• Critical Hit to the Chest

  What makes a good roleplaying experience?

  written by Alex Woitalla, 28.11.08

  or many years I have played roleplaying games. Sitting on both sides of the table, as game master and as player I did most genres. Fantasy, science-fiction, superheroes, cyberpunk, comedy, cthulhoid... With my current Cthulhu campaign racing towards its climax and Dark Heresy hitting the shelves at last, I really wonder what makes a good roleplaying experience. Is it the game system? May it be the plot? The cunning of the gamers? The ruthlessness of the game master? To be perfectly honest, after all those years in the games I still do not know. But there are promising leads that point out, that it is not a single factor to have a great game, but a combination of many.

  If you ever have the joy of introducing the hobby of roleplaying to complete newbies, grasp that chance and make the best of it. I once started the “Enemy Within” campaign with two friends, playing along for a whole day and night, just to finish the first part “Mistaken Identity”. More friends joined us and soon we had a great fellowship of enthusiasts, coming together in a weekly basis, going through heights and depths of the campaign, finishing it as Heroes of the Empire. By the way, Olli, co-editor of this glorious blog, was one of them. One of the most important factors is the players. They are the brains that make it all happen. Everything you as a game master consider as your ideas will be manifested in the imagination of your players. Keep that in mind. You as game master are the one giving cues and providing them with a general red line which is known as plot. So if you think about opening a new group to play a long term campaign, be sure about your players, start with few players and invite more, when you are sure about the direction your new group is taking.

  But what to play? Which system? What about the rules? Basically the rules are nothing more than a contract between the players to avoid misunderstanding and potential disharmony. A good set of rules should be easy so comprehend, support a swift and light gameplay and provide you with about ten to twenty rules of thumb to cope with most situation the players might encounter. Those systems are not easy to find and every group that I played with I the last twenty years had a backup of several house rules, set up as a supplementary to the original. You can’t just go without them. Always good for a laugh, for example… the 666 rule. If any player rolles a 66 on a D100, another D6 or D10 is rolled. If it shows an additional six, it is at the game master discretion to come up with some evil, ugly, messy, horrible or even mind blowing feature, which of cause should always be connected to the situation. What system is best for you to use is your decision. A lot of people like the Warhammer Rules, because they are build on a basis of about five basic rules. Easy to remember, they are. Rolemaster is tough at the first glance, but proves to be rock steady in the course of the game. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is a classic with a gazillion settings and derivatives. Worth a try, for sure. Call of Cthulhu is provided with a rudimentary set of rules, a lot of glitches and plenty of room for your own rules. I you like the Lovecraftian style,go for it.

  Keep in mind, that character creation can be tedious as well. If you are playing with new players, don’t scare them off with an hour long creation process. Those can be found at Rolemaster, for example. The creation of a character should not take any longer than twenty minutes, maybe thirty, if you are creating the whole group at once. Anything longer is bullshit in my humble opinion and points out, that there is something wrong with the system you are going to play.

  When I mastered Palladiums “Tombs of Gersidi” for the first time, it was my first experience as a game master, and I screwed it. Thinking about it, I came up with the result that I just had the wrong attitude to the game and to the players. What is it that makes the game fun? Good roleplay. How do you encourage good roleplay? Give as much room to the players as possible to actually play their role. All of them need some spotlight-time. Don’t be a fool and try to wipe out the players at any given opportunity. Roleplaying always is a giving and taking of ideas, hooks, clues, laughs, anger and at its best results in stories, buried so deeply in your players minds, that they are retold even years after they actually happened, like songs about your players deeds, sung by bards in taverns and inns. If you have that in your group, you are half done having a good roleplaying experience. The key to it is just relaxing and having fun. If you get over-ambitious, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. The complete opposite to a relaxed roleplaying experience is the power gamer. This species is absolutely not endangered and can take possession of good friends you never expected to be power games. First thing they do after joining the group is buying the basic rulebook and at least two supplements for their specific character class.  They know the rules by hard after two sessions and do not hesitate to show this every five minutes. Spreadsheets are their favourite tool, and the character-development is laid out precisely for the first ten levels, which incorporates at least three years of weekly playing. It is not easy to deal with power games, as they tend to ruin the whole “fun approach” for the rest of the group. When I’m doing roleplay, I’m sacrificing a whole lot of time to it and I want to get the most fun of it. And I will not spend my time with discussions about rules and whacky-talk about the best way to level up perfectly. Power gamers, in my opinion, have to leave, if they are not willing to adapt to the “hang loose” style I prefer. I think you get the point.

  Another killer is the location. Can you image sitting around the kitchen table, neon-lights on and having a good time? No way. Make yourselves as comfortable as possible, dim the lights, provide them with candles. Prepare some food or make your players to bring some munchies. An important factor is music. It really helps getting into it. I came up with my iPod, sporting several play lists, themed “idle”, “suspense” and “battle”. From time to time there are even “special events” that deserve to be set into music. Try to gather movie soundtracks. Their sheer cheesiness is perfect for roleplay and giving it a fake-movie-mood. Have an intro to be played at every session, a particular heroic piece, something eerie, which is easily recognisable. Don’t herald it with “Ok, guys. Here’s the intro. Time to settle down and shove it!” Just play the intro. If it is well-chosen, your friends will feel the connection.

  These are just a few thoughts on how to make the best of your role as a game master. Other folks have written tons of stuff about it, so I’ll stop here. If you have any other ideas, let me know.

  With Dark Heresy in my hands I came up a big question. How can proper roleplay be realized in the 40k universe? It is a brutal place, where the lowest of the scum will never have any chance to work his way up to become the shiny hero, which is the final goal of all roleplaying, right? A good roleplaying campaign should start in a very local area, with the characters being just anything, but no heroes. Slowly but steadily a plot of treachery, backstabbing and foulness makes its course along well chosen waypoints, mini-climaxes as you might say, to cumulate in a gigantic showdown that might even chance history itself. “The Enemy Within” did that quite good, as every new part of it is a dedicated adventure that can be connected to the greater whole. “The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep” is epic, world-spanning and incredibly well written, both in plot and background information. It is a character spoiler, in case you play the standard rules, but that again collides with my style of roleplay. So we modified the rules a bit and we have a great campaign with true heroes evolving from it. Their minds are cracked and they end up in the Arkham Sanatorium, but it is great fun for everyone.

  To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if the original Dark Heresy can provide this. As far as I read the recommended setting, you are a bunch of henchmen to the Inquisition, who are given quests by an obscure Inquisitor. Isn’t this a little bit generic? Can’t there be a better way to rise through the ranks from scumbag to Space Marine? What is your motivation to jump back into hell again and again? Just to please your master? I don’t know. There has to be something better, a proper plot that incorporates eating shit at the beginning and getting more proficient over time until you reach a level of boasting self-confidence and bio-tech enhanced muscles that only Horus himself could take you on. I think it is really just a matter of good story telling to provide this, instead of hiding behind the limitations of the in-game setting to the commoner and publishing some quick and dirty mini-adventures. We will see how Fantasy Flight Games will take on this huge task.

  Me and some friends already did quite an epic 40k roleplaying campaign, years before Dark Heresy was conceived, with a stunning plot, enough room to travel the galaxy, giving the players the opportunity to see everything that can be described as the essence of the 40k universe, but still being the average scumbag. How did we do this? Well, this is another story and I’ll tell it in some later posts, so stay tuned.
  

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