2/23/2009 - Jack the Lasher Finds his way in 4e

No wonder Ethan hates roleplaying eh?  It always seems to mess him up, the rules are much safer.

In this scene, the DM and Ethan are furiously passing notes back and forth, frequently rolling, and Ethan is calculating how much he can carry!  Mike and Melissa look on in frustration, their questions of what is going on being answered with "Nothing" or "Lots of monsters to sneak past!".

Well Melissa wasn't having any of it, so she came up with a roleplaying way to mess up Ethan's plans.   Of course the bat didn't try to sneak, and Ethan's plan has been foiled.  We'll find out over the next few comics how the resulting scene goes down.

Has anyone else used roleplaying to mess up another person's plans?  And when they yell out "Dude!" you reply with "Sorry, just roleplaying".  If so, post on the forums here

So, those who know me, or have sort of been following along, know that I've been gaming for a while now.  You'll also know that I'd become a bit jaded about the whole thing, to the point of nearly abandoning the hobby.  Then I stumbled across the works of some brave game designers who questioned, for better or worse, the way gaming has "always been".  I was once again hooked, invigorated by the hobby (or at least this subset of it).  There were, certainly, a great many excellent ideas being bandied about, particularly if you like the idea of an RPG creating a "story-like" experience.  I think many regular-GMs were probably equally excited by the prospect for this very reason, though many of the games did away with "viking hat" GMing (that is, GM with ultimate, godlike authority) and provided a level of transparency and player input that likely appealed to many frustrated players out there.  However, much of this excitement and enthusiasm gave way to the zealotry of the newly converted.  And I was one of them.

Now, I'm not saying that the message wasn't good and valuable, but like any new devotee armed with soundbite doctrine and tales of unverified miracles, I was trying to apply concepts (that I didn't even fully understand) as a panacea to all of the (gaming) world's problems, real or imagined.  However, I'm not one to accept an idea fully on faith, so I sat on the temple steps, and though I rarely contributed to the debates of the learned, I listened.  And eventually I realized that, as usual, things aren't simply black or white.

I learned that while a great system can provide structure and inspiration and focus, if the people at the table aren't interested in taking advantage of it, it's meaningless.  You simply can't run a game on auto-pilot.  Well, you can, but it will be as dull and lifeless as you would expect.

Related to that, the real reward of an RPG comes from what the structure DOESN'T cover, the "fruitful void".  Yes, it's corralled by the structure, informed by the inspiration and guided by the focus, but it's the chaotic, creative maelstrom that those things surround (without touching them) that are what make RPGs fun.

And then there is simply the fact that different people want different things, to the point of barely sharing the same hobby.  It's like getting some Rugby, Soccer and Football players together for a game and assuming that since it's all field-sports, then it's all the same.  After all, it's just endzones and kicking and tackling and stuff, right?  I'm sure you can see how that game would quickly devolve into anarchy and arguments.  It's like the powergamer, storyteller and immersive roleplayer all trying to play together.  The powergamer isn't being a jerk because he's knocking the roleplayer to the ground, and the roleplayer isn't intentionally disrupting the storyteller by wearing a giant helmet and shoulderpads.  The problem is that they're all playing different games with different assumptions, expectations and needs.

So, there's not much I can do about the last, short of being clear what the goals and expectations of play are, but I CAN play with creative people and enjoy that place between the rules for the blank canvas that it is.

So that's where I am right now.

Anybody have a similar experience?  Any questions or insights?  Feel free to share them HERE!

So Jason has been motivated lately to do more comics. Yay!  Which means I have to spend much more time coloring and bubbling comics....er yay?   Actually I find coloring the comics to be a lot of fun, and I think I do a decent job, though I will admit that after 2 hours or so coloring I start to get lazy.  Since I do the text bubbles last, guess which suffers the most from my laziness?

Since I became writer, I've written a lot of bad scripts, though I think I've written some good ones too.  The biggest problem has always been the constant struggle between humor and story.  Originally it was pretty easy to balance the two, because we didn't really try to combine them, we'd have pure humor comics with no relation to the story, then we'd have 80% story comics with maybe a gag in the last panel.  That worked pretty well when we had 2-3 comics a week.  When we switched to 1 comic a week, it meant that if we had 2-3 humor comics in a row, the story fans would suffer for nearly a month before receiving the next 4 panel increment of the story.  Not really acceptable, and to be honest writing the scripts for these 4 panel story comics that ended up being a month apart even I'd lose myself. 

Ironically enough, even as Jason has started feeling motivated to do more comics (which we should all give him a hand as he lends his pen for what effectively amounts to be free), I had felt motivated to changing my writing style.  Sure, maybe a couple years later than I should, but meh, better late than never.  Lately I've been pushing the humor with the storyline, and even when we do what used to be pure humor comics (things like our "what not to do in a game" style comics), even those are pushing forward the story.  All of this to avoid getting emails "can we stop doing X thread for 6 months?", which unfortunately are easier to ignore than the "Your comics aren't funny anymore, I hate you, you should fire yourself and hire back the writer from 6 months ago" emails, which ironically are telling me to hire myself since I was also the writer of the previous comics (at least the ones they were referring to). 

The risk is that people won't recognize that the joke comic actually still described what happened in the story comic so as to make it seem that the story comic is skipping things, but hopefully people "get" it.  The most recent example of that is Arthur wondering why the group went in circles, which of course is because the group failed their skill encounter to find the kobold cave which was totally a "joke" comic, but it affected the story too.

Why were they making a skill encounter to get back where they have been before.  Is 4e just that crazy? No, not at all, Ethan was pushing for constant skill encounters and DM's new to 4e often feel pushed to include skill encounters, especially by the often more rule knowledgeable rules lawyers.  For rules lawyers and munchkins, dice are often more fun than soft roleplay. 

Speaking of Ethan, does anyone miss Ethan's illithid? [Duck from the mob with torches angry for us changing Ethan's character]    Well heres a bit of a spoiler, in an upcoming story thread, Ethan joins a 3.5 group where he'll be regularly causing mayhem in their group, and of course he'll use what turned out to be his (and everyone else's) favorite character, Ethan.