Post by flybane on Jun 14, 2010 5:03:34 GMT
Hi,
I just made it through my maiden voyage as GM of an RPG, and it was a success: my player, a 12-year-old boy, was ultimately excited about it and can hardly wait for our next session.
It's an unconventional game on some levels: I'm in my late 20's but my player is a middle schooler; I'm GMing as well as playing The Doctor since there are only 2 of us (for now, a third player about my age may be joining next week or so) and my player is doing something rather taboo by playing The Master - and yes, I allowed it.
The whole planning process has been very much about adapting to the more whimsical tastes of my young player. The game expressly says not to play The Master, but my player wanted to, and so I compromised: He gets to be The Master, but with some serious limitations, amnesia, and a situation in which he can't hurt The Doctor without jeopardizing his own survival. The point needed to be to explore the perspective of someone with serious character flaws rather than to just be plain evil and take over the world. I was expecting that it would be a constant challenge to keep the game from devolving into mischief and mayhem. Actually, it wasn't that hard this session. I gave myself The Doctor as a minor character (again, explained by in-story limitations) to help set the tone, and usually a stern "no, we are *not* going to crash land the TARDIS in that populated town" from my character sufficed to keep the mischief to joking rather than actual gameplay.
I was also surprised at how little dice rolling and rule checking there actually was. For one thing, my player would often ignore opportunities I had planned, instead offering his own suggestions for what happened, some of which were quite good (it was a bit like a recording I heard of a Polaris session: player says what they think happens, and then we negotiate it). My game may end up being more cooperative than I had expected, I think.
Another part of it was that I didn't want to let my tenuous grasp of the rules bog the game down, so I ended up liberally estimating difficulty levels. I had worried that I would end up having to micromanage dice rolls for complicated actions, but instead, my player turned out to be very eager to do trivial everyday exploration of the imaginary setting. So a lot of dice rolling was actually for simple stuff like going fishing and successfully cooking the fish, convincing a neighbor to let you on his property, and borrowing a boat.
My new question arising from today's session is: any advice on handling the mood of a game? I worked really hard to set up a backstory with (I hope) emotional and moral potential to explore, mysteries to solve, and opportunities for character growth and development. But it looks like I may have to accept that a young player may be more interested in the sheer adventure of helping to create an imaginary world. He's definitely no method actor - I think it's the ability to interact with and shape the virtual world that intrigues him, and character development is secondary. I want to respect what my players want to do with their game, but I'm also a bit concerned that if it goes too far that way, it will pull the emotional core out of the plot trajectory. I'm also having a hard time running a compelling plot when the atmosphere so easily swerves towards the silly and the irreverent. It's kind of fun socially to be silly ad we are here to have fun, but my personal ideal of gaming fun would tend towards taking the story a bit more seriously. Where do I go from here?
Finally, some specific questions:
1) If a character uses "Resourceful Pockets" and finds, say, Psychic Paper, does the character then have have access to the item for the rest of the game?
2) Squareness gun: We know it "deletes" walls. What happens if a player wants to use it to create a hole in the ground by deletion? Pressed for a decision, I arbitrarily limited delete depth to about 1 foot and didn't allow it to stack. But what would you do?
I just made it through my maiden voyage as GM of an RPG, and it was a success: my player, a 12-year-old boy, was ultimately excited about it and can hardly wait for our next session.
It's an unconventional game on some levels: I'm in my late 20's but my player is a middle schooler; I'm GMing as well as playing The Doctor since there are only 2 of us (for now, a third player about my age may be joining next week or so) and my player is doing something rather taboo by playing The Master - and yes, I allowed it.
The whole planning process has been very much about adapting to the more whimsical tastes of my young player. The game expressly says not to play The Master, but my player wanted to, and so I compromised: He gets to be The Master, but with some serious limitations, amnesia, and a situation in which he can't hurt The Doctor without jeopardizing his own survival. The point needed to be to explore the perspective of someone with serious character flaws rather than to just be plain evil and take over the world. I was expecting that it would be a constant challenge to keep the game from devolving into mischief and mayhem. Actually, it wasn't that hard this session. I gave myself The Doctor as a minor character (again, explained by in-story limitations) to help set the tone, and usually a stern "no, we are *not* going to crash land the TARDIS in that populated town" from my character sufficed to keep the mischief to joking rather than actual gameplay.
I was also surprised at how little dice rolling and rule checking there actually was. For one thing, my player would often ignore opportunities I had planned, instead offering his own suggestions for what happened, some of which were quite good (it was a bit like a recording I heard of a Polaris session: player says what they think happens, and then we negotiate it). My game may end up being more cooperative than I had expected, I think.
Another part of it was that I didn't want to let my tenuous grasp of the rules bog the game down, so I ended up liberally estimating difficulty levels. I had worried that I would end up having to micromanage dice rolls for complicated actions, but instead, my player turned out to be very eager to do trivial everyday exploration of the imaginary setting. So a lot of dice rolling was actually for simple stuff like going fishing and successfully cooking the fish, convincing a neighbor to let you on his property, and borrowing a boat.
My new question arising from today's session is: any advice on handling the mood of a game? I worked really hard to set up a backstory with (I hope) emotional and moral potential to explore, mysteries to solve, and opportunities for character growth and development. But it looks like I may have to accept that a young player may be more interested in the sheer adventure of helping to create an imaginary world. He's definitely no method actor - I think it's the ability to interact with and shape the virtual world that intrigues him, and character development is secondary. I want to respect what my players want to do with their game, but I'm also a bit concerned that if it goes too far that way, it will pull the emotional core out of the plot trajectory. I'm also having a hard time running a compelling plot when the atmosphere so easily swerves towards the silly and the irreverent. It's kind of fun socially to be silly ad we are here to have fun, but my personal ideal of gaming fun would tend towards taking the story a bit more seriously. Where do I go from here?
Finally, some specific questions:
1) If a character uses "Resourceful Pockets" and finds, say, Psychic Paper, does the character then have have access to the item for the rest of the game?
2) Squareness gun: We know it "deletes" walls. What happens if a player wants to use it to create a hole in the ground by deletion? Pressed for a decision, I arbitrarily limited delete depth to about 1 foot and didn't allow it to stack. But what would you do?