![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Return of Stormbringer
Apr. 16th, 2005 11:12 pmRan my second session of my new Stormbringer game today. Though the first session went fine, I was somewhat rusty. It'd been 5 or 6 years since I'd run a roleplaying game and probably close to 20 years before I'd seriously tried to run a Stormbringer game. (There was a brief flirtation in 1990 or so but I overextended by tring to create my own world; before that it was sometime in High School, with my old RPG crowd.)
This time around I felt a little more confident and in the groove and things went well. When Dave P. gave me a ride home he mentioned that he thought it'd gone very well, which I appreciated hearing. The game lasted about four hours, starting a little late because Eric F. and Dave W. were extremely late in arriving, and running a little late because I was in the middle of things. I went through only about a half or a third of what I'd prepared, which means that I really worked hard to improv and expand on what the players were interested in. There were hard moral dilemmas with no easy choices (which is what I build my stories around) amd I think it kept everyone involved.
Oh, and there were some mysteries to try and keep people interested and coming back for me.
I've tried to take a different tact to preparing my adventures this time around. In the past I would pedantically prepare my adventures in outline form bullet point by bullet point, point by subpoint. I was partially using an adventure from a book this time, though that was the part I never actually got to. For the rest of the story (and what I actually ran) I just have four or five lines of notes, plus a few dialogues that I prepared in my head on the way over to Donald's house.
In order to make this whole my-running-a-game thing work I really need to be able to minimize preparations and improv on limited notes, because I won't have enough time otherwise. I'm very creative when I write, and will often knock out a whole set of scenario ideas for an individual person/place/thing, so there's no reason I can't do the same when running games, and today at least showed that can work.
I'm also doing my best to build a rich tapestry for the world, with person, places, and things that the players will increasingly become familiar with, which should make games that much easier to run in the future. I felt like I accomplished that a fair amount better this week than last time, because I seeded plots for at least three future adventures (including the one that players headed out to accomplish, but we never got to).
It's unclear what's going to be going on next week, because there are limited folks around, the week after that I'm going to run again, and then Dave P. should finally be starting his pirates game proper.
This time around I felt a little more confident and in the groove and things went well. When Dave P. gave me a ride home he mentioned that he thought it'd gone very well, which I appreciated hearing. The game lasted about four hours, starting a little late because Eric F. and Dave W. were extremely late in arriving, and running a little late because I was in the middle of things. I went through only about a half or a third of what I'd prepared, which means that I really worked hard to improv and expand on what the players were interested in. There were hard moral dilemmas with no easy choices (which is what I build my stories around) amd I think it kept everyone involved.
Oh, and there were some mysteries to try and keep people interested and coming back for me.
I've tried to take a different tact to preparing my adventures this time around. In the past I would pedantically prepare my adventures in outline form bullet point by bullet point, point by subpoint. I was partially using an adventure from a book this time, though that was the part I never actually got to. For the rest of the story (and what I actually ran) I just have four or five lines of notes, plus a few dialogues that I prepared in my head on the way over to Donald's house.
In order to make this whole my-running-a-game thing work I really need to be able to minimize preparations and improv on limited notes, because I won't have enough time otherwise. I'm very creative when I write, and will often knock out a whole set of scenario ideas for an individual person/place/thing, so there's no reason I can't do the same when running games, and today at least showed that can work.
I'm also doing my best to build a rich tapestry for the world, with person, places, and things that the players will increasingly become familiar with, which should make games that much easier to run in the future. I felt like I accomplished that a fair amount better this week than last time, because I seeded plots for at least three future adventures (including the one that players headed out to accomplish, but we never got to).
It's unclear what's going to be going on next week, because there are limited folks around, the week after that I'm going to run again, and then Dave P. should finally be starting his pirates game proper.