Prodigal Son: Fresh Meat

Part Nine:

Hello.  Brad, here.  Matt thought it might be nice this week for you lovely people to hear my point of view on the RPG madness he's unleashed upon my life of late.  So, yeah, I'm not a real gamer and I don't really have the terminology at my control (NPC, that means something right?) so don't mock me too much, okay?  Appreciate it.

Matt and I have been buds for about three or four years now.  And in that time, I've had to sit through endless conversations regarding Role Playing and how this sport is the highest art of dorkdom.  I've always respected (and mostly enjoyed) his stories of The Game.  But I've never bothered with Role Playing and I've never really had an interest in it--a curiosity, sure, cuz it really does feel like it's own world outside of Film Buffs, Comic Nerds, Code Monkeys, and the like.  RPG is hardcore Nerd Behavior.  And I am in a constant state of achieving King Dork.

But, to me, it's always been a mystery.  I've never quite understood what goes on in the games or the game parlors.  I'd seen the D&D movie.  I seen the D&D jokes peppered through various pop referencey comedies like That 70s Show or Community.  But how do all those crazy dice work?  How do you compile these great adventures Matt's always talking about?  

So, it's that curiosity, that finally got me to break down and say to Matt, "Let's do this."  In the past, we had attempted a couple times to get a mini-group game going.  I'm a huge Trekkie so naturally we had talked about the possibility of doing a post-Motion Picture/pre-Wrath of Khan game.  I had even come up with a rather lame character to put aboard our outer rim vessel.  But for a variety of reasons, that game never got off the ground.

A year later, Matt and I finally just decided to do a one player game.  A test of the waters.  Would I dig it?  We've both been grooving on Lovecraft lately, so it wasn't too hard to decide on Call of Cthulhu as my introductory game.

The whole shindig took two days.

Day One:  Character Creation.  Again, I had no idea how these things went down.  Even having come up with a mini-biography for that failed Trek game I still was clueless on the creation process.  I understand that each game is different, but with Call of Cthulhu there's this character sheet that I had to complete using a little creativity and some funny shaped dice I came away with my characters' Education, Skill Sets, and even a little Personal History.  

I took my characters name Paul "Paulie" Connors from the Casablanca and Soylent Green posters hanging above the kitchen table, mashing actors Paul Henreid and Chuck Connors into one fine specimen.  I made him a Great War vet, a North Dakota farmhand--the strong silent type who's seen just enough hell to prepare him for the Mythos madness about to spill aboard the tramp steamer heading towards Innsmouth.  

Day Two:  The Story/Game

What I learned fairly quickly was that Role Playing was a serious creatively collaborative process.  For the game to really work it was going to require that I bring as much storytelling power to the table as game master Matt did.  More or less, we're writing a short story together.  Matt sets up the pieces and I with my protagonist push the narrative.

And I found that process to be incredibly frustrating.  Don't get me wrong, I had a great time.  But--I was just not prepared to write a story.  For some reason, even though I knew we weren't playing Monopoly or Sorry or the game of LIFE, I thought there were a lot more mechanics to the process.  I thought I was going to be rolling the dice every couple of seconds, move ten paces, stop MONSTER!, fight, move three space, etc...etc...I just didn't realize I was going to actively take on the roll of investigator.  That I was going to have to put on my thinking cap and solve this thing.  Who or what was killing the crew?  How was I gonna get off this boat?

In the end, Paulie Connors survived.  He killed a bunch of folks.  Cleaned up the blood.  Burned all the bad books.  And jumped overboard, swimming to shore.  Sigh.

It was fun.  But I never figured it out.  Heck, I never even quite understood how this story tied into the Cthulhu mythos.  The game was definitely entertaining, but also incredibly maddening.  Part of me thinks I played too safe.  Maybe I should have read more of the manuscripts or played around with the dark artifacts.  But I never quite felt comfortable enough with my character.  Was I playing him or was I playing me?  It was just tricky to get into that collaborative storyteller headspace.  I think I'd do better next time.

One thing is definite, Role Playing is fascinating.  I want to do more.  Particularly, I want to do more Call of Cthulhu with this plot Matt has cooked up.  I need answers.  And I want to bring my wife into it.  I think she could end up having loads of fun with this geek format.

And at the very least, I'm quite happy to have finally checked RPG off my dork bucket list.  Hmmm, is Cosplay next????

--Brad