For Christmas I asked for it, and my mother on a trip to Barrie decided to break it out to keep my sister and I quiet, but it was a boardgames and not what I was looking for. It was fun but not right. I got the Basic set for Christmas and my dad tried to run it for my friends and he said that it was not something he understood. Amongst our friends we tried to run it, Geoff— the guy that started this craze for us DMed first, Grant, Patrick, Shane, Donald, and myself all had characters and we pawed through the encounters one by one taking turns running the game. The first time I touched the control stick was early and I decided that I was never going to let go. The players encountered a Carrion Crawler and defeated it, then the players began flipping through books looking up what treasure that it had and I thought, "What are you doing? You're scrambling to count all the gold in the middle if a monster filled dungeon and the fighting over how to divide the loot?… okay you are doing that, a second monster hears the commotion and comes to investigate." Total player kill. My friend Donald told me after all the others left unhappy that I did something unfair like that, that he thought it was realistic. So began my journey.
Honestly, I was a bad GM. I thought that I was the monsters and that I had to kill the characters. I had no teachers. I had no one with better experience and there was no Internet. So I did my best. I took a hiatus as I moved away when I was 13, but came back I continued our games. Most of the people stopped playing in High School or went to play other types of RPGs, but I persevered and I started the school's Dungeons&Dragons Club. Listen, you don't get it, nerds were not in then. I was outcasted, I was not popular to begin with but some people signed up and I DMed and I allowed people to borrow my books to read. And some people stole some, that is cause they wanted them and could not find them or were poor. I just hope they treated them right. Anyways, that was where the Temple of Elemental Evil was tackled for the first time. But I was still in player kill mode, but the players did not seem to mind.
I went to University and I thought that I might find people to play, but I only found a couple and nothing ever happened. It was in second year that it took off. That was ten years after I started playing. I found a good DM who learned from some other people and was a different kind of DM a ST, Story Teller. He told a D&D story. We played for nearly a year. The next year he introduced other games and new players and new storytellers. And the year after we played an epic game of Vampire: the Embraced. Then he turned to me the next year and asked me if I would run Temple of Elemental Evil for him. The campaign lasted for years. It started with just him and enlarged to include a mutual friend and later the friend's girlfriend and after three years and a Master's degree, the temple was vanquished! From there it went on to a weekly campaign where Gerald the Ranger went on to immortality in the eyes of the people of the world and was retired. And then I quit D&D, becuase of some creative differences that I had with the game designers.
I played Exalted then for fifteen years. What's the difference?
D&D was almost always based around premade adventures, for me. I mean those premade adventures were created by other people and first played by other people first, but when I got them they were already done. Exalted was just setting. Nothing else, and they were extremely bad at putting out premade adventures. Their premade adventures consisted of indepth setting with NPCs. Pretty much that's it. So I was forced to make it all up. And I was bad at first and later better. I learned a whole bunch of shit from successes and failures.
I learned to know the setting. By that I mean, know the history and know the movers and the shakers in the setting and the reactions and beable to see everything moving without my players. When they players do something, it affects their immeadiate surroundings and if what they do is big enough it affects things beyond them. So it is important to know what is out there at least in terms of big things. The little stuff can be moved around and changed anytime, but when they do something that changes the flow of history, then that is when things for the player get cool, because they are recognised.
I learned to pay attention to their backgrounds. People spend some time making them and this means that they think it is important. So I make it important. I make it as important as they make it to them. If they have an ally, it is level one important. If they say his name is Faust, level 2. Faust, is a money changer in the city of Nexus, level 3. Faust of Nexus the money changer, helped you rob a merchant who was raiding villages and selling people into slavery, by exchanging silver into jade script to make yourself appear to have a need of slaves so you could exchange money for slaves and catch him red handed … level five. The detail tells me how expendable the person is. It tells me that the character is invested in them, the more detail the more security it has. The more security means that I can invoke that character to do things with that part of their background. If they have a magic item, it is only a magic item until they name it, and then it becomes special. If they say they have two brothers and five sisters, then I see that is licence to use them any way I see fit too. If they have a sister named Lizzabek, then that gives the sister insurance, I can't just kill Lizzabek, I can ransom, blackmail, kidnap, threaten, sacrifice her, but not just kill her.
I learned to make the game about the player. Duh! Let me reiterate that, in a group of four to six players, I have to make the game about the player. When Jaguar played the game her companions, her RL friends were beside her, but I had to get her to feel that I was gaming for her alone. I was by-the-way, I was gaming for the other people alone too though, at the same time. Jaguar's village had been carted off as slaves, she needed to rescue them so every other, more or less, session she got a lead on that, sometimes there would be ten with nothing, and sometimes ten with. I stole a game mechanic from somewhere else and modified it and if a character wanted to do something outside of where I was going I added it to the game for just them. My game famous quests for sorcery, enemy, rivalry, romance, etc. these were things that kept the focus on each player. It is a teacher thing, I don't know if other teachers do it, I do not teach. I think it would make me a good teacher. It would likely make me a very tired teacher too.
I learned not to put players in a box. Boxes are these things that they do in television shows, because they are written that way: the character wakes up in a prison and the story is how they got their. That NEVER works in roleplaying. One of the characters decides he does not want to be in prison and well gets upset and tries to destroy everything to make sure it does not happen, even if it gets them killed. There see, I did not go to prison, becuase I am dead. They won. Never mind that the story was supposed to be them getting out of jail. And it was cool, but now he is just dead. Another box is to have a session with the future character. I thought it was a cool way to introduce a opposing character to interact with, but they saw it as me placing limitations on their character and they then quit afterwards, nevermind the conversation happened a thousand years in the future.
People tell me that I am a good storyteller these days. I tend to focus on areas where I need to improve, maybe that is part of my inner teacher, I mean if I fail a kid, I have failed. That is
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