25 thoughts on “About a half hour away from running my first game with three of my friends.”

  4. Also, yeah, AW is actually one of the easiest games to run – you have these printouts that tell you exactly what to say if you can’t think of anything, and whenever you want, just ask lots of questions.

    Like, ask a lot of a questions. A lot.

  7. Thank you so much for the encouragement guys! I’ve got all the trifolds printed and ready to go, and I’ll be sure to lean on all the MC moves.

    Caitlynn Belle Thanks for the compliment!

  11. It didnt go! One of the three didn’t show, up and another fell asleep waiting leaving me and the last guy quietly nursing drinks rather than facing the apocalypse. Still I was ready to play and that’s no small accomplishment in and of itself. Running an RPG, any RPG, has long been a social phobia for me, so finding myself ready and willing to run a game, even one that didn’t happen, is still a victory. Thank you all for the well wishes and encouragement, I’ll hang onto this thread for the next time I try this.

  13. Dooooo itttttt!

    (Serious sympathies from someone who also always gets anxiety before running something, even for close friends – but in like 99% of the cases it is way, way worth it all in the end!)

  17. You can’t tell the difference between brain scans of subjects who are anxious versus subjects who are excited. They are nearly neurologically identical states. The difference is the story you are telling yourself: are you expecting a positive or negative outcome? Having jitters beforehand is a normal phenomenon. I get them all the time and have been running games for 30 years. But you learn to expect a positive outcome. Keep at it!

  19. Ok first session is complete, down one player, and it is going to be a weird apocalypse.

    The gray expanse of the Bleak is overlooked by Titty Sprinkles, the hedonistic, cross-dressing, laissez-faire hardholder in charge of the ruddy prominence called Red Rock City. He’s armed with a lot of knives and a chloroformed rag. His rule is backed up by a gang of thirty or so savages providing protection to the people living in Below, the scummy ditch around Red Rock. Sprinkles is given future portents to stay ahead of his enemies by Al Ab’awhat, an insane, toothless brainer, clothed in a ‘holy raiment’ bearing ‘the message’. In actuality the raiment is an old banner declaring “Drink Budwiser” or something similar. He hears the message through its rustling in the wind, and sometimes sees things through its aluminum-ringed rope holes, which he uses like a kind of monocle.

    I fairly butchered the character creation process, doing almost everything out of order. In fact by the time we finished I realized we had jumped clean over Hx, so we backtracked and declared the first session a “how they met” scene. Next session we’ll fast forward a bit, do Hx again if the third guy is there, and see where it takes us.

    I’ve got a few problem levers to work at. Their food, something that qualifies as ‘meat’, comes from out west in an impossibly fecund strip of mangrove called Grawtoe. This hellish backwoods community also produces some teeth-staining elixir called Green Water, which keeps Red Rock hydrated, and also probably drunk.

    Grawtoe gets their shipments to Red Rock via a length of shattered freeway when the ‘Dragon Flies’ are out of season. No idea what those are yet. That freeway passes through Red Rock and continues way out east where it eventually reaches Rolett, a weird, walled Shangri La that’s hungry for clay fired ceramics, which is Red Rock’s only reliable export, and kidnappable children, which is Grawtoe’s.

    Internally Red Rock is run by Titty’s number 2, Babs, an implacable woman who keeps the whole ceramic firing operation in line with a pack of literal-minded assholes. The most literal of those assholes is Dave, who, while reliable, is in need of very clear instructions if you don’t want a bunch of people murdered in place of given lodgings for the night. Titty’s gofer is a jittery sieve named Rummy (insert name here). Rummy is often paid in Green Water, and sometimes a chloroformed rag when he’s got the shakes special bad, or when he’s causing a problem, or sometimes when he’s looking the other way. And finally we have the quarter master, Balls, who bricked and soldered himself up in a panic room with all the compound’s collected goods. He has long since descended into a delusional fog, demanding to see someone’s passport before he’ll hand out any requisitioned items. Sometimes you even get what you’re asking for.

    And that was largely the stuff defined in the first session. The game feels like it going to be playing out a lot like Borderlands the table top RPG.

    If anyone has any advice I’m all ears!

  20. You’ve got more than enough setting and situation here to work with. So for your next session, just let the players tell you what they do, and ask questions until everyone is on the same page as to what’s going on in the fiction. That’s pretty much it, man. It’s really that simple. 

    Just be honest about when a player move triggers or doesn’t trigger. I like to delegate some of that to the players: “Ok everyone, you are responsible for letting me know when your moves happen! Interrupt us when one goes off, ok? That’s your job! I’ve got enough to keep track of.”

    If things get too boring or slow or whatever or you get a lot of “I don’t know”s or “nothings” when you ask the players what their characters are doing, use a MC move. Soft then hard, but it’s ok to pick either. If you don’t know which to pick, pick randomly. It’ll work.

  21. Ask questions first, too! Like, for example: Hey Balls, what is the weirdest, most beautiful thing you’ve got with you in the cubbyhole? Titty, were you born here or did you come here from somewhere else? Rummy,  what does the Green Water taste like? Babs, who have you most recently had to teach a lesson?

    Also, Balls is my current favorite PC ^_^

  22. Oh! I should have been clearer. My two players are Titty Sprinkles the Hard Holder and Al Ab’ahwat the Brainer. The other four are the currently named members of Sprinkles’ gang. They’re all NPCs. I’ve got a third player that missed out because he went UNK-hat before the game started. There’s also the potential of a fourth player who might drop in at some point, we’ll see!

    But yes, Balls is a hilarious lunatic and should cause all sorts of problems when things are needed at a moment’s notice.

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