At this point the Erin's 7th Sea Wave game has been running for about a week now on Wave. Trollsmyth and made characters who had met up before the game got started proper so we'd been playing a bit before Christmas, testing the waters, but the game didn't really get started until December 30th.
Things have been, well, rough. Fun, yes, but there's been a bit of friction. That's normal for a new campaign, particularly for one where the players don't all know each other and haven't all played with the GM before, but the period of adjustment can still be awkward, even if you're expecting it.
A lot of it, honestly, is a side-effect of Doom & Tea Parties. That game going for a year now means Trollsmyth's been my DM for more games than probably all the other DMs I've played with combined. (I game a lot, but the campaigns I've run tend to be short and the campaigns I've played in tend to be shorter. I've had probably eight DMs in nine years of gaming, and run a lot more than I've played.) Which means that I have a lot of habits and expectations and things based on the particular style of that campaign. And Doom & Tea Parties is weird. I love that game, but the ideas it's given me about how I should handle in-game situations, and what the results of various actions will be, don't translate to every game, and it's caused a couple spit-takes on my part when Erin has done something that reminds me, oh yeah, new GM. Not to mention that Labyrinth Lord is not exactly the same rodeo as the drama dice slinging 7th Sea. So that's an on-going adjustment.
But that's part of why I signed up for the game in the first place, so I'm not complaining. As you may have noticed, one of the things I like to do is try new kinds of games and new styles of gaming, so I'm looking forward out of getting shaken out of my rut a little bit. It's a fun rut, and I'm not planning to abandon it permanently, but I could use a little vacation now and then.
It also doesn't hurt that my character, Alasdair the Highland Marches (read "fantasy Scottish") Pirate, rocks, and I'm having all kinds of fun playing him. I put a somewhat ridiculous amount of work into developing him pre-game (1000 words of character background and another 400 of physical description, way more than I would have even considered writing a year ago) and so far it seems to have paid off, giving me a lot of things to riff off of and interesting reactions for him to have. I'm particularly happy with the relationship Trollsmyth and I sketched out and are playing with between our characters -- recently re-united half-siblings, which has produced quite a bit of banter and continues to keep me amused.
He's the first male character I've ever run, which is an interesting challenge that I'm not sure I'm quite meeting yet, and something that I have wanted to do for ages but never did -- first because we had a rule against cross-gender play for a long time in my high school group, and later because I'd seen some cross-gender play at the table and decided it was too confusing to be worth it. In text, though, it works.
So that's where that is. Early in the going of it, but promising.
See, now I'm curious which of my actions has caused you to spit-take.
ReplyDeleteMostly because I want to do it again. :)
Besides the culture stuff, mostly that you seemed to be pushing us away from doing a lot of planning and recon, which I tend to do a lot of in Trollsmyth's game, especially the solo -- partly because there are always a lot of opportunities to talk to people and buy information from them and scheme, and partly because when our plans screw up things happen like people getting enslaved by extradimensional sorcerers. So it's taking me some time to adjust to the bold action! style.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I've noticed is that you call for rolls a lot more than Trollsmyth does, but that's as much system as anything else. Labyrinth Lord has combat and saves, so if we're not being attacked or poisoned everything pretty much just comes down to DM fiat and what he thinks would be reasonable/fun.