7 Lessons From Playing My First Roleplaying Game
Dawn light stole slowly over the tired streets of Seattle. Street pedlars were already out warming up for the day, though at this time their only customers would be disappointed prostitutes on their way home. Sitting cross-legged in the centre of his derelict room, Khaelidus let the sounds and smells of the street wash over him. At that moment, it was the crashing of jack-boots on the stairs that held his attention.
He could probably deal with these low rent cops, his grip unconsciously tightening on the handle of his sword as he imagined blood splattering across the stairwell. But now was not the time for such impulsiveness. As brutally enthusiastic as the police could be, they were not the enemy. Slowly, he placed the blade on the floor and raised his hands.
“POLICE! FREEZE!” accompanied the splintering of the old door, “EVERYDODY ON THE GROUND – oh.”
A half dozen assault rifles pointed at Khaelidus’ head. “Good morning, officers.”
“You’re under arrest for the hijacking and theft of the commlink delivery in Takoma last night. Don’t – er – don’t try to resist.”
Interesting, thought Khaelidus, as a cop nervously clapped handcuffs around his wrists. Something I didn’t steal.
Two weeks ago, I sat down with a group of friends to experience my very first roleplaying game. My elf ninja Khaelidus and his/my misfit group of runners, a term for the mercenary gangs operating just on the shady side of the law in this world, got out of jail with the help of a mysterious lawyer, survived a bar fight after receiving our first job, and having broken into our target’s hotel room, found him dead with a haul of drugs untouched beneath his bed. Not bad for one night of gaming!
Roleplaying tends to involve playing a system, a set of rules that define the world and how your characters can interact with it. Dungeons & Dragons is likely the most famous one. We are playing Shadowrun, a world of guns, blades and bombs, but mixed with fantasy like races of elves, orks and trolls, as well as magic. It’s 2075, and in this dystopia, corporations rule the world (wait, did I say dystopian future? #satire), deckers escape reality on the Matrix, samurai are cybernetically enhanced warriors, while wizards and adepts use magic to match them. Think William Gibson/Android: Netrunner meets classic fantasy. Hell, there are even dragons!
As this was my first time playing a role-playing game, I thought I’d share my experiences, thoughts and lessons learnt. Let me know what you think! If there are any important lessons I’ve still to learn then please let me know in the comments!
1. Be Prepared: Character Creation is a Nightmare
Before you can get into the action and adventure of a roleplaying game, you must go through the nightmare of character creation. Here, you decide your character’s race, their attributes and abilities, their skills and their starting equipment. However, it took two full evenings to get our group sorted out. Two full evenings when I could have been playing awesome board games! Fighting through long lists of skills and equipment that you need to read. It’s ridiculous! I mean, just look at these tables of stuff!
Now, it’s not all bad. It sets the scene for you and you get to decide your background and imagine the exciting things you’ll be doing mid-game. Part of the issue is that we are playing Shadowrun, particularly heavy on the character creation front, where other RPGs have slightly gentler procedures. Even better, your games master can probably do the lions share of the work for you if you give them a good idea of the broad strokes of your character. Certainly they should guide you on the best abilities and skills that will fit your character. I decided my character would have an aversion to machinery and implants, preferring to trust in his own abilities. My games master therefore suggested I took on the role of an Adept, who boost their abilities with focus and diligence (and maybe a bit of magic, but I chose to interpret it differently). That further helped to define how my character might act, and what skills would fit in with that.
Character creation is without doubt the most intimidating part of the process, but forewarned is forearmed! There are also plenty of things you can do to help make it less painful than I found it! In particular:
2. Read up on the World Before you Start
Have a quick read about the system you’re playing before you leap into things. It makes creating a new character so much easier. I completely failed to do this! I was introduced to the world and what characters might be capable of at the start of our character creation session. A bit of my time spent reading some of the background could have sped this process up considerably! The main rulebook is a great place to start, and typically all you need. It doesn’t even have to be much, just a few pages of background and setting. If you’re keen you could start skimming through the available skills to get an idea of what you could do before a formal character creation session. Next time I’ll definitely do some background reading!
3. It is Totally Worth the Wait!
After the frustrating start, I’m very happy to report that actually playing the game was great! From my opening arrest and subsequent release (thank you, mysterious blond lawyer!), getting our first job and surviving the subsequent bar fight, then arriving at the location of the pimp we were sent to rob and realising there might be more to everything than we first thought, I swept along imagining, and creating, the world as we went. I helped carefully construct a plan to break into the target’s hotel room, I boldly (and foolishly) engaged the boss of a ghoul gang in combat, and generally acted the arrogant, haughty elf. It was immense fun, and every step of the way you are picturing the story in your mind. Utterly fantastic fun!
4. Weaknesses and Flaws make your Character Interesting
It’s a pretty universal truth of story crafting that if you want your characters to be interesting, they need to be flawed in some way. It makes them relatable and your audience wants to see them overcome those flaws. In role-playing, it makes for interesting opportunities to challenge your characters! Shadowrun has a system whereby players can specify certain negative attributes of their character. One of my fellow role players has a drug addiction (in the game…), whereas my character wants to avoid innocent casualties at all costs. I like to imagine there was some traumatic, mission gone wrong, type event in his past. While it hasn’t come up yet, I bet our games master is waiting to create some nasty situation to test me!
5. Set up Conflict Within the Group
These flaws are a great way of setting your group up for internal conflict. This, I’ve discovered, is a really cool thing to do. While plenty of role-playing sees you in conflict with external threats (like monsters, or in our case rival gangs), these exist only in the words and descriptions of the games master. Internal conflicts between players are actually ‘fought’ between the people you’re playing with, which is even more fun! For example, at the end of our first mission, we found a haul of drugs in the target’s hotel room. I, as the supposedly noble ninja, wanted to leave them behind or even better, to destroy them. However, the drug addict I mentioned earlier was keyed into the hotel’s security systems and wouldn’t unlock the door until I agreed to bring them with me. It was hilarious and totally secondary to the main quest, but makes for a much better story!
6. Stay in Character
Of course, you can set up all the interesting situations you like, but if you don’t behave in character, it’s all going to be for naught. In any situation you need to take a moment to consider how your character would react, at least I do! This isn’t something that has come naturally to me. But it’s good to think about. I want to try and make my behaviour consistent even when, as in the bar fight, it puts my character’s life in danger and takes the help of my group to get me out of it. Of course, it was all part of my plan to manoeuvre the bad guy in front of our Orc Shaman’s fireball! Now, I expect (and hope!) my character will develop and change over time as the game plays out. But those will be small, subtle changes. I want to be sure I can explain my decisions within the context of my character. Khaelidus is not about to going bombing public places, at least not without making sure the place is clear first!
7. You Don’t Need to be a Great Actor
This was my most important discovery, and the thing I was most afraid of before starting our first adventure. I did a bit of acting in high school, but that was always scripted. I suck at improv! So the thought of acting out scenes, as a character, with a bunch of people who’ve done this before had me seriously worried! But I really didn’t need to be! While a fully acted out scenario would be awesome, that isn’t the only way to play. In my group there was much more passive narration of activity than full-blown character monologues. That means that acting ability was not important at all. There’s plenty of opportunity to gently try it out as scenes play out but no pressure to do so. Hopefully I’ll gather confidence as the sessions go buy! But there’s no need to be nervous, you can be as enthusiastic (or not) with the acting as you like.
When I was invited to join in on this roleplaying campaign, I was pretty unsure. Having only seen roleplaying sessions as the butt of comedy show jokes, I really didn’t know what to expect in the real world (or meat space, as Shadowrun affectionately calls it)! While I knew there was a huge variety of roleplaying games out there, I’d never even seen one being played before. So I hesitantly agreed to join in, hoping I wouldn’t regret it. It’s with great relief that I can say I had a fantastic time, and I can totally recommend giving it a go! If you’re reading this in the same position I was in two weeks ago, and want a slightly better idea of what you might be getting into, I recommend you check out Wil Wheaton’s new series: Titansgrave. He is leading and filming a roleplaying series, and while the story might be pretty geeky and not to everyone’s tastes, it gives a very good sense of the feel of playing in one. Most importantly though, just have fun!
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