Unquiet Desperation

I don’t talk much about gaming here,  but I do enjoy running and playing in a well-run, deeply story-driven roleplaying game. There’s nothing like developing a character you love, or revealing a world to players one step at a time; watching their characters change over time.

I’ve wanted to run a game for my friends who gather at the International House of Johnson. About six weeks ago, we started the first part of a campaign where I have the opportunity to take a set of experienced gamers into my little plot.

It’s been an absolute joy.

The group I play with is made up of a number of extremely creative people. Because of this, their characters are fully developed, with interesting backstories and personalities. As an added benefit, the setting I am using is something that most of the players have never played in before, so I get the unqie opportunity to introduce a group of people I respect to a world that I love. Thus far, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

One of my favorite things about this game is reading the character diaries that some of the folks are posting up on the game’s web site. Each is blogging in their character’s voice, and I love reading the entries. It’s absolutely fascinating to me to read how the different characters recount their adventures so far…what each chooses to focus on, and what they forget that others remember. Witness this, written by Laura, as her character Ralph. Ralph is a 20-something boxer who is down on his luck, broke, and living with his parents:

So one night I had a really weird dream. Maybe I had too much spicy sausage pizza for dinner and it gave me indigestion. Mom always said that could happen. Anyway, in this dream I was in a room with a lot of books all around and there were these other people in there with me. This kind of weird old lady showed up and mumbled some stuff I didn’t understand and all of a sudden these tentacle things reached out of a fireplace and grabbed her and she’s gone. Goofy stuff. Well, the next day I didn’t think anything about it until I was downtown after visiting the training center and I meet up with all the people that appeared in the dream. I swear I never met or even saw any of these guys ever before, but somehow we all got together. And we all had the same exact dream. I was really bugged by this. It was kind of creepy, but I really don’t believe in astrology psychics or crystal balls or stuff like that so there had to be some reason it happened and I wanted to know what it was. It was just the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. I decided to go along with the group because I think the Spanish dude, he’s a wrestler, might be able to get me a job. I really need some cash. My unemployment will run out next month, I think.

Compare it to Rachel‘s Raina, who is a university student at Case Western:

I’m Raina Wallace, and I had a dream.

I had a dream about being seated in a book lined room, with other people. A ghostly woman appeared, tried to tell us something – the word Paris was in there – and vanished, drawn into the fireplace by weird tentacles. Which is all kind of standard for a dream. Except, the next day I saw someone – someone I had seen in the dream. In fact, I met everyone that had been in the dream, that next day. Everyone was in Cleveland, like me.

I don’t mean “Hey, you kind of remind me of someone…” it was more like a lightning bolt this is the man from the dream. We all felt it. It was real. A connection. These were people I never would have met, otherwise (let alone hang around with – half of them were big thugs). And so we decided the room must also exist.

Finally, from Kris‘s character, Rex Barrett, who runs a gun shop, is a survivalist, racist, and a loudmouth:

My nightmares usually involve an unstoppable flood of brown-skinned people swarming over our southern border and spreading like a dirty puddle across the entire nation, or fifty faceless ATF agents in body armor kicking down the door to the gun shop—or worse—the bunker and hauling us all off to jail, or finding mom dead in the kitchen—not just crying and bleeding and bruised, but dead, her head bashed in or twisted around the wrong way or a knife in her chest or much, much worse—and dad just sitting there, an empty bottle of bourbon lying on the table and another half-full bottle clutched in one fist. In one such dream there were probably thirty guns of various calibers, all of them smoking, lying on the kitchen table. Always he has this blank look on his face; no remorse or sorrow, just an empty stare, and he’ll take a pull from the bottle and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand (the bourbon sloshing in the bottle as he does so) and say, “That’ll shut you up. That’ll shut you up good.” But nightmares about women being sucked into fireplaces by tentacles? That doesn’t happen.

I’m seeing something that I’ve not seen in a long time: people really enjoying their characters. I’m watching them develop before my eyes, and it’s spurring the players to delve deeply to play their parts authentically. Game nights are not only fun, but they are starting to reach a level of intensity that only comes when the players are fully invested in the future of their characters.