Background
I found a gaming group that asks some questions about a person’s gaming background to screen them for joining their games. It feels like an RP resume, so I offer you here a glimpse into a side of me that would not surprise anyone who knows me. ^_^
My favorite experience as a GM
My single favorite experience as a GM came when I was playing with just three friends. The setting was a space opera sprawling multiple planets. To get their characters in sync I gave them a mentor that would train them and teach them to use their powers together as a team.
There was the small white-haired psychic kid, the nightmare-ridden geisha assassin, and the animalistic sword-person. They were a good team, and became fond of the mentor, a small kung-fu artist type person who taught them in a bamboo forest/garden atop a megastructure on a futuristic planet.
The geisha’s backstory was that she was under a geas that revealed her targets in her dreams, and if she didn’t take them out in a timely manner her full body tattoo would begin crawling and overtaking her skin, causing tremendous pain. Near the end of their training it was revealed to her that her next target was the man that had been training them.
Quite an epic battle ensued, with the players switching sides multiple times trying to discern the correct course of action, really delving into their character’s background and personality to RP their response.
The moment that I remember fondly is the point in which they banded together and overcame the old man, defeating him, while in the his death fall the old man forgave them for their actions. My friends sat in stunned silence before wiping tears from their eyes. I felt like a shaman passing on our ancestral memory to a group of responsive village children. It was amazing.
My favorite experience as a PC
This is a toss up between two moments, but I will go with the one where I role-played well.
The Legend of the Five Rings setting is based on asian mythology and has a heavy emphasis on a samurai caste system, which always filled me with anxiety when I played my character. I chose to pick a difficult role of having an ancestor who had dishonored himself and refused to commit suicide. He was eventually hunted down, and came to haunt his descendants in an attempt to restore his honor. My character was somewhat unique in that I was a ronin shugenja, that is to say a wizard with absolutely no ties to anyone (my ancestor taught me the single healing spell in the game, allowing me to be useful). In fact, any of the other players (a massive 11 players) could have their characters kill mine without any repercussion. A lovely challenge.
The part I fondly remember is when the Scorpion Clan geisha informant is gathering all the PCs together for a mission to go into a restricted part of the world to investigate something. She is either seducing or paying everyone in the game to do this. When it came to my character I am promised restoration of my family’s honor, power, access to magic, all kinds of things. I am refusing all of them, in character, and I can see that the GM is running out of things to promise me. My character looks the women in the eye and says he will help her, but not for power, wealth, or honor. He reaches down and sips his miso.
“I will go because the soup is delicious.”
My favorite character
All of them.
Honestly, I don’t get to play very often (I GM), so my characters don’t feel very complete. I played a wizard that I liked. I am partial to the wizard that overcomes challenges without using magic, but rather through role-playing that high intelligence mages are so proud of.
Four questions and I got an incomplete.
My GM experience that led players to revolt and my game books to be sealed away…
I am a pretty relaxed person when it comes to mistakes. I enjoy communicating, and making mistakes is a great ice-breaker!
The things that I screw-up are normally being in the moment during certain games. I enjoy world-building on a near obsessive level, and will go into details about something and e-mail it to all my players and completely forget to look up a rule or make a decision for something that a player asked me. Also, while I am pretty good making impromptu decisions in-game sometimes I don’t stand my ground with twinks who are meta-gaming. I used to think that I wanted to make the game enjoyable for everyone, but now I just want the rules to make the game smooth and focus on RP.