After a fantastic yesterday spent celebrating the awesomeness that is my son, today was spent celebrating the awesomeness that is tabletop roleplaying. For the first time in several years I was able to gather around with some friends and play a d20 game.
There were five of us and it was our first time to play together. Heck, is was the first time for some of us to meet. There were some first timers and some rusty players, so it felt like we were roughly at the same place.
Today was my turn to run the game, with another player on deck to helm the next. I got to bring out some of my favorite setups (assassin vine guarding the entrance to a goblin base). Overall I think it was a successful session, but its hard for me to really say. I had fun and hopefully that means the players did too.
One of my favorite parts of tabletop is that it is cooperative fiction. Here we are all in the same room with likely costly different mental pictures of what is happening in the game, but we are working together to add to the enjoyment of the group. Sure, there are rules and dice, but it really is about saying “yes, and…” to the ideas floating around. It is just as important to know how to follow the rules and to know when to through them out the window. Tight preparation is a necessity, but sometime the random idea that gets thrown out can lead to a much more fun and player driven solution.
I thought tonight’s game would end up as a standard dungeon crawl, and instead we ended up having the end scene of Seven Samurai. And if I had tried to steer the players towards that end, it probably wouldn’t of happened. Sometimes I think the number one rule of running a game should be give options while maintaining flexibility.
Also, I took an audio recording of the game. Later I’ll give it a listen and if it is decent quality I might invest the time and do some editing and turn it into another podcast. Say perhaps a podcast that might be offered as a reward for a certain Patreon account (yes, I have started Patreon and am trying to think of good ways to separate you from your cash.)
And now I need to finish, because Leo had me up at 6am this morning and that was a long time ago. As far as nonstop games go, this was a dandy one.
Deadly Troubadour 