2002-02-23 - 00:36
freaks and geeks

current mood: groovy
current music: Iggy and the Stooges, Raw Power (Iggy's 1997 Remix version)

Tonight we finally got this new GURPS campaign off the ground. We'd been hashing out our characters individually with the DM over the course of a couple weeks; we're all students here, thus hella busy, only available in sporadic little chunks of time. And in any case, we didn't want to do the character creation together, because the game is set up in such a way that each of us has a bunch of information that the others don't, and part of the fun of it is going to be piecing together stuff about this world where the campaign takes place, about which none of our characters knows a whole lot, for various reasons.

It's a nice small group, only three players. The DM and one of the other players are friends of mine, and the third player is someone I know well enough through mutual friends.[1] My friend who was playing had never, ever done tabletop roleplay before, but had done lots of online RP. I hadn't done any tabletop since I was about 13 years old, so I was a little nervous. I hoped the DM knew what he was doing. Ours was the group he assembled after dissolving his last one, and he said he wanted to make sure that this one was going to be more fun than the last, and just be made up of a few good players.

As it turned out, he really did know what he was doing. I can see that he picked people not because of experience but because of their sense of character and narrative, and the three of us are working out pretty well together so far. He worked some really cool stuff into our character backgrounds that we figured out tonight during what was basically the Meeting And Setting Out On The Adventure session--clever stuff. I'm playing a character who got frozen by a magic spell for several hundred years, so I know a lot about ancient history and am trying to find out what the hell happened to the world while I was stuck in a time-stopped shiny magic thing. I won't go into any more boring-ass detail than that, but I have to hand it to the DM for great world-building on the stuff that came out when I talked to the other characters.

There were nice stretches of time, especially around the beginning of the session, where the DM just leaned back and listened to us talk in character about all the weird shit we seemed to know. My friend who'd never done this before was nervous that all the information-dump was contrived, but we were all having a great time with it--and it was all in character, which is the important thing.

Oh, also (I'm just assuming that most people stopped reading right around the word "GURPS," so the readers I have left might actually give a crap), I'm playing a straight-up fighter, which I have never done before, and I'm really getting into it. I totally wailed on some orcs tonight (god. I am such a fucking geek. no, but seriously, I was cutting these motherfuckers in *half.* god, I am such a fucking geek), which was usually not my character's specialty in previous campaigns. It also helps that I spent a lot more time and had more fun doing character creation for this than I ever had for the mediocre AD&D and Dark Sun campaigns we did back home. So though I have a little role-playing problem in the form of not knowing as much about military strategy as my character does, I did have the time to develop a pretty strong sense of character, and that made the initial interactions a lot more fun.

We geeked for about five and a half hours total, including various out-of-character digressions and pizza procurement and such. The DM's girlfriend, a very sweet young lady who isn't quite as geeky as the rest of us present (she had to ask if "geek" was a verb. c'mon), observed from the sidelines and offered occasional commentary. After the game broke up, I walked my friend back to her dorm. We did a little post-game analysis as we walked. She'd been nervous, before and during the game, about being any good at this. She had a *lot* of fun. She wanted to do it again right away. She had that wonderful newbie enthusiasm, of which I was feeling a little myself, being sort of a Born Again Gaming Virgin. It had been a long time, after all. (And I'd never really been in a *well-run* game before, so, y'know.)

So yeah. That was good. And I'm caught up enough on work that I actually had the time to blow an evening on that. Next Friday, more weird shit, probably more Orc Filet with a side of Orc Skewer (no, honest, we kicked their ASSES). Maybe we'll find out what happened to all the damn dwarves.

God, I am such a fucking geek.

[1] I don't know if any readers ever wonder what my policy is on using people's names here. I know I sure do. I have no idea what the hell my criteria are for first names vs. no-name descriptions. I'll fill you in when I figure it out.

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