Dice Were Rolled

This past Sunday the gaming group I play in (not the one I GM) got together after a hiatus of...well, I can’t remember exactly. A long time, at any rate.

Again the party stayed one step ahead of the law, getting a wrongly accused noblewoman (strong on giving orders, weak on helping out) to another city where she had a safe-house. What are our motivations here? If we were after money, a detour through a dungeon solved that problem. Loyalty to the noblewoman’s cause? Doubtful--at least for the thorough-going rogues among us.

I suppose, our motive was: adventure! And that we got--though sometimes in a Keystone cop kind of fashion, admittedly.

A few highlights: A brawl on a train with Agnar (our fighter) bluffing a mercenary with a ridiculous tale, just as my artificer was blasting another mercenary in the face with a Melf’s Acid Arrow, only a few feet away. A Warforged monk dropping from above unto two mercenaries with a cry of “Moon Knight style!” Discussion of how formal wear could be modified to hide weapons, and a female halfling thief complaining about wearing a dress. Bargain-hunting for weapon and armor upgrades in the city.  A foiled assassination attempt in a burning ballroom.

A few times during the gaming I found myself thinking about all the theoretical discussion that goes on in the blogosphere and forums about how things "should" be done, and measuring the conduct of our game against those various, often well-argued ideals. 

Ultimately, none of those concerns, interesting though they are, really mattered--not in the moment and at the table. No one was confused about our goal--enjoyment in the context of a game--and GM and player’s were of one mind in that regard. Dice were rolled and--whether an action succeeded or failed--everybody won.

You Never Forget Your First...Dragon

“My first adventure and I get a dungeon AND a dragon?”
- Chad, 2011

Yesterday, a group I’m gaming with reconvened after a holiday season hiatus. My friend Chris is GM of a Pathfinder game set in Eberron. Last time, our intrepid band, trying to find a way through a ruined castle built inside a gigantic cave, freed a fighter (a new player, our friend Chad) who had been held captive by performance-enhanced goblins working for some mysterious big bad. Agnar (as he named himself) quickly showed us what kind of fighter he was going to be, by rushing heedlessly unto an alchemical laboratory (from which several goblins had been attacking us from cover), killing a goblin alchemist, destroying a shelf full of potions, and setting the room ablaze.

That was Chad’s first ever rpg session. Yesterday was his second...and he killed a red dragon.

True, she was a weakened thing, and hobbled by some magical chains of some sort (how weakened, and hobbled in what way, remains mysterious), but she was still a dragon, and with her special goblin entourage, could have easily done us all in. With a little bit of tactical planning, a bit of luck--and no small measure of daring--we triumphed.

It’s been enjoyable to sit back and play instead of game-mastering, but what’s been most fun is seeing a new guy get into gaming. I should say Chad just isn’t a guy who’s never gamed before--he’s a guy who’s been actively disdainful of gamers, thanks to the customers he had to deal with back when he worked at a comic book store. To see the unbridled fun of getting scaling walls, taking goblin scalps, and charging a fifteen foot tall dragon with a frost axe turn a hater into a player...now that’s entertainment!

Eberron and Clashing Inspirations

My friend Chris (of Chris's Invincible Super-Blog fame) invited me to play in the new game he's starting up--a Pathfinder campaign in the Eberron setting.

In getting ready for the game, I've been perusing the Eberron Campaign Setting book--something I haven't really looked at since I purchased it in curiosity, because it was the winner of WOTC's setting contest. The introduction has a section on the "Tone of Eberron." I think a lot of the elements mentioned here--the emphasis on "cinematic" action, the blending of pulp and medieval fantasy conventions--go a long way to explaining what the judges at WOTC found appealing about the setting. There's also references to "a thousand shades of gray" and "dark adventure," which seem to suggest moral ambiguity and edginess--things the kids are thought to be into.

What drew my attention in particular is that Eberron's version of the old "Appendix N" are all film references, not literary ones. Nothing wrong with that, in particular. The list of inspirations for my current campaign contains a filmography. What's particular interesting is not that its a list of films, but rather that its a fairly disparate group of films.

I can put Brotherhood of the Wolf, and From Hell together. These are "cinematic" (in the since of visually dynamic) and somewhat "dark" in tone. Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Mummy certainly fit together with over-the-top action and a bit of humor. Maybe Sleepy Hollow and Brotherhood and of the Wolf bridge the cap between those two and From Hell in slightly different ways.

The ones that really have me scratching my head are Name of the Rose, Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon. I can put Name and Maltese together, or Maltese and Casablanca, so maybe by the transitive property I can group the three, but I have a harder time putting them with most of the films above.

I'm sure I'm over-thinking this. I firmly believe that inspirations can have dissonance as well as consonance. But without any explanation, I sort of think these references were slapped together for very superficial reasons without much thought to how one might conceptualize their elements to come up with a coherent "feel" for the setting.

Luckily, I'm not the DM this time, so I don't have to put those things together, and I'm certainly won't deny that there are some cool elements to Eberron, for all that.

And in the end, its gaming--with friends.  And that ain't bad.