My Geek Is Showing

[dr_tectonic]

Additional rules:

1) I am allowed to write about RPGs, so long as I refrain from externalizing my non-public narrative.. In other words, no talking about what happened in the game unless there is some point that would be appreciated by someone who wasn't there.

2) I am allowed to write entries that are boring and/or short.

Friday evening was Call of Cthulhu over at the Floyds'. Chris is running Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and we finally got together for another session. It's a fun game; I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and I'm psyched that Jerry is enjoying it, too. Shared activities are good for the relationship.

There was an interesting moment (which, as per rule 1, I won't detail because a) you had to be there, and b) it turned out that I was actually wrong in my interpretation) that made me realize something I like. One of the things I think is really neat in an RPG, and which I realize I'm trying to build into most of the big games-or-maybe-novels that I'm perpetually working on, are moments of illumination. Times when you put together lots of pieces and suddenly understand what the big picture looks like. Ideally, these are accompanied by a sort of sinking feeling and you start to realize what the implications are...

I'm not sure that I can recall any particular instances of this kind of moment in a game (or a book, or maybe movies), but I know that I must have experienced it. You'd think, given how interesting I find them, that I'd remember them.

Comments

re: moments of illumination

[dpolicar]

one of my favorite moments from Pete's BSPD campaign was along these lines, where hours after a battle scene Andrew and I ruminated for a while and concluded that anomalous fact X that seemed irrelevant to anything at the time had more than likely been a side-effect of (and a potentially useful later predictor of) presence of villain V. It never actually mattered, but it's always nice when the world's texture is woven tight enough to make inference possible.

Another thing I like in fictional worlds is the presence of important things that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with you. The first GM I ever played with was fond of randomly-rolled encounters, but was cognizant of the need to avoid throwing impossible challenges at low-level parties, so you'd end up with things like our 3rd-level party encountering a 200-soldier party of orcs crossing our path... on its way somewhere, to do something... completely uninterested in us as long as we stayed out of its way. A few hours later, they'd passed in front of us and we went on with whatever our quest at the time was, in some other direction. Never did find out what they were up to.

Re: moments of illumination

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Those are both really cool. I toss them in my mental stewpot.