Wow... it has really been almost 2 months since I last looked at this blog here. As usual the reasons were many, why this has not come to pass. Mostly lack of time and enthusiasm, but also lack of things to write about.
It is a Saturday morning. On Friday, my wife and I fell asleep in front of the TV at round about 8 o'clock in the evening and apart from a brief shuffle from couch to bed at around midnight, I slept all the way through until 7:00 am. 11 hours of sleep that speaks volumes, I needed it, but what to do with this much time now so early on a Saturday. Yep, writing an update in my blog seems like a fine idea.
I initially wanted to write about my experience reading and recording Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, but that is not complete yet, so I will write a bit more about role-playing :) Last weekend, we had a role-playing session after a rather long hiatus (almost a year) and it was awesome!
We are currently in a demon infested area and it opened up some surprising avenues for me. The one I wanted to talk about here is fear. Yes, fear. In role-playing, I think there are two types of fear. The fear of the character, but also the fear of the player for their character.
The latter is an interesting phenomenon, it lets the player act quite unlike what the character would do. Thankfully, I, so far, have shown enough sense to not let the player get into such a situation, but I also know that the players are role players enough to accept the fate of their character if it may come to pass.
There were a couple of close calls, especially with our viking like player character. He plays him just as suicidal as you would expect and it needed some tempering, otherwise there would have been no reason for the character to logically stay with the group... or in fact, the rest of the group wanting to have him around. With the player (a really reasonable fellow who just had a specific idea of the character in mind) we shipped around this problem with some very near death experiences. He was shown that he can't kill everybody, when he got involved in the drug trade of a city without the knowledge of the other players. He was addicted to a weak stimulant, but didn't have the money. In the end the drug bosses made him do their dirty work and when he wanted out he was completely destroyed and left for dead. As a good measure, in case he survived, they made him addicted to one of their worst drugs. It was interesting to watch. The player knew one false move and he would have to make a new character so he was surprisingly tentative throughout the process. Usually playing him very boisterous, loud, arrogant and violent, the viking was suddenly rather more... tame, let's say.
Then he had to go through the drug addiction. That took an entire all-day session (several weeks in playtime). It got the other characters to kind of respect him again, I felt.
Then lastly, he was taken and tried for his crimes. He once diffused a frightened villager mob situation, by throwing an axe into the crowd and killing the baker. That sort of injustice can't stand. As a consequence, he was tried before the sun god (and god of justice) in his holiest of chapels. Everyone expected him to be executed (including the player himself), but strangely the god through his priest decided that instead of execution, he was to guard a fellow citizen for a very extended period of time (thus introducing a new character). This was the final step, that made the character a gods fearing man again and more in-sync with the rest of the group, without really completely overhauling the concept.
I write this as if I planned to do this, but it was more of a work in progress. I just reacted to things that happened.
What has this to do with fear? Well, the player really didn't want to stop playing his character, so he always took the way that let the viking live in the end leading to a gfantastic compromise and acceptance of the character in the group.
Now, in the last session, I was inadvertently able to play with the fear of the characters, not necessarily the fear of the players. If any of my players reading this, hopefully they don't lose all respect. It may have appeared as if I planned this, but the effect came about due to my forgetfulness and just going with the flow. But let's start from the beginning.
The heroes (yes in this game we are heroes) were looking for someone in a demon-infested forest. They find the person who broke a leg because a wild boar attacked his horse. The guy had a horse with him and I actually wrote down in my notes: "They find the horse shortly after grazing on a clearing." For good measure, I thought: "What the hell! Let's make this a bit more atmospheric." and I let the horse be found as a carcass entangled in vines that seemed to have choked it to death.
Of course, I chose that moment to let the wild boar with two of his friends attack the group of four players in a frenzy (Split the party up and all). The first two attacks by them were rather devastating to the characters endeavor to survive and as an afterthought I read out loud what the boars are like. I didn't mean to startle the players by saying that it was 250 kilos. In fact, I was as surprised as they were. I just concealed my surprise.
While the players were going through the motions of organising the rather complex fight system, I read through the scene again. Bear in mind, I wrote this more than 2 years ago and 3 rounds in I realized that those vines were supposed to actively hinder them. So I started to weave that information into the game. The look in the players faces was interesting. It went from "Oh this is a hard fight." to "What the...!!!" and then while still playing, the same happened again. Suddenly, the wizard who thought he was safe from the action got hit by a tree branch since I just read what I wrote 2 years ago. That is, I read: "The trees will at intermittent intervals attack a random player".
The effect on the fight was a constant build up of the situation from bad to worse. The players were quite busy with the fighting system, but it dawned on some of them that their characters should really be frightened now, because they are encountering something that they have never seen before and every time they think, it can't get any worse, it heaps on another shovel.
At the end of that fight, most of them were worse for wear and one had a near death experience. What happened next, was something that I had not planned but seemed like a good idea at the time. One player had a new character and we decided that the old one, a hunter/ranger type strong with a bow, would become possessed by the demonic arch enemy of the god of the hunt. I didn't know what to do with him at the time of doing it, but it occurred to me during the session that the characters won't rest until they knew what happened to him. So, I had to show him once more for them to realise that he is not a player character anymore.
So, I let him stand atop a hill, clearly to be seen and shoot an arrow at them and let him miss. All the characters knew his skill with a bow so they knew he wanted to miss. The arrow had a note saying: "The hunt begins...". Again, the players were strangely quiet taken in by the atmosphere but not scared for their character (strangely), but were realising what their characters are experiencing and tried to weave this into a reaction and they all came to the conclusion that this is effing scary.
Finally they had to camp in that forest for one night and that was the final point where I noticed that they all were quite interested in the situation so I did some face to face discussions with each player making him aware that this is an extraordinary situation for their character and what his reactions are. Not necessarily visible to the other characters, but also emotionally. I didn't bother with courage checks or the like as I thought it would take away from the situation if one of the warriors who had been in tense situations like these suddenly pisses his pants in fear due to a badly failed courage check.
All in all, I felt it was a cool experience all round creating some nice atmosphere for the players and letting them explore the less heroic side of their heroes. If any of my players read this, I would be interested how they felt this whole ordeal went along.
