The Origin Story
A PC forgets that Disturbing Past is a bad disadvantage to Min-Max with.
Bryce : Hihabnabitmkiii : Hiya.
Bryce : Well, we had the game yesterday. It was fun...
habnabitmkiii : Did anything interesting happen?
Bryce : Yeah.
After the game proper, Space Gnome and I stayed to help Josh make a new character, as his uncle said we should be there to "keep him honest". Also, Josh wanted Space Gnome's sage munchkin advice for making a non-useless character.
Josh: "I'm going to be a human rogue with Empathic psionic powers!"
Space Gnome & I: "(sigh)" (knowing that to be a human Empath is a 1% chance per roll into the random advantages/disadvantages table...)
It took at least an hour for us to make the character. And by us, I mean primarily Space Gnome and me, as Josh mainly rolled the dice and reacted to Space Gnome's announcements of each new random trait he got as I marked them down on a paper.
Eventually, Josh hit a random disadvantage that required him to pick three other disadvantages.
He picked "Disturbing Past" 3 times! And, I point out, this was over the advice of Space Gnome: "Remember what happened last time?" Some people just don't learn...
habnabitmkiii : It should make for a very interesting future session.
Bryce : Oh yes.... very interesting. (Insert the peal of distant thunder here.)
Bryce: It gets better, though. He hit that disadvantage again (he had a lot of rolling to do - remember, 1% chance to get what he wants each time), and picked "Dark Secret" 4 times!
habnabitmkiii : Do you pick the secrets, or does he?
Bryce : I do. I usually cooperate with the players to come up with them, but that's not required. (Space Gnome had to remind him of this when he disliked the first one.)
habnabitmkiii : Haha, so what are his secrets?
Bryce : His first one requires a little explanation. A bit after rolling his future horrific death^W^W^Wdark past, he rolled "Natural Sage". Sage, you probably recall, is one of the three psionic disciplines.
Getting "Natural Sage" is obviously good, and indeed many people might have quit there with the random table. But no.
Josh: "Sage? But Sages are gay!"
Space Gnome: "Are you saying my character is 'gay'?" (Space Gnome is a multiclassed Sage-Bright-Empath)
"One-third gay."
Space Gnome: "Sages have Chaos Butterfly!" (A psionic that lets you control random events, within some very specific limits.)
As this little discussion continued, I came to a realization: Me: "Josh, I just figured out your first Disturbing Past. You insulted Valana (Space Gnome's character's name) in a bar a year ago... and somehow you survived."
"Up until now, anyway."
habnabitmkiii : Hahaha.
Bryce : So, that's Disturbing Past #1 - Having insulted Space Gnome. He had better hope that Space Gnome was too drunk that night to remember him. Frankly, that's probably the only way he could have survived angering her anyway.
I mean, it must be hard to effect Flaming Death with four or five drinks, given the small mass of gnomes.
habnabitmkiii : What about his other disturbing pasts and dark secrets?
Bryce : For Disturbing Past #2, I think I'm going to do something from Children of Dune. Well, a twisted version of it, anyway. You know how some of the protagonists in Dune had access to personified ancestral memories?
habnabitmkiii : I'm not sure. I've only read the first book.
Bryce : Oh. Well, the idea was that it was like having voices in your head you could talk too. It could be good or bad, but it was a risk because if you let your guard down too much, they could take over, possibly forever.
Bryce : But these voices were of your ancestors, created by your subconscious from genetic memory or some-such. (Awakened by the Spice.)
habnabitmkiii : Interesting.
I started reading the second Dune book (is that Children of Dune?) but I got bored of it and never finished.
Bryce : Dune Messiah is the second one. It's a bit of a lull. Children of Dune is a bit ponderous and dark, but the plot is more interesting. God Emperor of Dune is great. I'm reading Heretics of Dune now.
So anyway, I'm going to give him that... something that can be a blessing or a curse. Except with fictional characters, instead of his ancestors. So, he could, say, call up Sherlock Holmes or Darth Vader for advice. Of course, only he can see or hear them, though. (Imagine those little "shoulder angels" in cartoons.)
And of course the whole thing might be indicative of insanity...
habnabitmkiii : Ah.
Bryce : But the real reason is that he is being invaded by an extra-dimensional being. Or maybe lots of them. We'll see. But the figments will try to convince him to let them take over his body and senses on various pretenses.... and when that happens... muahahahahah!
Bryce : (For instance, if his inner Sherlock Holmes said something like: "Presently, I cannot help you find that vital piece of evidence, because I only occupy a small fraction of your mind. But if you were to allow me more complete control, then I could aid your party...")
habnabitmkiii : Do his other disadvantages also allow you to potentially control him?
Bryce : I haven't made up the third one yet, but I'm probably going to use it to bolster the second one. That leaves four more to go.... I haven't made them up yet, so I don't know.
{Space Gnome thinks that Josh has learned his lesson and will not allow anything to control him, because of the other incident. I am skeptical.}
I got this idea (apart from the Dune inspiration) by the way that he would, when alone in his thread, totally out of communication with the rest of the party, ask advice from the other players.
We joked that he had an "inner gnome" and "inner rogue" as "shoulder angels" that he could talk too. (His inner gnome did not want to be bothered unless "interesting" things were happening, and then generally advised blowing stuff up.)
habnabitmkiii : Hah.
Bryce : The only reservation I have about this is the likelyhood that I am going to get bombarded with requests to summon up obscure Anime characters. (That I don't know about.)
So I need some kind of way to deny them and make it look like a game mechanic :)
habnabitmkiii : How was it that you found your players, again?
Bryce : Well, Josh and Andrew were bored (it being summer and they being kids - I recall but dimly this condition, a thing banished from my life by Internet), so it was easy to get them to try the game. They were in fact my first two players, on^Wwith whom I debugged my rules.
("Sorry, your roll indicated that your arm exploded. No, I'm not being heavy handed. Deal with it.")
habnabitmkiii : Hahah.
Bryce : I figured that it would be easy to cut my teeth GMing with them.
This turned out to be a good move, although I dare say that the game was satisfactory enough for them; I didn't fail utterly as a GM. By the third session, I was much more comfortable with it (I'd never played an RPG before, understand), and their father joined the game.
He says he joined mainly to support the game, but he says that he genuinely enjoys it now.
That third session was the first one of our present campaign, how in it's thirty-first session, about eight months later. The previous games I played with the two had been in the same continuity, but weren't connected with the campaign.
Anyhow, at this point I thought the game was debugged and entertaining enough to invite my other friends, which I did.
I did this in a very straight-forward way - I just explained something of the game to them, the kinds of characters they could make, and so forth, and then invited them.
That method got Space Gnome and his cousin, the other gnome player. (Ike Einberg, the preacher.)
Later on, the mother of Andrew also joined the game.
My friend Britten came with his little sister, and they play from time to time. I've learned to work with Britten's apocalyptic tendencies and make his characters rogue antagonists.
(Which is a useful way of incorporating a player who is both intermittent in his attendance and prone to acts of chaos.)
So, that's how the game got it's players.
habnabitmkiii : I guess I wasn't aware you had so many parents playing.
Bryce : That's a good point. Space Gnome's father also played the game. (For maybe five sessions.)
I haven't thought too much about that, but I suppose it can be a "family" activity, rather than the sole province of teenage nerds and unemployed, overweight single men. (As the conception some people have of role-playing would have it.)
Certainly it helps to promote the friendly image above the questionable meme that had a most regrettable vogue in the eighties: "Dungeons & Dragons will turn your children into cultists (An image also associated with people who think all RPGs are D&D, sadly.) Whatever the content of D&D that concerned people find objectionable, the basic fact is that criticism of all RPGs on the basis of the most popular one is exceedingly poorly reasoned - especially when the comparison is cross-genera.
Anyway, I'm going to go to bed... 'night.
habnabitmkiii : 'night.
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