The Campaigns End But the War Continues
Assuming nothing happens today that would otherwise cancel it, tonight my gaming group moves into single-shot adventures instead of ongoing campaigns. This is the first time since I started doing role-playing games that it hasn't focused on an extensive campaign. Here's a list, because I love lists.
My first campaign was a D&D 3.5 adventure run by rishu73. Characters created by my coworkers Rob, Matt and Victor joined my barbarian Owyn in a campaign pulled from Dragon Magazine. Our first characters lasted quite some time before a total player kill caused in large part by our rogue making an exceedingly poor decision in combat that led to a scenario where the DM would have had to blatantly cheat to keep us alive. We voted to die in the interest of verisimilitude.
We then rerolled in the same campaign setting; this time I went with the classic Dwarven fighter, Scarsmile. Among our other exploits, we killed the zombies that had been created with our old characters, which is always fun. Alas, rishu73 moved to Portland and the campaign ended, although he did gift me with the relevant issues of Dragon should I decide to give it a go some time.
At this point, Rob decided to run another D&D 3.5 campaign. Matt dropped out, but rshruti's husband Jason filled in. I now played a half-elven rogue whose bluff and diplomacy scores were so high that I could talk my way pretty much anybody out of or into anything. Unfortunately, Rob got bored with his campaign and we often had 'fast-forward's sections. Then when D&D 4 came out the campaign just died altogether.
One thing that these D&D campaigns had in common was that there wasn't really much role playing involved in them. Most of the players in those campaigns, including mine, were much more about "what is the most rational thing to do to win the fight"; not quite munchkins, perhaps, but let's just say that the team druid was definitely optimized for summoning bears, and that therefore bears were always summoned. Scarsmile had some hooks I'd built in that got pulled, briefly, at the cost of pulling the story away from the DM for a moment.
Some time later I was invited to join a Champions campaign being run by khiron1416 with theferrett and zoethe. It was set in a BPRD-esque environment. My character, Butch Goldberg, was nigh invulnerable to most physical damage, could often use his force of will to command people ala Jesse Custer, and later picked up super speed. This paled next to theferrett, who was playing Hans Landa, if Landa had been turned into a mummy crossed with Captain America's patriotism. As you might imagine, this campaign was riotously fun. Ok, so there weren't riots so much as gunfights and arson.
This was really my first extended experience with actual role-playing. I'm not going to claim that I was particularly good at doing what the character would do instead of what I would do, but at least I was trying. This is in large part because I have a lot of trouble getting the rational part of my brain to turn off so I can get into character, but even now I mourn the fact that some of the story hooks built into Butch never had the chance to be pulled out. Eventually we fought Hitler's reincarnated body inside a stone golem in the streets of Jerusalem. We were at this point so overpowered that khiron1416 opted to call the campaign to a hiatus.
In its place, he offered up a Mage campaign. I played Sean Morrison, a guitar-playing, mind-reading, time-shifting rock & roll wannabe as we fought vampires, werewolves, the Technocracy, and assorted other magic doers for possession of an incredibly powerful and thankfully largely dormant sentient magical object. We even had dayton-by-night to summarize our notes. Josh played in one scenario, and susitna joined for a few months before effectively suiciding her character when she dropped. At the very end Scott & Lucy joined in as well, but an abrupt schedule shift forced them to drop. When we last saw our heroes (well, characters) they were trapped in a paradox generated realm of chaos, and while I'm sure we would have gotten them out of there, khiron1416 expressed a desire to stop being the man in charge.
So for the moment we are moving on into one-shot territory. theferrett is going to run us through some things for a while. I look forward to being delightfully dorky for the foreseeable future.
My first campaign was a D&D 3.5 adventure run by rishu73. Characters created by my coworkers Rob, Matt and Victor joined my barbarian Owyn in a campaign pulled from Dragon Magazine. Our first characters lasted quite some time before a total player kill caused in large part by our rogue making an exceedingly poor decision in combat that led to a scenario where the DM would have had to blatantly cheat to keep us alive. We voted to die in the interest of verisimilitude.
We then rerolled in the same campaign setting; this time I went with the classic Dwarven fighter, Scarsmile. Among our other exploits, we killed the zombies that had been created with our old characters, which is always fun. Alas, rishu73 moved to Portland and the campaign ended, although he did gift me with the relevant issues of Dragon should I decide to give it a go some time.
At this point, Rob decided to run another D&D 3.5 campaign. Matt dropped out, but rshruti's husband Jason filled in. I now played a half-elven rogue whose bluff and diplomacy scores were so high that I could talk my way pretty much anybody out of or into anything. Unfortunately, Rob got bored with his campaign and we often had 'fast-forward's sections. Then when D&D 4 came out the campaign just died altogether.
One thing that these D&D campaigns had in common was that there wasn't really much role playing involved in them. Most of the players in those campaigns, including mine, were much more about "what is the most rational thing to do to win the fight"; not quite munchkins, perhaps, but let's just say that the team druid was definitely optimized for summoning bears, and that therefore bears were always summoned. Scarsmile had some hooks I'd built in that got pulled, briefly, at the cost of pulling the story away from the DM for a moment.
Some time later I was invited to join a Champions campaign being run by khiron1416 with theferrett and zoethe. It was set in a BPRD-esque environment. My character, Butch Goldberg, was nigh invulnerable to most physical damage, could often use his force of will to command people ala Jesse Custer, and later picked up super speed. This paled next to theferrett, who was playing Hans Landa, if Landa had been turned into a mummy crossed with Captain America's patriotism. As you might imagine, this campaign was riotously fun. Ok, so there weren't riots so much as gunfights and arson.
This was really my first extended experience with actual role-playing. I'm not going to claim that I was particularly good at doing what the character would do instead of what I would do, but at least I was trying. This is in large part because I have a lot of trouble getting the rational part of my brain to turn off so I can get into character, but even now I mourn the fact that some of the story hooks built into Butch never had the chance to be pulled out. Eventually we fought Hitler's reincarnated body inside a stone golem in the streets of Jerusalem. We were at this point so overpowered that khiron1416 opted to call the campaign to a hiatus.
In its place, he offered up a Mage campaign. I played Sean Morrison, a guitar-playing, mind-reading, time-shifting rock & roll wannabe as we fought vampires, werewolves, the Technocracy, and assorted other magic doers for possession of an incredibly powerful and thankfully largely dormant sentient magical object. We even had dayton-by-night to summarize our notes. Josh played in one scenario, and susitna joined for a few months before effectively suiciding her character when she dropped. At the very end Scott & Lucy joined in as well, but an abrupt schedule shift forced them to drop. When we last saw our heroes (well, characters) they were trapped in a paradox generated realm of chaos, and while I'm sure we would have gotten them out of there, khiron1416 expressed a desire to stop being the man in charge.
So for the moment we are moving on into one-shot territory. theferrett is going to run us through some things for a while. I look forward to being delightfully dorky for the foreseeable future.