A bit of an unusual weekend for me now that Moulsari’s out of the country, but I survived it with the poise, grace and super-suave style that everyone has come to expect of me.
Gaming yesterday went really well, despite Richard’s absence. I rather enjoyed playing his character a bit as a GM. A GM always has expectations and ideas about how a character should react and respond in certain types of situations, and sometimes those differ quite a bit from the player’s opinions. Richard’s character, Thomas, is a ranger, and he’s not…ferral enough in my opinion. Richard, like many players, puts a lot of his own ideals into each character he plays, and I don’t think they necessarily mesh well with the concept of a ranger as I hold it. Obviously our opinions differ.
Some time ago (actually quite some time ago) when we still played Shadowrun (can’t wait to do that again soon), I got to play Dennis’ character Proteus for a session or two while he couldn’t make it. Proteus was a verteran physical adept, but I felt Dennis didn’t give credit to the awesomeness of his own character. He downplayed his abilities a little bit, while he should’ve realised he was playing freakin’ superman. I had a lot of fun freaking the rest of the players out with some GM creativity, and they started to respect his character a little bit. Now, of course, it could well have been the case that Dennis intentionally downplayed his characters abilities, but I had fun with it anyway. :)
The rest of last night’s session went very well. There was quite some travelling involved, which is always hard to play, I think. It ends up being a bit of a monologue on the GM’s part, I find, which sucks. In this case they had to move into a massive swamp, in search of a temple that was supposed to be hidden there, somewhere. The mage managed to pull of a spell that was still well beyond his ability (Polymorph Self) and changed into a large crow and acted as a scout, which helped things along nicely, and the players found an old boat, half submerged, and probably once used for mudcrab fishing by the local population on the edge of the swamp. They cleared the boat, and managed to make some flotillas by tightly weaving reeds together. All in all, very clever. If you give players something to do, or a hurdle to overcome, like finding their way across crocodile and troll infested swamps, then traveling doesn’t have to suck so much. I tried to keep it as short as possible, though, and made sure they got to the temple (or close to it) by the end of the session. Next week, they can start there, afresh.