Tiny Validations.

Tiny Validation:

“High my names is Mark, and I write games for my friends.”
And that's about it.

Over this weekend however I ran one of my games for a couple of people who haven't played the game before, whom I had never ran a game for before.
So lets set the scene. A home brew game of dubious quality. Three players I know very well, one player I have played with but never as a GM, and two players who I know but had never directly gamed with. We gamed over Roll 20, (which presents it's own set of issues.)

Now here's the thing I have been Game Mastering for a long time, but I don't claim to be great at it. I'm alright , but I'm spoiled by having run for a steady group of some of the best folks you could ever ask to have at a game table. They will tell me if something sucks. They make things fun, good players oil the gears for a DM in a way that setting, and system never will.

I am not that guy (I don' feel I am any way I have never tried.) who could plop down at a gaming con table, run a game and knock it out of the park.

It's a bit validating to know I can still get a few new people around the table and not have them simply throw up their hands and quit. Validating in that I have not done it in a while and was a bit nervous that I had not run for new people in so long that my style would be off putting to new comers. Apparently it was not. No one ran screaming into the night.

In fact the game ran relativity well. I'll go over the mechanical hitches from my side perhaps in another post. Overall however I think everyone had a good time and people enjoyed themselves.

I knew things were going OK when near the end one of the characters got smashed to death by a high level monster and the player did not just quit the game to go about his day (easy thing to do on roll 20.)

Rather he hung around till the end to see who made it and who didn't. I loved that (Thanks Dave.)

Intentionally or not it seemed in my mind anyway like the little game had created a party with enough investment that when a character got killed in sudden fashion the player still wanted to know how the rest of the party fared. (Even if it was a ghoulish curiosity about how many players were going to get offed.)

So anyway, the game worked well enough I learned a few things about it.

I did well enough, and I learned a few things also.

I guess there's a reason why I still play these games even now that I'm 40 years old. Saturday morning 9 am to 2pm FLEW by with some coffee and some laughs. Now we have a handful more stories that we all share. Not in game stories, but real life things that we can laugh about months or even years from now.

“Remember that character Neal had who cast so many spells his bones melted?”

That for me is the lasting, validating appeal of RPG's.

Thanks for reading

-Mark.