I've gamed long enough that I have several memorable gaming sessions, and I've written about one of the negative ones in The Munchkin Book and on this Substack in the past, but I'm going to write about one of my favorite memorable gaming sessions.
I have two great memories. I DM a family DND game. Last year my adult daughter played with us as a guest character and wow, I was blown away with her “acting in character” and how my sister in law riffed off of my daughter’s character. It was one of the few times I was able to sit back and not have to run things. It was so awesome!!! The second good memory, same group, different time, and the teens had been playing for almost a year but still hardly engaged unless I directly talked to them, and even then, when I’d ask, what would your character do, I’d get an “I don’t know”. So I just kept working with them, teaching them by example, and one day it happened. My niece actually told me what her character wanted to do! I almost fell out of my chair! I was so happy and proud. Finally, a few sessions later, the nephew did the same thing!
My friends collected the world jewels that had different powers (before the marvel films were a thing but based on the comic) and the main baddie got the world jewel crown (see, not a gauntlet) and proceeded to make himself immortal 😂.
That sounds like a blast. We have to draw from everywhere for our inspirations. Heck, one of my first Substack posts was about pulling gaming session ideas from your social media feed.
Since I live in Idaho, let's just say that a lot of "Yellowstone Visitor" stories become the basis for encounters/adventures in my games.
I’m part of a loose affiliation of like-minded players and GMs from all over the world who play online using Zoom and Discord. I offer this up not - of course - as an objective notion of what makes for a ‘good’ gaming experience, but as an indication of the variety of play styles that exist. Although, as it happens, this is one the most memorable sessions I've had in a while.
This online group coalesced around a preference for a play-style that is narrative, discursive, RP heavy and more interested in exploring characters than hitting things. In fact, we have an informal competition going on to see which game session can pass with the least happening in terms of ‘action’. Previous entrants have included a session where the characters walked from one side of a field to another while discussing their present situation. My most recent entry was from a couple of sessions ago when myself and the other character didn’t get up from our breakfast table. We didn’t ‘move’ at all.
For more context, the game is a three-hander, the GM, myself and one other player and is set in Mythic Babylon, using that sort of BRP percentile system. My character is a priest-astrologer from the temple of Marduk in Babylon, an establishment figure utterly convinced of the superiority of the order and prosperity that the city-state enjoys and imposes on its neighbours by conquest. My fellow player portrays an indentured servant, sold to pay off her father’s debts, pious in her own way, but with ‘dangerous’ ideas about the rectitude of empire and slavery (my character’s own NPC slave is a ‘floating’ character, controlled as appropriate my the GM, myself or the other player).
I won’t bore you with the background, but it is enough to say that, over the course of a journey, the gulf between our characters’ attitudes to society, justice, religion, order and liberty had begun to be exposed and the breakfast table scene was a tense verbal collision of world-views between two very different characters. Again, the substance would be dull to relate, but the point is we spent three hours engaging with the game world and the characters. No dice were rolled at all.
For those reading this who are already damning me as a cursed ‘story-gamer’ and ‘theatre kid’, well, guilty as charged. I’ll up the ante and add that, throughout, we were thoroughly meta-gaming. By this I mean that we regularly stepped out of character to engage in player discussions to elucidate our characters’ inner thoughts and attitudes, which we then took and used to inform the responses of our own characters. And this not because it provided some advantage to ‘win’ the exchange, but to deepen the understanding and so allow us to make in-character statements that played in to and increased the tension based on what we knew at a meta level.
You'll never find any judgement from me regarding playing styles. From Gygax's first session with David Arneson where he and Rob Kuntz fought/encountered 4 Balrogs (see my earlier post regarding where I learned) to Glen Blacow's and Jeffrey Johnson's "4-Fold Way of Adventure Gaming" and from Robins' Laws of Good Gaming to tactical guides about how to most effectively use your monsters, the hobby has always had a wide array of styles of play. All of them are correct for the groups and people they work for.
This is a DIY hobby.
It encourages the creative spirit in multiple directions. That's why I love it.
I have two great memories. I DM a family DND game. Last year my adult daughter played with us as a guest character and wow, I was blown away with her “acting in character” and how my sister in law riffed off of my daughter’s character. It was one of the few times I was able to sit back and not have to run things. It was so awesome!!! The second good memory, same group, different time, and the teens had been playing for almost a year but still hardly engaged unless I directly talked to them, and even then, when I’d ask, what would your character do, I’d get an “I don’t know”. So I just kept working with them, teaching them by example, and one day it happened. My niece actually told me what her character wanted to do! I almost fell out of my chair! I was so happy and proud. Finally, a few sessions later, the nephew did the same thing!
My friends collected the world jewels that had different powers (before the marvel films were a thing but based on the comic) and the main baddie got the world jewel crown (see, not a gauntlet) and proceeded to make himself immortal 😂.
That sounds like a blast. We have to draw from everywhere for our inspirations. Heck, one of my first Substack posts was about pulling gaming session ideas from your social media feed.
Since I live in Idaho, let's just say that a lot of "Yellowstone Visitor" stories become the basis for encounters/adventures in my games.
I’m part of a loose affiliation of like-minded players and GMs from all over the world who play online using Zoom and Discord. I offer this up not - of course - as an objective notion of what makes for a ‘good’ gaming experience, but as an indication of the variety of play styles that exist. Although, as it happens, this is one the most memorable sessions I've had in a while.
This online group coalesced around a preference for a play-style that is narrative, discursive, RP heavy and more interested in exploring characters than hitting things. In fact, we have an informal competition going on to see which game session can pass with the least happening in terms of ‘action’. Previous entrants have included a session where the characters walked from one side of a field to another while discussing their present situation. My most recent entry was from a couple of sessions ago when myself and the other character didn’t get up from our breakfast table. We didn’t ‘move’ at all.
For more context, the game is a three-hander, the GM, myself and one other player and is set in Mythic Babylon, using that sort of BRP percentile system. My character is a priest-astrologer from the temple of Marduk in Babylon, an establishment figure utterly convinced of the superiority of the order and prosperity that the city-state enjoys and imposes on its neighbours by conquest. My fellow player portrays an indentured servant, sold to pay off her father’s debts, pious in her own way, but with ‘dangerous’ ideas about the rectitude of empire and slavery (my character’s own NPC slave is a ‘floating’ character, controlled as appropriate my the GM, myself or the other player).
I won’t bore you with the background, but it is enough to say that, over the course of a journey, the gulf between our characters’ attitudes to society, justice, religion, order and liberty had begun to be exposed and the breakfast table scene was a tense verbal collision of world-views between two very different characters. Again, the substance would be dull to relate, but the point is we spent three hours engaging with the game world and the characters. No dice were rolled at all.
For those reading this who are already damning me as a cursed ‘story-gamer’ and ‘theatre kid’, well, guilty as charged. I’ll up the ante and add that, throughout, we were thoroughly meta-gaming. By this I mean that we regularly stepped out of character to engage in player discussions to elucidate our characters’ inner thoughts and attitudes, which we then took and used to inform the responses of our own characters. And this not because it provided some advantage to ‘win’ the exchange, but to deepen the understanding and so allow us to make in-character statements that played in to and increased the tension based on what we knew at a meta level.
You'll never find any judgement from me regarding playing styles. From Gygax's first session with David Arneson where he and Rob Kuntz fought/encountered 4 Balrogs (see my earlier post regarding where I learned) to Glen Blacow's and Jeffrey Johnson's "4-Fold Way of Adventure Gaming" and from Robins' Laws of Good Gaming to tactical guides about how to most effectively use your monsters, the hobby has always had a wide array of styles of play. All of them are correct for the groups and people they work for.
This is a DIY hobby.
It encourages the creative spirit in multiple directions. That's why I love it.
Thanks for sharing your story.