a navy base. A captain had accosted us in an otherwise unpopulated control room with large windows, and we needed to end the fight without killing her. Once we realized she wasn’t going to stop attacking us, we focused on a way to get out. Around that time:

Me: So these are giant windows, right? There doesn’t seem to be anything special about them?
DM: Not as far as you can tell.
Me: And I’m closer to the captain than anybody else. The rest of the party is behind me.
DM: Yeah.
Me: Which means I’m facing away from them.
DM: …Yeah?
Me: I take off my mask.

I didn’t do anything spectacular. I just used an at-will attack that dealt sonic damage, one I’d had since character creation but had never used because it only worked in melee. But because I’d never done it before, the table reacted as though I was removing a seal and I was about to unleash something devastating. The character’s intentionally vague backstory, the layout of the battle, and my known predilection for giving my characters a rarely-used second or third gear, combined with a group of players receptive to all three, turned a mundane attack into a huge emotional payoff.

I did destroy the window. Getting the captain through it was another story.