My Life on (Graph) Paper

A couple of weeks ago as we were packing up for the day my colleagues asked me if I had big plans for the weekend. "Not much," I said. Then, I added quickly, "Just playing some Dungeons and Dragons."

That statement still elicits curious looks and a bit of laughter. It was even considered too nerdy for my friends at Ziff who get together to play nerd games (and that's what we called them, "nerd games." Board games like Puerto Rico and Shadows over Camelot, Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan.)

The first time I played Dungeons and Dragons, I was probably eight years old; the twelve-year-old son of a family friend was over (during the holidays, I imagine) and he desperately wanted people to play the game with, so he roped in me and my sister (who was six). I liked all the pretty colored dice but didn't get anything he was talking about. I'm sure he was extremely frustrated.

In high school I had friends who were über-nerds (and I went to a nerdy high school). I joined them when they played Car Wars during lunch, and although I now have an appreciation for that game, as a fourteen-year-old it didn't much appeal to me. It wasn't until we played Call of Cthulhu one Saturday that the role-playing geek in me was fully awakened.

It was at my friend Randy's house, in the suburbs; we played in his giant bedroom, which to me seemed as large as the family room at home. He set the stage by choosing the right music on his stereo - when the group went to Egypt to track down an obscure clue, he put on the soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia. It was a brief campaign and drove most of our characters insane, as this type of game is wont to do. But it was a thrilling experience - sitting around on Randy's carpet, listening to him describe the horrors we were facing while listening to his special game mix - sounds he'd collected from soundtracks and sepcail effects records.

There was one more marvelous, perfect weekend like that when I was in high school. A friend of ours had an empty house for the weekend, as his parents were out of town. Our friend Josh saw this as a golden opportunity to put on a two-day campaign. The set up was a classic British murder mystery - a weekend in a mansion, the wealthy industrialist host murdered, and yes, some unnamed horrors lurking in the deep, just under the surface. The brilliant thing about this was that we came to the house Friday night, character sheets in hand; Josh made us role-play our meetings with each other. Then we had dinner - I think our friend David cooked it, and while we ate dinner we role-played the conversations we were having as our characters had dinner in game. It wasn't an accident, I think, that several friends there were from the drama department and two of them went on to become professional actors and directors.

That weekend was the perfect union of game, role-playing, and social interaction. We stayed up all night Friday night drinking and talking and playng; we playing most of Saturday (with some breaks, I imagine, although I don't really recall any.) Josh, the DM, had a fine sense of the dramatic and although the pace of his storytelling was slow and involved lots of private closed-door meetings with players, it was expertly crafted. I think the times I feel that itch to play again is because I want to recapture that thrilling feeling of having dinner with my friends while we were simultaneously playing this rich and complex game, talking to advance our characters while alert for clues and hints, and enjoying the avocado soup that David had made.

Then came college, and my first real boyfriend, and an ill-fated game in which his character (a paladin modeled after Aragorn son of Arathorn) shot my character, a thief, in the back. I don't know if it was coincidence, but I switched over to single-player computer games mostly after that.

There were a few more times I got back into tabletop gaming - dabbled a bit with GURPS, with other d20 systems, with AD&D, and then with D&D 3.0, which we played Saturdays in a church in Berkeley. But that game broke up too. I also sat in on a friend's campaign a couple times but that game was a bit too intense for me - min-maxers and very combat-oriented. I tried White Wolf products, but I was lost among people dressed like vampires and people in fancy clothes with little plastic pointy ears. I tried other LARPs, but they seemed to take things a little too far in the other direction - I decided I don't want to actually run around a forest in Novato with a foam-padded sword; I'd rather do the running in my mind and sit around a big oak table with cheese and crackers and a glass of wine.

So, I'm looking forward to our next session; at the same time, I've been turning over in the back of my mind another game idea - I'm getting a little tired of the medieval fantasy world. What about a Victorian mystery game, where a doll house is your board and dolls are the figures? How about throwing in some steampunk? Or adding international diplomatic intrigue? Having Sherlock Holmes as an NPC? Because that's the other appeal of games like this - not only do you get to play in these worlds, you get to create them for other people to enjoy. Is that dorky? Maybe. But it's fulfilling.

Comments

[Zonk]

Table-top gaming is no nerdier than waiting two days in the cold for a PS3, raiding for 'phat lootz', or 'teabagging' a foe in Halo 2.

Methinks the Ziff folk doth protest too much. ;)

[Mark Strecker]

I think the ideal game for you (from the vast catalogs of published RPGs, of course) would be Castle Falkenstein.

http://www.lange.demon.co.uk/Castle_Falkenstein/CF_Index.html

The game is set towards the end of the 19th century in a world where nearly all of the literature of that time is true. Not only is Jules Verne the French Minister of Defense - Captain Nemo is terrorizing the coasts. Sherlock Holmes is solving cases, and the young novelist Arthur Conan Doyle is instead a journalist tracking the sensational detective.

One of the most interesting things about the game, in my opinion, is that it eschews the usual trappings of RPGs. There are no character sheets, there are instead character diaries. No, statistics, but descriptions of your character. You might be remarkable in ettiquette, but a very poor fencer.

The character diary also allows more freedom to the players - who are encouraged to handle downtime events in their journals. Want to equip your character? Write up a shopping list in your journal and show it to the GM later, if he challenges you. Need to say goodbye to your sisters before you cross the channel? A short description is all that's necessary.

Unfortunately I only had the chance to play a few sessions before the campaign broke up. But it's been sitting on my shelf ever since, awaiting the right combination of time and players.

[Jens Alfke]

There's also Universalis, "The Game Of Infinite Stories":

http://www.ramshead.indie-rpgs.com/

I've got the rulebook, but have never actually played. It's more of a collaborative storytelling system with RPG elements: the players can shift perspective between characters, and take turns leading the story. You have to spend tokens (poker chips) to affect the story -- to add a plot twist, create scenery, introduce characters -- so no player can dominate too much. It all sounds really neat.

[jane]

Mark - awesome that you mention Castle Falkenstein, as I just came across that recently while researching steampunk games. It does seem to have the narrative flexibility I'm looking for... and the no dice thing is pretty interesting! I'll definitely give it a try.

[hikaru]

A paladin with a ranged weapon...?

And I dunno about Novato, but running through the woods in Malibu on a moonless night through waist-high grass buried in fog, wearing chainmail and wielding a huge PVC sword, knowing that there are baddies lurking about (in elaborate undead costumes)... that's pretty fun. ;)