Ostracism in RPGs...

[sabredog]

When I was first dating my wife in the early '90's I was wrapping up a regular Saturday night Call of Cthulhu campaign that had been going on for 2 years. It had started in the 1920's and the campaign arc was scheduled to complete in 2010 with some of the original characters involved...oh, it was amazingly complicated and there was no way I was going to stop it early. It had to finish or the players would probably lynched me for dereliction of a referee's duty.

Well, my wife, good upstanding Christian that she is saw my rule books, notes, maps, etc., scattered around me one Saturday afternoon as I was getting ready for that night's game and you'd have thought she caught me in the middle of some satanic ritual. She freaked out about how sinister the path an RPGer was heading down, etc., and demanded that I give up the hobby and destroy my books and notes.

I told her there was absolutely no way that would happen since people were counting on me to show up, but that she was more than welcome to come and watch the game - or play - if she wanted to try to "save" us all from our unholy ways. After all, some of the wives and girlfriends not only tagged along to visit with each other, but a lot of them played the various games I ran.

So she goes with me, she was so tense it was soooo hard not to laugh at her, but once she started to talk with everyone, meet my friends and all she settled down. By the time I was a couple hours into the game she was really sucked into the storytelling and roleplaying...laughing with everyone else when something funny happened, jumped at a scary part, and when it was over she couldn't stop asking questions about the whole thing.

It was pretty funny to see the change in her. Once she realized we weren't going to start devil worshipping and that this was more like our "bowling night" she left me alone about it. My wife has never played in any of my games - she says she still can't understand how grownups can act so silly and all when in real life some of us (like me) are so serious. Once my wife asked me why I can't be that way all the time, but stopped asking after I told her it was because I'm not really an archeology professor who went so insane that he could only run in circles and cluck like a chicken - I only play one on TV.

Nowadays every time I start working on some new adventure and run the idea past her or my kids (the youngest of whom just started a Traveller solo game with me that I'm converting to a series of stories for) my wife just rolls her eyes and calls me a nerd.

 

[fiat_knox]

When I was first dating my wife in the early '90's I was wrapping up a regular Saturday night Call of Cthulhu campaign that had been going on for 2 years. It had started in the 1920's and the campaign arc was scheduled to complete in 2010 with some of the original characters involved

2010? The campaign, or just the setting?

It was pretty funny to see the change in her. Once she realized we weren't going to start devil worshipping and that this was more like our "bowling night" she left me alone about it. My wife has never played in any of my games - she says she still can't understand how grownups can act so silly and all when in real life some of us (like me) are so serious. Once my wife asked me why I can't be that way all the time, but stopped asking after I told her it was because I'm not really an archeology professor who went so insane that he could only run in circles and cluck like a chicken - I only play one on TV.

That's the line I come up with whenever people ask me "Are you for real?"

Nowadays every time I start working on some new adventure and run the idea past her or my kids (the youngest of whom just started a Traveller solo game with me that I'm converting to a series of stories for) my wife just rolls her eyes and calls me a nerd.

Good story. Nice one.

 

[sabredog]

2010? The campaign, or just the setting?

LOL! The campaign setting. That thing burnt me out so badly that I haven't been able to stand even looking at that game anymore. It was a lot of work and fun, but I think the most important reason it worked out as well as it did was the players.

Even though it was incredibly complicated and wove together player characters from the 1870's (adventures in the days of the Raj with secret cults in the high Hindu Kush), 1920's (standard stuff including vampires, werewolves, Darkest Africa, and of course Antarctica with the final scene involving sorcerous combat onboard a flaming zeppelin over R'lyeh with US Marines storming the island to stop French cultists who found the island by using old dreadnoughts that had been converted to submarine battleships...) , and then finalized in a dystopian 2010 (where the Cold War never ended and an all-out Soviet nuclear first strike on the US missile fields was orchestrated to crack open a great gate and rift in time and space).........well, you get the idea......

...it was the mix of players we had that made it all work - total suspension of disbelief and they all GOT IT with regards to that game and the way my campaign ran. I don't think I've ever had as good a group in any other game I've played before or since. It just gelled so perfectly that often the players would come up with an idea about what they thought might be really going on behind the scenes of some plot that was totally wrong - but it sounded so much better than what I had written that I'd just toss my idea out and wing it off the cuff till I could catch up with them and write that new change into the campaign. Players like that are worth their weight in gold.

 

[JAFARR]

Good players can make a mediocre GM look good and visa versa. They can also run you ragged. Our Traveller GM once put the game on hold with us in an out of control head long dive into an ocean once we came out of a planned (on his part) miss jump. That miss jump had taken us from somewhere near Regina to somewhere in the Solomani Rim and 5 years into the future. We survived the miss jump, but our pilot made a fatal error trying to land on the Earth like world we found there. He had so much work into that campaign he was not going to scrap it due to a fatal error. He put us on hold until the next weekend to figure out how to save us. We ended up losing everything except the cloths on our backs and what we were carrying in our hands and on our person - little enough when you are expecting a level 3 pilot to make a normal landing. We did manage to have an inflatable raft within reach and land in a current that carried us within sight of land.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Good actors can make a director look good, and vice versa, though I think the latter might be a bit tougher.

But a misjump from The Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim? How do you do that?

 

[aramis]

Good actors can make a director look good, and vice versa, though I think the latter might be a bit tougher.

But a misjump from The Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim? How do you do that?

GM didn't have Atlas, I suspect.

 

[Madarin Dude]

Good actors can make a director look good, and vice versa, though I think the latter might be a bit tougher.

But a misjump from The Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim? How do you do that?

GM drives a Fiat.

 

[fiat_knox]

Does he really?

 

[JAFARR]

...But a misjump from The Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim? How do you do that?

How do you jump in time? You have to ask him, but I've lost track of this old friend. Found his name online and sent a letter, but it was returned as undeliverable.

 

[Blue Ghost]

IIRC (which, admittedly, I may not), you roll a die to determine the number of dice to roll to determine how many hexes you jumped, and roll one die to determine the direction.

Misjumping from the Marches to Imperial occupied Terra seems to require a bucket full of dice

 

[far-trader]

Ah, it's been that kind of a day...

GM drives a Fiat.

...took me several hours to finally get it. The sad part is I almost posted the same thing without the jest just before you posted, and I still didn't get it then. I think it's the late tired mind winding down that finally allowed my mirth to escape it's prison and see it.

Well played sir

 

[Whipsnade]

Dan,

If the post had included a rim shot, you would have got it immediately.

As BG correctly remembered, it's usually 1D6 for misjump direction an 6D5 for misjump distance. The Marches-to-Rim misjump follows the one rule that trumps all others however; The GM can do whatever they see fit.


Regards,
Bill

 

[aramis]

no, Bill, in CT and MT, it's (1d6)d6 for distance. (TTB. 51) Maximum is thus 36 parsecs. Not enough to cross a sector completely except if you started at an edge and go right off it.

 

[Whipsnade]

no, Bill, in CT and MT, it's (1d6)d6 for distance. (TTB. 51) Maximum is thus 36 parsecs. Not enough to cross a sector completely except if you started at an edge and go right off it.

Aramis,

Oops. Typo on my part. That "5" was supposed to be a "6".


Regards,
Bill

 

[Madarin Dude]

Sorry forgot the rim shot.

 

[rancke]

Oops. Typo on my part. That "5" was supposed to be a "6".

Either way it's redundant. In CT and MT, all dice are six-siders.


Hans

 

[Blue Ghost]

Heh, the almighty GM/Ref is "God" for all game purposes. "And Mike said, 'Let there be a misjump', and it was good, for verily did they reach far orbit Terra from yonder marches, and much rejoicing was had."

Seriously, getting back on-topic, you know, I just never found my gaming to be an issue with anyone. Not ever.

 

[kmsoice]

I only had a problem once. My uncle once asked to look at some of my D&D books to to see if they were appropriate for his boys. As he was looking through them he was so obviously lingering disapprovingly over every depiction of a female that it was only with enormous effort that I was able to keep from laughing out loud. I would have objected to what he was doing but it was just sooo obvious, so ... cute, that he had made up his mind long ago and was just looking for an excuse.

I do not think his boys, my cousins, ever played RPGs but considering that I was 'The Good One' and they were 'The Terrors' I feel better about my choices than I do about my uncle's.

I have never denied my gaming hobby but I have never exactly advertized it either. I have played RPGs side by side with dope smoking Hippies and with hard core Bible thumpers and I figure that as with with my uncle, sabredogs' experience aside, people have made up their minds one way or another long ago and nothing I say is really going to change it.

 

[ShapeShifter]

People immediately forget that I'm into RPGs when I tell them that I have the world's most awesome Hello Kitty collection.










Just kidding!
:rofl:

 

[far-trader]

That just about earned you a keyboard and monitor double kill :rofl:

Fortunately I had no beverage in hand to lips as I was reading.