This IAP, Christian 27’ and I organized a role-playing game with interested members of the house. To our pleasant surprise, a full 13 people (including us), expressed a desire to play, filling up two adventuring parties for Saturday and Sunday evenings. Nobody in the house had ever played, our experience with role-playing games was pretty much limited to the first five minutes of Stranger Things. To say the least, we were a little nervous, but the result blew away all expectations we had.
The Magic of Role Playing Games
I started playing Magic: The Gathering in fourth grade, which turned into an obsession with Warhammer: Age of Sigmar in high school. These days I spend my time reading the instruction manuals of board games I will probably never play. The point is, I’ve played my fair share of board, card, and video games, but never have I engaged in an experience as unique as game-mastering a tabletop role-playing game. Allow me to share a bit of game from our second and third sessions:
After stealing a lockbox from a zombie pirate and fleeing from a Kraken, the party was ambushed by pirates, threatened by a humanoid draconic pirate wizard to open athe magical lockbox or else. After acquiring an arcane drill, Saurus the orc broke the seals of the lockbox, arousing an ancient demon lich from a 10,000 year slumber. In exchange for their help, the lich killed the threatening pirate, teleporting the dragonborn’s quite dead body to the forest clearing where my adventurers found themselves. Needing to dispose of the body, Woggle the thief suggested they throw it down a mineshaft, and one fooled dwarven guard later, the party skipped town, having both killed the most dangerous pirate of the Shimmering Seas and unknowingly commencing the apocalypse in the form of the demon lich Thradak’narr.
What other piece of media can evoke such emotional highs, cinematic moments, and downright goofy shenanigans in the span of two hours? Best of all, the above game was entirely improved on my part as the game master. Going in, I was convinced the party would fight the dragon pirate, I had even planned a fun sea-battle. But the resulting narrative was miles more interesting than anything I could’ve dreamed of.
Role-playing games are unique in that literally anything is possible. The game master allows for the players to react to the world in whatever way they chose, presenting a possibility space that is unparalleled even by the largest open-world video games or bloated Kickstarter board games. As a game master, I was constantly allowed to put players in interesting situations. Each session, I found myself preparing less and less content, gaining confidence in my players to propel the narrative with their own ideas. Sure, I had a general idea of a story in mind and possible encounters, but at the end of the day, the players were the ones who controlled the world, I simply wove together what they gave me. At any crossroads, I chose whatever was coolest, and when a bit of lore about our world came up, I turned to my players. “Althea, how widespread is the church of Theyrad?”, “Saurus, how do Orcs feel about magic?” This resulted in a simultaneously natural and engaging narrative. As I am writing this there are around 24 hours until my group’s final session, and I have only prepared about half a dozen bullet points of fun things that could occur.
A Brief Aside: Dungeon World is really very good
I am by no means qualified to review this game. Dungeon World was my first foray into the hobby, and I have played for less than ten hours in total as only the game master, but still I feel compelled to say that this game is incredible. The game allows for an emphasis to be placed on what matters most: Having cool characters do cool things. By unburdening itself of the complex systems of other games, players can focus more on the collective theatre of the mind rather than the rules of the game. Players are focused on each other rather than the rules sheet in front of them. Every part of Dungeon World effortlessly propels the story forward, the Powered-By-The-Apocalypse system allowing things to happen
In Conclusion…
Role-playing games have a bit of a PR problem. Generally, these games tend to be perceived as complex affairs of many-sided dice, long tables, and rulebooks that look like fantasy spreadsheets. Sure, some games are like this, and those games have their respective audiences, but at the end of the day, role-playing games are about telling incredible collective stories. Anyone can enjoy these games, all that is required is a broad imagination and a willingness to be a little uncomfortable. And for those who think they could be a game master, I’d suggest going for it; there is truly no parallel experience in all of gaming.
