I'm back with scars to show

[enthusiastick]

So, following on from my last post, let's talk about the other big Changeling game in my life.

We're into recent enough territory now that I actually have notes for that game, carefully archived and backed up on some auxilliary storage medium, an external hard drive or possibly a burned CD. And I suppose I could dig them out and pore over them in an attempt to recapture just what was going on there, in that place and time, but then you wouldn't be getting an entirely honest impression. My memory would be refreshed and therefore different things would rise to the surface. As it stands you get a relatively unbiased window looking in, a snapshot of what I actually recall when conjuring up thoughts about that particular roleplaying endeavor.

And besides, why look at boring (and at this point arcane) Storyteller's notes when I've got pictures?

I don't have a scanner in my life, otherwise I would attempt to share these pictures with you, because honestly they need to be preserved in digital format. They are among my most prized possessions. Rodrigo drew them, and through my various moves across the country and around greater Boston I have carried them with me to each new home. Rodrigo played in that game, you see, in the time when thablueguy and I were still sometimes referring to him as our "pet freshman," a tongue-in-cheek sobriquet that he put up with for some reason, demonstrating far more self-assurance than I would have in his shoes.

I like to think that each time I sit down at the table I bring an increasingly refined toolkit to bear on the gaming hobby. In planning for Changeling I was demonstrating that I had learned from my mistakes in Exalted, falling back on a system I knew so thoroughly it was like rediscovering an old friend. To this day I could probably make a Changeling character from scratch, given a little paper to work with, and given a handful of ten-sided dice I could even run a passable one-shot in the system, all without the aid of any books. Which isn't to say that I don't have books; I have most of the books in the Changeling line and I cherish them. I've just moved beyond them, which meant that I was operating in a sandbox that was very, very familiar to me. It was like coming home.

I was also utilizing what I had learned from the ill-fated Chicago chronicle, albeit in an indirect way. I was more of a dewy-eyed idealist in those days, as evidenced by some of the entirely fatuous and yet ultimately very characteristic things I said on an audio-only documentary on roleplaying games Rodrigo made as an exercise for one of his RTVF classes. I believed then, as I do now, that roleplaying could be a vehicle to something greater, something sublime, and that at its best it could actually change your life. And I was starting to understand the mechanism by which that was accomplished; it became less of a blind belief and more of a demonstrated phenomena that I was eager to utilize.

Too eager, perhaps, because as could be expected I pushed too hard and too fast. It was a good game of Changeling, in the end, but it was just a game, and I subjected friendships to stresses they should not have borne in my attempts to use gaming as therapy, to make clumsy ham-fisted points to people about things I didn't have the temerity to broach so arrogantly in real life. Frankly, after some of the crap I pulled, I'm surprised that lassarina is still talking to me (and _glass_house_ as well, though I was not quite so much a blunt instrument with her.)

It didn't help matters that the interpersonal relationships of the players were often tense and strained out of game, but I made things worse and I did it deliberately. People made characters that in some way reflected these issues, as they tend to do, and several times I herded them into head-on confrontations. It could have been awful, and a few times it sort of was. Ultimately I got gun-shy, pulled back from the brink, re-focused on the plot and brought the game to its conclusion. Ending games is a rare pleasure and I like to think this one went over passably well. I was looking to have an affect, and its clear that I did, but not in the way I would have wanted to, looking back on it.

But at least I got awesome group portraits out of it, hand-drawn by Rodrigo and carefully preserved by me. They're waiting to be scanned and someday, probably, framed.

Comments

[king-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Can you talk about the player-characters in that game? As I recall, they amused me but all I can remember was that Rodrigo was a cricket and Blue Guy some sort of depressed Red Cap who hated eating everything.

I remember some funny dialogues only in that they existed as everything else has fallen to the wayside.

(Here I am, reminiscing about stories of games I didn't even PLAY in and only heard of second hand. Ain't that a bitch?)

[oberndorf.livejournal.com]

If you do ever get those things scanned, I'd love a copy of them.

[lassarina]

Ah, well, you see, in my brilliant self-absorption I kind of missed the blunt-instrument effect, as I was too wrapped up in my own angst to really observe it. But we loves the Pooka regardless. :)