Musings and Happenstance

What do you mean, "How did my character get here??"

When fleshing out ideas for the GodzWar campaign, many thoughts ran through my head as to how exactly I could make the experience more than just a Hack-N-Slash meat grinder adventure. After all, it was a challenge. These days, a gamer's options are wide open. It's not like it was in the 80s, when video games were little more than blots on a 16-color screen and adventures were limited to less than one Megabyte of storage. These days, video game graphics are unreal. The scenery in World Of Warcraft (of which I'm a player) is fantastic. The sound is phenomenal, with a soundtrack that rivals many movie soundtracks. Players of today's video games worry little about having their imagination take over. It's all right there, even in 3-D if you wish. How could an old school game like Original Rules AD&D think to compete? And then I had it: Make the story as vivid and full of depth as any novel. You want to hack-n-slash? Go play WoW or LoL. You want to have to think things through and be challenged every step of the way with not only physical challenges, but mental ones as well? Come into my parlor....

The first trick in handling this was to encourage, nay, demand, that all the players give some real thought into their character. Their physical appearance didn't matter too much... no, I meant for them to create a backstory that would be both intriguing and exciting. Each character has their own quirks, their own way of thinking and doing things. Most players try to do this in some way, shape or form, but do they ever really understand WHY their character is behaving in some way? The 7, as they are starting to become known, certainly understand why they do what they do.

Some would argue that this is part of the DM's job, and that I'm just passing off some work to others to make it easier for myself. On the contrary! Having the characters think of their characters to this depth makes my job more challenging. Each one has a tale, and I have endeavored to use that tale to wave a grander story line based upon each history I have received. The effect is dramatic. Each player feels more involved and in tune with their character. The story makes sense to them, because they see things that they've made up showing up in the story. As the characters (and the players) become more comfortable with each other, there is a lot of curiosity about other characters. All this boils down to one thing, and it is the one thing I have been aiming for: Emotional involvement and commitment to the characters.

There is a downside, however. Since the story revolves around the characters and they have become an intricate part of the story line, it can prove difficult when a character actually faces death. This isn't to say I'm reticent to kill a character off -- indeed, given the right circumstance it can help the story immensely... even still, when tales are told, one wants the tale to be of the original, not of the character that came afterwards. I'm really hoping the characters don't die, but if they do, my job as DM is to make the story continue -- and provide therapy and possible suicide watch over the player.