DMing with Charisma

What fictional character would best fit in your group? Why?

See, this has the same problem as yesterday, but it’s just different enough that I can’t use the same steps to resolve it. There’s a huge difference between “who I want” and “who will work”, and a difference between “a person who exists” and “a fictional person who can be interpreted differently by different observers”. That was a question of opinion, and this is an assessment based on tenuous, mutable facts. It’s borderline unanswerable.

So you know what? Batman. I want Batman, because that can be dozens of characters based on what I want. Sometimes we need Adam West Batman and his zany comedy. Sometimes we need Christian Bale and grimdark growling. Sometimes we need a genius, sometimes we need storyteller, sometimes we need a mentor. By just saying “Batman” I can get whatever flavor I need at any given time because I have access to every interpretation of him.

Except Frank Miller Batman. I don’t foresee needing an expert in prostitutes and swearing.

What historical character would you like in your group? For what game?

I can’t speak to the personality of any given historical figure. I’m not a history buff myself and I don’t really know who’s approachable, who’s clever, who’s good at thinking in-character, and who’s actually incredibly racist. But in a sense that’s freeing, because it means I can discard personality and decide based on what other skills or knowledge they would bring to enhance the game experience. We’ve had plenty of times where we needed to know things like “how many people do you need to maintain a boat this size?” or “how hot does a fire have to be to eradicate a human skeleton?” Somebody who knows the answers would not only save us time, but probably come up with the kind of ridiculous ideas we treasure.

Since I basically want a Renaissance man to act as a repository of facts, I might as well say Leonardo da Vinci. If we can’t handwave the language barrier, then Benjamin Franklin. I think the best game for them would be one set during or slightly before their time period, preferably without too much magic. There’s no way our game is enhanced by having our guest star note that fire spells kill everybody in the room by consuming all of the oxygen.

What types or source of inspiration do you turn to most often for RPGs?

I’m always passively looking for neat ideas. Whenever I bungle into something that I think would make a neat campaign idea, like the Year Without a Summer, I make a note of it. There’s no specific place I look for things like that.

When I’m actively looking for ideas, the walls of my office are covered with pictures and posters from various forms of media. If I’m stuck, I’ll just look around the room. A single poster can remind me of an entire movie, or all the characters in a show, or a comic arc I really liked, and from there I can strip it down to its component ideas and get a plot, a character, a setting, or something else I can work into my campaign. It’s important to me to have a large number of works represented so I can work through as many ideas as possible; a picture of Ryu from Street Fighter doesn’t give me any more ideas than a picture of Zangief, because when I see Ryu I’m already thinking about the rest of the cast as well. I also prefer pictures to something small, like DVD cases or book spines, because it forces me to consider each of them instead of letting my eye pass quickly to the next. There’s no point to having something for inspiration if you’re not going to give yourself time to consider it.

Who would be on your dream team of people you used to game with?

The people from the last legs of the Great Tower of Oldechi were pretty close to an ideal gaming group. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen six players interact that well for that long and have that much fun doing it. We had a party who leaned incredibly evil, in a railroad-heavy campaign, in a setting with few if any long-term consequences, in a system that put handcuffs on almost every aspect of play, and they still knocked it out of the park for months without an ounce of complaint or table drama.

That said, I am happy with both of my current groups. Perhaps I could cherry-pick from those and the Tower group and form a perfect gaming Justice League. But that doesn’t always work. Again, gaming is a social hobby, and the society at the table was perhaps the best thing about it. I can’t say “removing Cid’s player and replacing him with somebody else would make the group better” because the consequences are so unknowable as to make the thought experiment meaningless. I can only say “I’m certain this group is great, because I’ve seen them play”.

What makes a successful campaign?

Everybody had fun. That’s it. My most successful campaigns were fun throughout, and my least successful were ones where either I felt the players weren’t having fun or I didn’t have fun myself. The same goes when I’m a player.

Of course, I prefer having a good story arc through the campaign. And I like it when the good guys win in the end, whether or not I’m one of them. And I like it when it’s clever, so we’re not just going through the motions while throwing jokes at the setting, but not so clever that it’s just an excuse for the DM to prove his or her intellectual superiority. And I prefer a consistent group of characters so we can see them interact and grow over time. But all this is secondary. I’d rather have a monster-of-the-week, cliché-ridden, saw-it-coming campaign that’s entertaining than a story-driven, smart, keeps-me-guessing campaign I can’t stand.

I guess what I’m trying to say is Sailor Moon is a better campaign than Evangelion. That’s how I’m going to describe it from now on.

What game is your group most likely to play next? Why?

Pathfinder, because I promised them we would. The Zelda campaign ended earlier this month, and that group is taking a break for a month and coming back to the next chapter in the Eight Arms universe. It’s a campaign I wanted to run a few years ago, but I was burnt out enough that I moved it back and switched to the relative simplicity of 4E.

After that? It depends. I have three or four campaigns I want to run in two or three systems. It’s a matter of what my players have patience for. Are they willing to try a system none of us have ever done, like BESM? Do they want something less crunchy, like Fate or an Apocalypse game? Are they too enamored with that surprisingly meta “the players are magicless characters fighting off the inevitable tide of high-magic play” idea that really needs a system like D&D? I’m not sure what we’ll be excited about the next time my turn rolls around.

Do you prefer hardcover, softcover, or electronic books? What are the benefits of your preference?

I like hardcover the most for its tactile properties and the satisfaction I get seeing it on my shelf. A thick softcover can serve the same purpose, though most of the softcovers I have are shorter, flimsier books that have a hard time staying open on a page. But as I get more books, I find myself gravitating more to electronic copies. In my earlier campaigns I made sure to bring every book I would need for a session, which meant I was limited by the number of books I could carry to our FLGS and how many I could fit on the table at once. Electronic copies remove that limit.

I think the biggest advantage of electronic over physical is searching, especially multi-book searching. I don’t have to review five tables of contents to find out which Monster Manual has the moonrat (it is, of course, Monster Manual 2: the Book of Goofy Ideas), and I can quickly find everything that deals lightning damage if I’m looking for something that fits my theme. But I don’t have a PDF reader that allows easy tabbing, and rulebooks are all but designed to have you flipping back and forth between pages at the opposite ends of the book to understand something. Until I have a program that lets me view PDFs, see my table of contents and bookmarks at the same time, and split my view so I can see two pages at once, a physical copy is just more convenient when I’m doing a deep dive.