In two weeks, I get a chance to run a game session for what you could call a "secondary" group. My core group is caught up with life, but the other people who are always invited to play, but never can make it are actually available. I haven't seen some of these people since the last year's Day of Sloth, if not longer, so I'm excited at the possibility of reconnecting with old friends, playing with different styles, and comparing notes on how the Hangover II stole most of our Buffalo road trip memories (and a few of Ohio, but we agreed that never happened and no one has found the body... yet.)
The goal is to run a table (or two) of Gnome Wars to give me a reason to get the painting going for the units for Historicon. I had initially decided to run Call of Cthulhu, but I've changed it up with a "very special" rpg session instead. I'll explain it here after the session, but it should be enjoyable, and amusing to both parties. To accomplish this, I've sent out "roommate questionaires" to a couple of the players I'm not quite familiar with. As the name suggests, the questions would be completely acceptable territory for college roommates to ask each other on week one. "So, you're Polish?" "What's your major?" "What do your parents do?" "Wanna wrestle?"
Okay, the last one isn't on there (the game isn't THAT kind of very special). I'll be able to extrapolate the information received and provide them with a gaming experience tailored to their needs.
Trust me, it sounds completely pretentious, but I'm just short of betting my life that everyone will have an awesome time.
This got me to thinking of all the other surveys, questionaires, and scantron sheets I've dispersed to my players, all in the quest of finding the optimum game.
Back in high school, we didn't have that problem. We had a finite group, we played AD&D 2nd Edition as our primary game, and whenever somebody wanted to run someone new and/or cool, we found time to run that. Sometimes we got decent campaign runs, like our GURPS-Humanx, GURPS-Napalm Death, or Gamma World 4th Edition games, while other times we played games like Recon, Robotech, Rifts, Basic D&D, just to try them out and see if they were actually cool.
In community college, the group was new and variable, but we basically threw all our options in the ring and democracy won out. Sometimes a strong-armed loudmouth dictator would force something like a lukewarm Vampire game onto us, but we got a nice diverse selection of Tunnels & Trolls, D&D, Recon, Talislanta, and a bunch of small press games out of the Gamescience catalog.
Somewhere post-community college and during the true "college years" a few years later, I began having player, prospective and current, fill out the occasional survey. Sometimes, it was to find out what game they really preferred to play, sometimes it was a series of direct questions to see what as a player the wanted to direct their character question. The old "on a scale of 1 to 10 what to you prefer most in your games? A- Combat B- NPC Interaction C-Personal gain D- Big-Ass Sword." This way, while I could not guarantee 100% satisfaction for each player, I could tailor storylines, and even certain parts of each session to accomodate each player/character's needs for a successful game.
I laugh now, because with time, a good GM does that with just casual feedback, not post-demographic feedback. For our Hackmaster game, we had a motley assortment of fools, er.. characters, so I constantly had to adjust my GMing between roleplaying, character advancement/developing, and the fact that the game is called HACKMASTER, so some sessions are combat heavy, possibly disenfranchising the weaker characters of their Gawd-given right to be important. I've been at the other end of that equation, and there's never enough love interests, plot twists, and political intrigue to counter a meat grinder session when your character definitely does not have the cajones to make through without being a burden to the party. Luckily, eveyone knew what they were getting into, and I tried to integrate something else into those sessions when the books started getting perused or knitting came out mid-session.
With the current group, I've resorted to sending out emails with just multiple game options. I've got more ideas than time to play them out, so a little input would always be appreciated. Unfortunately, the regular guys are just as desperate to chuck dice as I am, so often I've received "All sound good," or at best "Regular Fantasy," or "I want to kill things." This has not been a positive to me as a GM. Why try something new when the group will take any McGame they can get. This has been the reason my "Home" Polynesian game and "City-State of Kathad" have never gotten off the ground.
I've also resorted to making the players list all of the proposals from most-favorite to least. This seems to have the best effect out of all the questionaires, as although the players primarilly choose the "regular fantasy" options, they have shown that my pet settings have some interest, and if I can tailor the game to each player's needs, it could work.
But for now, I'll fill my sessions with Gnome Wars, CoC with the main group, and a super-secret game for my secondaries. Let's see what happens.
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