"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
The laws of combat are a wonderful thing, and apply to many situations. Especially in gaming, when you are the GM. Players (nevermind friends you think you know well) just always manage to surprise by, well, surprising with actions you didn't think they'd do.
Heh, ok, I'm making it sound much more ominous than it was. I don't think it went too badly, though its hard to gauge exactly how the others felt about it.
I do need to be cautious (especially with spoilers), as I know at least one person from the group reads this blog...
My plan was, I thought, a rather inspired one. As I made everyone create a backstory for their characters, I wrote a one-page 'introductory story' for each of them, which summarized their recent past, how they came to the starting city (none of the characters knew each other) and also hooks to involve them in the story that was about to play out. These pages were handed out (all nicely printed) as the game started, followed by some general text that laid out a scene, and began an encounter that would bring the characters together, introduce them to the adventure, and begin a journey to the adventure's main locale. More would ensue there. The idea was to entrance the players with their introduction story, have them deal the encounter, and have them sucked into the game and story (and into character), leaving a powerful impression that would carry through in this otherwise 1e-style module.
Except that the combat took way longer than I thought, leading to some tediousness, and worse leading to not even beginning the journey to the other locale. So I fear that the 'entrancing' didn't root. And some of the characters didn't quite play/do as I thought they would, or play-off what I'd crafted in their intro as I thought they might , and then I got some timing wrong, and those forced other changes... and then you forget something... and you end up driving home cursing yourself and being worried because, for some reason, you actually care how your players feel. Hee.
At any rate, we'll see how this goes from here. Nothing that went awry was horribly detrimental, just out of order or not as 'elegant' as it may have otherwise been. I'm mostly disappointed that the 'entrancing' didn't go (as) well (as it may have).
One week now to prepare for the next!
Posted by kannik at April 5, 2004 03:26 PM in Daily, Gaming | TrackBack