2 Game Masters Walk Into A Bar...

SSLF was my first foray into RPing, especially in a forum-sensitive way. I remember when the Hub of the Worlds opened up and some of the first RP's coming out: obviously things prepubescent teenagers would enjoy, like Halo and Aliens and Star Wars and Starship Troopers; i.e. adaptations of established universes. I didn't try my hand at it until much later, and I can't even remember my first RP as DM. Maybe it was a Zelda one; I did a couple after all.

There were big stigmas back then: no one ever RPed as anything but male soldiers and most stories were very simple in their plots: 'X Squad gets to Y, kills Boss.' I remember Shagohod being one of the first members to RP as a woman, especially in the Halo RP that went on to be 100 pages (I don't think this was topped until Hawk's Pokemon Blue RP.)

Throughout middle school and high school, there was a bit of poor outlook on tabletop gaming. No one I knew was playing D&D, no one had money for all these models and books being pushed out. Especially in my town, all gaming stores shrunk or went out of business until it was really just Gamestops and Best Buys. Through school I found a big love for drama and improvisation, and often found myself adding on and building stories with my friends casting them as characters within. I was always stuck afterschool without a car, so there was a time where I would lead these no-dice, no-paper, improv scenarios that people would always want in on. There was one in particular; a big-rip off of Indiana Jones that spanned 3 stories and ended with something along the lines of escaping Atlantis from Nazis in their crab-like submersibles.

I ended up getting into 40k and playing actual tabletop games later in life, when people accepted fantasy and TTG without being lumped into the weeaboos playing card games or neckbeards dicking around. Still, I always kept that freestyle and improvisation (especially when I got better at it) which really helped to get people who would never play otherwise. By foregoing the hard dice and rule books and big character sheets and treating it more of an improv game with a fluid story, I found that even the most 'popular' kids would like to try these zany adventures.

Eventually I petered out on SSLF because there was a much more interactive RPing community (which turned out to be us here now.) It was honestly Grom, really, who showed me a lot little tricks and the nuances of managing big teams. His campaigns were always so damn cool, no matter what we were playing, and he still often talks about his other ones with little anecdotes. There's one about a soldier who had a D12 in Endurance or something and just shrugged off jumping out of a plane with no chute. Through Grom I got to try things like Dark Heresy, Deadlands, Savage Worlds (my go-to RP system since it's incredibly easy) and Sundered Skies. We must have played for years, really, and I would never regret looking down at the clock and seeing '3AM' because it was always a blast. There were plenty of times where I didn't go out on Friday nights to party because I wanted to RP with all my friends and there was only one way to get Singapore, Australia, Canada and all the US coasts playing at the same time. Younger me would have been nuts about the whole partying thing, but I would have never traded a single session for anything else. It's always gotten my imagination flowing like no medium can, be it player or GM.

My main concern has always been about keeping it fresh. I grew fed-up with the identical RPs that were cropping up, along with identical characters with no motivation. There was a time where the template for a character was 'shadowy figure, possibly a bounty hunter." A lot of my SSLF RP's never worked out; you can see it on my old page. A lot of them are gone too, so it's almost like they never existed. I tried out a lot of ideas to see if they would work in that way, or if it was better to remove the player element and just leave it to narration. I tried all sorts of things: Jurassic Park and Alice in Wonderland, my own super SWAT team/Time Crisis-like shoot-em-up called CTTF, Stormtroopers ala COPS, a 60's mod London spy RP, a chiller survival-horror in a demented school/circus/asylum, and so on. Even if it didn't pan out, I was getting characters and feedback that I would have never gotten if I tried another way.


There are now a ton of conventional ways to express these stories I have: graphic novels, or tabletop simulators, or Savage World-ing it with a simple engine. But I'll always aim to include those who don't have D20's

I've run and played in a lot of games, almost all online and in a variety of systems. I think my first proper pen-and-paper game was as a player years ago playing DnD with some primary school friends (I'd have been about 9 or 10 years old), but I'd say my first 'real' game was a Dark Heresy game (Warhammer 40K RPG where the players are members of an Inquisitor's retinue, hunting threats against the Imperium of Man in the Emperor's name). We played over IRC and the game ran weekly (or a couple of nights weekly) for a couple of years. Since then I've run and played in games with that same group, although none of the other games have run quite as long as that first one due to being adults now versus being highschool kids.

I've also run a couple of games with some of the guys on here and some who're absent now, the main one being a game called Sundered Skies run on the Savage Worlds system which Arby mentions below. Sundered Skies is a post-apoc fantasy setting where the world the players inhabit was destroyed centuries ago, and the survivors live on floating islands suspended in a glowing sky that gradually turns those exposed to it mad - or worse. It seems fairly dark and grim, but the game itself - or at least, the way I ran it - was very swashbucklery, with lots of skyfighting on airships and adventure. I really enjoyed running a fantasy game with a twist and my players made some great characters. We had a young mechanic-girl (Arby) from a long-lost tribe of not-Scotsmen (who would later discover she was heir to a dwarven family), an orc berserker-turned-cook (Burgs), a mysterious elf who had ties to an ancient and eldritch horror (Richard, as if there was any doubt), a warrior-scholar who believed in - and sought out - the ancient and apparently long-destroyed moon (Dood), a wildling (cat-human hybrid created by the elves as slaves) swashbuckler as captain of the airship (Harry Monster), a dragonman sorcerer on a quest to attain full dragonhood and the power and immortality that promised (Gentleman Psycopath), a Glowborn (former goblins who suddenly gained intelligence, several feet of height and seem to have something to do with the glowing sky that surrounds the world) cleric of the Goddess of the Wind (Burngirl), and a dwarven courier who made a living travelling the skies delivering messages (Ambad).

By the end, it was a huge cast, but I never had trouble managing it cos all of those guys were great players. Matching up timezones was the only hard part because adventure hooks came so easily just because of how these guys (and gal) played their characters. Savage Worlds has a built-in 'flaws' system where players pick negative traits for positive bonuses at the start, but I always found a lot of the fun of the system came when the players and GM leveraged those flaws in creative ways. It's easy to be a badass fighter who kicks ass and takes names, but it's a heck of a lot more fun when that badass fighter's arrogance gets in the way and he tries to kick the ass of a badguy who's clearly a lot tougher than he is. It's a campaign I'd love to finish off one day, at least with the core group of players I started with, but I had a heap of fun running it which was mostly down to how great these guys are to run games for.

I tend to treat my games as collaborative stories where the players and GM work together to make a narrative - while as a GM you need to throw challenges in the party's faces, I tend to try to make sure the challenges are surmountable or, if they're not, are fun to 'lose' to. I've always thought that the best way to 'fail' any kind of challenge is to have it lead into another part of the story. If the badguy beats the party, he's not going to execute them; he'll take them to his fortress of doom to parade them in front of the people they fought to save to show his might, giving the players a chance to turn the tables - after all, now they're inside the fortress of doom, so they're halfway to beating him already!

Naw, you're making me blush!

To add a discussion question: what game do you guys wish you could run (or be a player in)? For me, I'd really love to try either a superhero RPG - it's one type of game I think works fantastically well as an RPG (players - and characters - can drop in and out, the 'heroes/villains never die' trope means favourite characters can show up again and again) but I haven't managed to get a group together. I've also got a bazillion ideas for other games I'd like to run as well which never helps.

If there's one thing I like about roleplaying is the diversity it has between an online forum, an online chat, tabletop, or pen-and paper. As Hawk said, forum roleplaying is unique in that it really is a combined pool of writers all effectively fleshing a story out together with the DM at the rudder, whereas online chat is a good hybrid between that but with pen-and-paper mechanics limiting (For good or ill) what players are capable of. Personally I'm a big fan of tabletop because it's fun to act your character out in person with a group of friends: It quickly becomes an improv acting session with the DM dynamically setting scenes while you and the party screw around. And of course dice rolling plays a hilarious key element in that whole improvisation.

One thing I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on are player death, especially on the tabletop. I find it difficult because after death that person ends up sitting on their hands for the remainder of the session, and incorporating them back into the campaign is always tricky (Namely with rank-up). If someone dies in a session I re-enroll them back into the session by letting them take control of a particularly effective NPC that I roll into the current of events. Afterwards, since there's usually a campaign still going on, I hand them back a character sheet and they can return as a new character (And at the same level they died with).


If it's online of course, I live and let die, but managing it for in-person, IRL roleplay sessions has me curious what everyone else does.

Player character deaths are always something I struggle with. I tend to like my games a little more upbeat and so I have a tendency to try to avoid character deaths at all costs. This is largely because my long-term group is quite small and killing characters off there would leave me a) very short on numbers, and b) ruin a lot of the overarching plots/interactions I like to build up. Instead, I like to try to work in injuries or long-term consequences for defeats. In Sundered Skies, I had Burgs' character Gorg captured by crazed dwarves rather than killed - what they planned to do to him was unclear, but it motivated the other characters to go in after him and added a lot of tension. Sure, revenge might've worked as a motivation - avenging their friends' death might have spurred them on - but this way Gorg was alive, Burgs got to keep his character and a race was on to save him before the dwarves could do what they planned with him.

The problem there was that, although Gorg wasn't dead, Burgs ended up not being able to do anything - as Solitaire mentioned, having a player have to sit out isn't much fun. I do like the idea of giving the player command of an NPC who might be on the scene as a way of keeping them involved - I'm not sure if I did that in our game, but there was a dwarf captain on the scene helping the players who'd have been an easy substitute character. This is obviously a lot harder to do in some situations (where the party has no reason to have NPCs around, for example) and is even trickier in certain systems and settings (some character classes in certain settings, like Dark Heresy, are very complicated - psykers, for example, have a lot of powers to pick from that work in particular ways that a player may not be able to get their head around).

I guess in the end I'm not really sure of the best way to handle it. Savage Worlds can be fairly unforgiving as a system (it's quite easy for a character to go down hard thanks to the 'exploding dice' mechanic which can make even a goon with a handgun a real threat) but also offers a lot of ways for players to hang in there (spending bennies to prevent damage or have better odds of passing bleed out rolls) and a lot of settings have their own subrules that make dying quite hard even if a character is knocked out of the fight. I do agree with Hawk that you need villains and monsters to be scary and that there needs to be danger, especially in an RPG environment where rolls are meant to carry weight, but I guess my style of GMing is a little softer. I tend to like seeing my players triumph as heroes rather than being beaten into a bloody smear on the sidewalk.

Luck is absolutely a huge factor in whether or not an rp succeeds. Sometimes, you get a concept that clicks well with the players and they all become invested in their characters. Other times, you may have just started an rp before some players leave and things quickly unravel. I honestly cannot say for certain what precisely makes some rps more successful than others. For instance, in addition to Rise I also tried to do S.I.N., which was a fun setting I envisioned with magic and monsters mixed with a modern crime drama. I thought I did a really good job of dming that rp, but it ended early due to inactivity. Why did Rise succeed when S.I.N. didn't? I'm not sure. 

I can tell you what I typically do though. My rps typically begin with a meet and greet. All of the new characters are meeting for the first time on a planet or on their new ship, and they have the opportunity to meet one another and explore the area. Certain players are great at working with little to no direction and in no time their characters are off doing their own thing. Other characters, meanwhile, may need something to spark their interest, so I may include some npcs for them to talk to or a few interesting locations they can go to. Then, in no time at all, the team is brought either into a mission briefing or something happens that explains to them what they'll be doing next, and the fun and games are wrapped up so the action can begin. 

One thing that I have noticed that makes an rp more successful is early evidence that the actions of players matter. Hey, that character said something rude to that npc? Well now that npc is pissed and ready to fight you. Feedback, early and frequently, is very helpful. And this can be both in character or out of character.