What Gaming Should Be About

Preface: The following is part of a forum I came across accidentally back in January. The subject was about the problem of a particular gaming session directly related to the imbalance of power among classes at lower levels (Something I of course disagree with by the way). The part in quotations is what started the forum. The second part without quotations is the awesome reply.

I think it best reflects what makes tabletop gaming worthwhile and highlights exactly how the original poster seems to miss the point about roleplaying entirely. It also reminds me of our campaign that we played at the house on Sherwood. Everyone talks about all the incredible and crazy things that went on but not a one of us can remember what level we were when that campaign came to halt or what magic items everybody had.

Anyway, here it is:

"All the players around the table deserve to have equal amounts of fun. It's no fun to have the player of a low-level mage being bored at low levels 'cause he only has one stinkin' spell to cast. It's no fun to have your high-level fighter overshadowed by a mage that can deal hundreds of times more damage than he can in a single round."

I think these lines point at something significant, the conception that fun is based strictly on the numeric-rated battlepower of each character. If your group is really ROLE-playing, it hardly matters how powerful the characters are, because it's all acting. If your novice mage's one spell is shot, he and his player can still be doing things. He (they) can still participate in creating the scene, making everyone visualize it. The point of the game, in its heyday and at its best, was a kind of collective mental improvisational theater. When it's really ON, the scene you're describing doesn't even need to be particularly "exciting," in itself, it can still come alive with incredible vividness. I still recall a particular session of a game I ran in the spring of 1988, in which, after many trials and tribulations, a group of characters had finally achieved their objective in one town of my fantasy world. They gathered their gear, and saddled up to ride across the rolling plains to a new destination, of which some enticing rumor had been heard. At this point in this particular game session, the five of us (myself running the game and my four buddies playing) had been going pretty hard. We'd been immersed in this other world, these other lives, for several real-time hours, almost continuously. Maybe there was a little sleep-deprivation factor altering our perception. Or maybe it was more like the sense of suspension you have in a movie theater, when you're well into a long, compelling film, and the outside world is forgotten. Of course this was a world, and characters, we had all come to know well over the course of a dozen previous sessions. The players knew that in my world they didn't just say, "We ride to Westhold," rather, they described their provisioning, the distribution of their equipment among the steeds and the pack horse, the riding formation designed to protect the physically-weaker (but valued) wizard from mishap. I had planned some sort of "encounter" for the party along the way to their intended destination, and as a lead-in to it I was describing the wind blowing across the plains, the low grassy hill their horses were cresting, the sight of a dark stand of trees on a river bank below the hill. And at THAT moment--before the "encounter" had begun--one of my buddies stood up, grinning, gesturing, saying "Wow, this is so great. Wow, can't you see it?" He was momentarily overcome with the intensity of the vision, the scene, that we had all created together. The REALITY of it, built up through all the previous sessions, the hours this night, the detailed descriptions of setting and backstory by me, and "on-camera" protagonist motivation and action by them...IT had crested at the top of that little grassy hill, too. We all sort of knew what he meant, because we had been "seeing" it too. It was like a waking dream. I think we took a break at that point, and emerged into the sunlight outside the theater of our minds. Maybe we polished off the pizza, marveled at how freakin' great this game was, and called it a night. I don't know. But it didn't have a damn thing to do with what "level" anybody was.

END

Let me know what you think about this- DM.