(Press Release)-Massive Games Announces it's Spring 2003 Line-up of New ReleasesHarvey Cruikshank, President, Owner, Designer, Writer, Artist, and Gopher of Massive Games has finally revealed the long-anticipated supplements to its wildly successful "JustOneDie" Core Book.
In which our hero discovers by means of a mirror he is somebody else and confronts issues of character as a consequence.A Buddhist who had just asked for a lift said it was satori. You don't want to know my reply as he left the cab. I don't advertise he got a free ride - bad for business. Sour grapes? I've got lemons. Between jobs now, I check the rear view mirror and see someone else's eyes staring at me from the driving seat.
This week will require a little homework on your part. Steal some money from whomever you steal money from in your life (boss, significant other, parents) and get yourself three things: masking tape, a stepladder and a measuring device. A yardstick works if you live in a land with yards, and this will be geared towards the non-metric for reasons to soon become obvious.
Being a GM is often a thankless task, and yet many of us still work tirelessly every week to thrill our players with another amazing session. We battle people's schedules, player apathy, and many other things to keep our campaigns going. Most of us do it blindly, but gradually learn from our mistakes over the years. In my own early days sitting behind the screen I wished fervently for any sort of guidance. I knew the players were out to get me, and fought constantly to stay one step ahead of them.
On to outfitting a tiny little crossbow, as promised last time. In this case, I was lucky enough to have a nicely-sculpted hand crossbow to work with. However, an empty bow doesn't look quite as menacing as a loaded one, so I decided to give the little guy some ammo.
"A plan never survives contact with the enemy," bemoans a military maxim. Modified for gaming, the proverb becomes "the DM's plot never survives contact with the players." The image of DM-as-frustrated-novelist is well known, and even parodied by the haltingly-read descriptions and purple-prose boxed text in a popular Net mp3 (". . .the smell of mildew emanates from the wet dungeon walls. . ."). This novelist tendency is understandable: isn't the point of roleplaying to tell the story of the heroes' careers? Most players in my experience maintain it is, but when they feel a DM trying to puppeteer their characters into a pre-ordained plotline, they often rebel.
If you're anything like me, you get tired of LARP plots that hold the fate of the world at stake. Every battle is not the ultimate battle between Good and Evil; every war is not the War to End All Wars. I mean, seriously: if you have the Ultimate Battle this event, what do you do for next event? Another Ultimate Battle? Does this make last event the Penultimate Battle? This really stretches the limits of believability, and besides, the impact of the Ultimate Battle will quickly wane if you have to fight it once a month for a year.
The bandits are dead, the necromancer defeated, and even the dragon hatchling has seen its last sunrise. The player characters have to buy a castle just to store their treasure and their skills are beyond human imagination. To meet the challenges of such a mighty group, the Gamemaster pulls out his secret weapon: The Villager.
It's over. We played through the climactic combat, spent half an hour tying up loose ends and detailing the fates of characters we'd played for the better part of a year, and declared the campaign to have reached its end. Then we picked up our dice, finished off the milkshakes kindly provided by one player, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways, most likely never to unite as a gaming group again. There was sadness at leaving, true, but also a certain strong sense of pride at having accomplished what our characters set out to do so long ago, when the story had first begun.
While gamers have been rolling dice in basements and bedrooms for well over twenty years now, on a relative scale, online role-playing is still many years behind. MUDs and other text based role-playing options began the internet phenomena which has branched out into full fledged 3D games that have years of planning and thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars invested.
