No one is perfect and one area where I am certainly ‘weak’ is my appreciation of the arts. The arts is a pretty big subject to squish into a single label but I can graduate things into stuff I appreciate that which I don’t.

I am going to junk the whole ‘what is art debate’ because I want to but I am also going to completely contradict myself in a minute and I am fully aware of the contradiction.

So the art that I appreciate is what I consider ‘extremely clever’ art. It is often technically difficult or exists to demonstrate a point. Esher’s optical illusions would fit this description, Jean Tinguely’s mechanical sculptures are another example. When I say appreciate it what I mean is I look at it and think ‘oh that is clever’ and move on. There is no desire to own it or want to create something like it myself or even a desire to have the skills or talent to create something like it myself.

Somethings I think employs art and artists but is not art. The division comes when it is of a purely commercial nature. Cinema is an example. Some films are art and exist for arts sake or the artist was trying to examine the human condition. I accept that is art, been there and didn’t like it, not going back.

Hollywood blockbusting movies are not art but do employ a lot of artists and that is work I can appreciate and that does inspire my games. I am a magpie of ideas and like set ups. I constantly see scenes that I wonder what PCs would do in that situation given that there is no script. I then set about constructing a story that will bring that scene into the game. I am not talking about railroading players or necessarily climatic scenes. Lots of the scenes that appeal are often throw away scenes and if they happen then great but if they don’t it is no loss. Some work well and some certainly don’t. There was a scene in Indian Jones where they were in small mining trucks.

That didn’t work too well as too many failed skill rolls ends up in big crashes. On the other hand the Matrix Lobby Scene was an amazing success. All I needed to do was casually mention the locations of discarded weapons and the players were using Tumble Attack/Evade all over the place.

So as inspiration art, not so much, cinema definitely!

This is a hard question to answer. I cannot actually remember ever having a compliment while gaming. The best compliment about my games must be that fact that the players keep coming back, and that they are prepared to travel half way across the country and spend good money on renting a house and all that sort of thing just to be able to play.

If I think about that in the cold light of day it is actually very flattering. So that is my answer for today’s question. Sad to say no one has ever said “OMG you are an amazing GM!” although that would be a little embarrassing.

This one goes back to the days of MERP.

3 PCs in a dwarven jail, I think it was in Erebor but it could have been the Iron Hills, the exact location is not important. We had been tricked into killing the dwarven queen, as you do. You know what it is like, these things happen some times.

Anyway the original offense, whilst we were actually guilty, we did kill her and a lot of her body guard was not our fault. They had been covered by an illusion as we thought we were killing some orcish leader and its honour guard.

As a PC party we were incredibly powerful, so much so that once we realised our mistake I think we still killed a few of her body guard accidentally just using the flat of the blade trying to subdue them.

So once we realised out mistake we gave ourselves up and hoped to prove ourselves the victim of a deception and we didn’t really mean to kill her.

The trial did not go well.

There was one point where I think I said “We didn’t mean to kill her but to use she looked like and orc.” Her grieving husband didn’t take that too well.

Anyway the end result was we were sentenced to death the following morning.

So the 3 PCs are sat in a cell debating whether to escape or not. Our execution was to be quite unusual but the dwarves were under attack by a dragon so we were going to be thrown to the dragon.

So if we escape we would be hunted men, guilty of regicide and generally not very heroic.

If we didn’t escape, to be honest I would pity the dragon. I was in favour of not escaping and trying to prove our innocence by turning our execution into a trial by combat or of situation. One PC was all in favour of busting out and to hell with the dwarves. PC number three was suffering from a curse that meant he would believe anything that was told to him as a fact.

So the tricky situation was trying to resolve an important turning point in our characters lives with two completely different points of view while NOT saying anything that sounded like it was factual. The choice was just as important to the middle player’s character and we needed him to voice his actual opinion. So there was no saying “If we can beat the dragon they will have to accept that we are innocent.” because the other PC would then completely agree with you because you just told them that they would have to find us innocent.

This argument ranged back and forth for a long time.

The really funny thing was that the dragon was attacking the dwarves because it was trying to get to us. One of the PCs owned a sword that was +50 vs dragons but attracted all dragons within 100 miles to his location. By the time I won the argument there were three dragons outside but the dwarves accepted the argument that against those odds that if we could slay all three dragons and save their city from three dragons then we probably were the fated heroes that we claimed to be. We also said that once the dragons were dead, if they could find their lairs then the dwarves could have their hoards.

The dragons didn’t really stand a chance, as I said we were a powerful party. The worse wound I suffered was when a dragon fell on me and broke both my legs. It did rather cramp my style but I was rather good at healing magic so we all walked away at the end of the day.

So the tricky situation was trying not to unduly influence another player and that characters fate when they were doing their best to play ‘in character’.

So I am running behind schedule again. I have two days to catch up and I have a post that I want to share that has nothing to do with RPGaDay.

So how has my play evolved?

It is convoluted answer time….

When we started we were terrible role players. We were more roll players than role players. Our games were lots of kick in the door, kill the orcs and then repeat.

As we grew up a bit our games became much more sophisticated, character became much more important and I think I was probably 17yrs old when I actually created a character with a personality radically different from my own. Our games were more to do with political intrigue, world spanning politics or world saving high adventure than kicking in doors to kill orcs and steal their two copper pieces.

These days with my face to face game we have sort of regressed to hack and slash. The reason being that our games are so infrequent that we cannot keep all the subtle facts of a political intrigue game in our minds in the months between sessions.

In my play by post games I play much more sophisticated characters. As one has the time to really craft your responses you can be always in character. More than just speaking with your character’s voice you can pepper your responses with mannerisms and body language. As a GM you can layer on setting details to keep the world ever present in the players mind. You can use a palette of materials and textures when describing scenes much more often that you would when describing things to a group around your table. So my PBP gaming is much more sophisticated than my gaming table ever was.

The third kind of gaming I do is solo. Solo gaming is a way of playing that takes  a lot of practice. It is really hard to start but once you get the hang of it it is great fun. My solo play has also opened up a whole raft of games systems. If like me you have shelves of games you have bought but never played then solo play is a great way of getting them off the shelf and run an adventure. I have played games I never thought I would get to play. Some games I had read and thought sounded great on the page have proved really slow and uninspiring in play. The opposite is also true, games I had dismissed as ‘not for me’ have turned out to be great fun to play.

There is also a different sort of answer to this question.  How has my play evolved? It has become ever more simple. I settled on Rolemaster in the late 80s first with the red MERP book and then 1st edition RM. Since then we added every single companion, profession and skill but then came my maturing as a GM and I started removing that which I didn’t feel added anything so I would keep the new spell lists but one channeling/essence hybrid is pretty much like another so I would skip the professions. I found the constant subdivision of the skills into ever more specific just slowed down character creation and made the characters less proficient. Originally a character may have had Medicine or Surgery as a skill but once all the skills were in the game they probably needed Medicine -> Surgery -> Ear, Nose & Throat -> Nasal -> Left Nostril and of course if the critical has blocked the right nostril the character was down to using half skill as the left and right nostrils are only similar but not the same.

This quest of simplicity is what lead to my abandonment of levels, professions and development points and the querying of realms of magic. I have pretty much abandoned Arms Law for having too many tables and so on.

So it is not just how I play that has evolved but what I am playing.

I have been looking back at some of my previous PCs and actually the concepts behind them all are rather tame. The stand out character in recent years is probably my illusionist.

Silas by game profession was an illusionist but was employed most of the time at the Nomikos Library as a freelance researcher. When not helping people find what they were looking for in the library he lead an Indiana Jones style double life as a hunter of dark wizards, warlocks and witches and anyone who used magic for evil purposes.

I was quite surprised how effective he was taking out evil magic users. Illusionist make great spies as their have amazing powers of disguise. The essence open and closed lists give good functionality for spying. He tended to take out the spell caster using Gate Mastery to summon creatures to fight for him whilst remaining invisible and out of harms way, in the dead of night, with surprise and when his target was sleeping.

For a profession that lacks a lot of fire power at lower levels he really punched above his weight.

This character is one that snuck up on the GM in that he became incredibly powerful. Right from the off I made a point of collecting Rune Paper. Most of the magic items I collected in my adventures were inherently evil and I took these back to the Nomikos Library and gave them to the library staff to dispose of. Obviously I kept any spell bonus items but I also collected Runes and Rune Paper. I think the GM started to compensate me for all these great but evil items I kept giving away.

I made a point of telling the GM when I created a new rune and as my ability to store higher level spells increased I would revise the spells I had stored as runes. As anyone who knows Spell Law will know that there are some truly brilliant low level spells. I ended up with nearly 60 sheets of rune paper and these represented something like 300 powerpoints worth of my most powerful low level spells bound into a  ‘working spell book’.

So Silas the Witch Hunting Illusionist is my rather tame ‘Wildest Character Concept’

I am guessing you can all do better.

I am struggling with this question. In the RPGaDay set up there are alternative questions in case you don’t like a particular question and I nearly plucked one of them out instead.

I have been gaming since I was about 13 or possibly 14 years old. I have never stopped. I gamed at school both literally, in lunch breaks, and during my school years. At college I found a new group to game with and I still migrated back to my home town and gamed with my school group.

After college I found a group of roleplayers where I worked and introduced them to RM and that was the last time I played D&D, probably 1993 and I think it was 2nd edition. I still migrated back to my home town to play with my school years group.

It was in the early 1990s that I discovered PBP which was snailmail back then and in 1993 I discovered dial up bulletin boards which allowed for daily updates or sometimes even more frequent updates. We used to download a text document, type out your characters actions and then upload it to the board to post each move.

That has turned into web based/forum based games. I pretty much game at least for a couple of minutes every day. That is on top of writing games, writing about games, writing adventures and blogging.

I do not think gaming changed me in so much as it is an integral part of me and has been since those important formative years. Gaming is not the be all and end all of everything for me, I am also a serious company director, and I compete at an international level in currently two sports but if things go well that will be three sports although one of them is as a ‘veteran’. I have a family, dogs and horses all of which take up a lot of my life. I am not one of those people who can only express themselves though their gaming or their social circle is entirely made up of gamers.

So I don’t think gaming has changed me or if it did it did it so long ago that I was not mature enough to notice the change. So that is my far from satisfactory answer.