28 September 2020

You Meet In A Tavern

How many RPG campaigns have started with that trope?

Aside

RPG or Role Playing Game refers to a tabletop game played with dice, pencils and paper.  The player informs the gamemaster or Dungeon Master what their character is trying to do and the GM tells them what to roll to succeed... or everyone plays their role and acts it out.  It does not refer to a video game playing piece mislabeled as a character where the only actions available are those which would be determined by a die roll.

End aside.

I know I've started a few that way.

It's a handy mechanism to get players who just met and have just completed character generation to introduce themselves and their characters to everyone else.

At this point in many (most?) games this is all the players know about the world besides the game system being used.

The GM then starts filling them in on things their characters should really already know (what with being born in the world after all).

Which is why I just laugh my fool head off at the numerous cases of reviewers and critics who didn't grasp the movie "Bright".

I got it.

Everyone I've ever gamed with and am still in contact with got it.

But critics and reviewers didn't.

I posit that they've never sat down and played good old fashioned D&D.

Another aspect that let me enjoy it, while they didn't, was the recurring situation where the GM only has a very small sliver of the world done when play begins.  The world expands as the players play in it.  Lots of things are presented without explanation, and they don't need explained, until the players head that direction.

And they won't if you describe it to them.

Things with descriptions are things the GM spent time on, and those are always traps.  Never go where the GM has details.  Go into the unknown, the gray space that's undefined.

The GM is your enemy and he is yours.

Let the mutual hate flow through you!

The people who wrote Bright didn't write it for critics or reviewers.  They wrote it for we who've rolled up a character and listened to the phrase, "You meet in a tavern..." and then proceeded to have the details of the setting applied as the GM made them up in real time while we interacted with and subverted their designs.

I look forward to the second module in that adventure.

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