David as the Game Master
JustinJustin has been a very “dramatic" player over the course of this game. His character of this story was a Hipster Musician that constantly hogged the spotlight. It was often difficult to get him to step aside to let the other players get a chance to be "epic." I managed to convince him to tone things down not in his characters antics but in his actions as a player. That being said Justin was often hit the hardest by changes I made to the game as we played. When the Big Bad blew up his own house and framed the protagonists it was Justin who had the hardest time dealing with it. Justin didn't like that his character couldn't live out in the open. He asked me more than once to let him create a new character. When I told Justin that he couldn't it he tried to have his character killed multiple times. He would throw himself at things over and over again trying to die and laughing about it. Eventually I got so tired of it that I told him if he tried to kill his character off and succeeded I wouldn't let him reroll. I had to explain to him that of course it sucked for his character to have to live in secret but that that was meant to force his character to act not mope around and attempt suicide. He was supposed to take this as a chance to develop. I told him that there is a name for a static character that mopes and attempts suicide when things don't go her way. Bella Swan. His mood improved drastically after that.
BenBen has always been a difficult person to write for because like Maya he tends to stay toward the background. In most stories being in the background can make a character mysterious and interesting, but when you don't speak up in a game you tend to get left by the way side. Ben was however easier to get involved in games simply by nature of his character concept. Ben wanted to play a Jedi. I worked with him to design a wizard who had spells that let him act like a Jedi. Ben's character then became a Warden of the White Council. This basically made him the equivalent of a magical police officer. This type of character became easier to write when his student broke one of the laws of magic. Breaking a law of magic is a capital offence which any Warden can and must execute. I had fun playing on Ben's Jedi-ness. When the party became separated in the maze they each had to contend with an evil version of one of the party members. Evil!Ben took on Good!Ben's student and got badly burned before escaping into the maze. Later on in the session I gave Ben a moment in the spotlight by concluding the session with and epic light saber duel against Darth Ben.
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JenHaving Jen in the game was an interesting experience. She played a very quiet character so it was sometimes difficult to get her involved in the game. She's great at role playing. A good portion of the plot for this game was about the Big Bad releasing "bombs" that induced artificial emotions. Jen's character didn't have a very high Discipline score so this meant whenever she headed into a new zone she was hit by the new emotion harder than anyone else. At first she thought I was changing her character too much. She thought that I was overriding the characterization and player choice. Eventually she realized that what I was doing was giving her a direction but never actually told her how to head that way. For example At one point, the party went into an area of town that was experiencing crushing despair. Many of the people in the area were killing themselves. She rolled a one to resist the spell. Others rolled higher and lost initiative or started feeling depressed. She became down right suicidal. I told her that she had to make at least one attempt to take her own life. At first she was horrified at the idea that she would have to kill her character that she she had spent months playing. She went and did exactly as she was instructed to do but did so in a way that was unique to how she played her character.
Maya
Maya is very new to tabletop gaming. Her character's tend to stay quite in social situations and are often rather difficult to involve in plot. That being said her characters often find themselves embroiled in combat very easily despite how much they try to avoid it. Maya was by far the easiest to please of all of the players. If I she asked to do something I tended to let her without requiring dice rolls. One of the funniest uses she has had was sneaking into the dugout of a ghostly baseball team and sabotaging their bats when so that her team could win and escape with their souls. She enjoyed doing silly things like distracting a batter by Carmelldansen while in her Tiger form, or ripping the legs off of the cast of the Jersey Shore. By the end of it she got to keep a leg from the Big Bad which aged several hundred years when separated from the magic that kept it living. She is still a very timid player so next semester I have decided to break up my group into two smaller groups so that she will have to get more involved and get off the side lines.
RodneyRodney is a lovable asshole and I have no other way to say that. He is over the top, and gets a kick out of making things awkward. His characters have a tendency to walk in on others having sex. Every character has wanted to kill him at least once and yet they beg for him to bring his characters back all the time. He makes things hilarious and makes people uncomfortable but doesn't ruin the game or anyone else’s fun. Rodney's character takes allot of punishment in games but even Rodney has fun bringing it on himself. He once reached down another characters pants and turned his hand into a taster. He spent the rest of the session in a wall. Rodney went aggressive but did it in a way that didn't make him hated. He was a joke character. His PC was probably chaotic evil but no one cared because he was s bad at it. His revenge was petty but humorous. We had another player who would take revenge on others but this player took revenge for out of game slights. Rodney once hugged him when he didn't want him to and in retaliation this nameless player killed one of Rodney's characters. He later tried to do it again with another character but because it was clear that he was doing it for clearly out of character reasons I overruled my previous policy on noninterference in Player Versus Player Combat to save Rodney from his vendetta.
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