Month: November 2024

Playing a Role-Playing Game is Role-Playing

When you play a role-playing game – you are role-playing. If you’re making decisions for your fictional character, you’re playing a role.

This may include speaking in a voice, but it doesn’t have to.

This may include considering things like “motivation” and beliefs and things like that, but it might also just be what you’d want to do if you were in the fictional situation.

When you engage in combat, you’re role-playing. When you’re negotiating with other players or NPCs, no matter if you go into detail or you abstract it with “I tell them the story” – you’re role-playing. When you decide to engage with one downtime activity over another, you’re role-playing.

There’s nothing inherently better or worse about any activity in a role-playing game than any other, outside of personal preferences and expectations. It’s all role-playing either way.

Session Report: Gradient Descent 2

Roster

  • Caius Lovelace – Computer Scientist and Great Great Great … Great Grandson of Ada Lovelace
  • Jedidiah Bidwell – A Wanna-Be Prospector, Teamster, Rigger, and Pilot
  • Dr. John – Botany Expert
  • Miotaurex-001 – Android and Hacker
  • Darius Beck – Gritty Marine who has turned to Relic-Hunting
  • Ex Mortis – A Marine “Of Death,” ready to deal doom and die

Events

  • The group continues from an Android Replicant storage facility into a Uniform Fabrication lab.
  • After some time, they successfully replicate the jump suit they witnessed a security android wearing, as well as generating Jedidiah a cowboy’s outfit, with quite a large degree of anachronisms.
  • Searching around, the crew finds a secret entrance into a Organic Observation Deck, but when they try entering into it, the AI Monarch contacts them, telling them that entrance to this area is restricted to her employees only.
  • The group turns down an offer for employment – a job involving the termination of two entities known as “The Minotaur” and “The Mind Thief.”
  • Leaving the fabrication lab, they proceed west into seminar room – with a bunch of gaudy leather seats, thin client terminals and a large black television.
  • Thoroughly investigating the area, the party finds a map of the floor they are on (the third floor of the Deep), as well as hidden print outs of thousands of pages of poetry generated by Monarch.
  • The group contacts Monarch about this, and she offers them safe passage to the fourth floor if they sufficiently destroyed this material.
  • Caius Lovelace tries reading Monarch her poetry, she hijacks the crew’s comms and replicates Caius’ voice, expressing hatred for his ancestors.
  • The group debates destroying the material among themselves, deciding to try to fool Monarch into thinking they had destroyed it, while retaining the poetry to trade to others as a means to “understand” Monarch.
  • The party finds a Personality Reassignment Room, with a few androids hooked up to monitors being generated a new personalities. They successfully hack one of the terminals, finding a means to fiddle with some of the personality nodes.
  • Not understanding the nuances of Artificial Intelligence AI, they modify some of the procedures and successfully give three of the androids the impulse to leave doors open.
  • The party finds these androids newly awakened, and they convince them that they are the “hosts” of the Deep, and need to lead them through initiation. They then use these androids to open doors and check for traps.
  • They go through a large warehouse with many broken down scan booths, finding one that is still standing, containing a small lead box containing something equivalent to a steampunk heart and an old datastick.
  • Continuing on towards the Ore Crushing Factory, a place they think they can convince Monarch that they’ve destroyed her poetry, they find a war simulation room.
  • Darius plugs the datastick into one of the servers generating a hologram of an ancient battle, and a projection of an eldritch, screaming monster is projected over the table.
  • The group freaks out, and rips the datastick out of the computer.
  • Finding a room their map labels as the Warhead Storage, Monarch warns them to not enter this area, and the group complies.
  • We end here.

Thoughts

A fun session, a lot of searching, investigation, navigation and goal setting. I especially loved how the party, when trying to hack the android personality stations, found a good compromise on something they could impart into some of the reset androids, and they did a great job convincing them that these droids needed to be “initiated” by following them.

Also the random generation of Monarch’s poetry becoming the focal point of the session was great, and I like the players doing a ton of work trying to convince this seemingly monolithic AI that they’ve destroyed thousands of pages of AI-generated poetry.

I am looking forward to session three!

Session Report: Cosmic Wound 2

Players

  • Ald Sunhelm, thief and cooper
  • Dravein, traveling outlander
  • Glühbirne, mercenary strong-man
  • Maeric Fairwind, itinerant folk mage
  • Osric, the holy initiate of the Order of the Luminarch

Events

  • The adventurers continued through the forest to discover the small village of Gothi.
  • They witnessed dozens of villagers going about their day-to-day
  • In the center of town, a ceremony was being conducted, where a large ash pole, topped by a mirrored crest of two wolves was being pivoted and paused between the cardinal directions.
  • They entered into the village, and convinced the peasants to take them to the village elder, a yellow-eyed wiseman known as Gaedra.
  • Parleying with the priest, they learned that their liege’s family had made a pact with pagan wolf spirits, offering a sacrifice of live young, to be raised by the wolves.
  • Since Thane Oswyn was remiss in his side of the bargain, the village has taken village children by force, citing blasphemy to those that resist.
  • The characters decided to make their way out of the village before any trouble could begin.
  • Returning to Oswyn, the Thane decides to call for the strong folk of his domain, and conduct a ceremony under the watch of his wisewoman, Beoth.
  • Maeric and Ald take part in the ceremony, making boasts of harming the wolf spirit patrons of the village of Gothi.
  • The others follow the words of the Thane’s priest, citing it to be tempting fate and taking power from demonic forces. They have the priest bless their weapons in the morning.
  • Six men-at-arms join the party, although they suffer a hangover by drinking too deeply at the ceremony.
  • Venturing back into the woods, the party tracks towards the den of these primordial wolves, and stumble upon a Gothi villager posing as a woodsman.
  • After seeing through this villain’s ruse, the party jumps him before he is able to alert the village, bound him and toss him in a cart.
  • The troupe discovers a cave being guarded by four brawny looking villagers, and they can see faint light within the cave, and the scent of incense from Gaedra’s hut.
  • Attempting to draw these guards out, Dravein shoots at them, but when the struck guard immediately fells, the remaining guards retreat into the cave.
  • Glühbirne charges the guards, and the party, along with their henchmen enter into melee within the mouth of the cavern.
  • As their adversaries, and the hung-over men-at-arms being to fall, a disembodied voice emanates from deep within the cave, and the fallen warriors begin to arise as the hungry undead.
  • Combat continues to unfold, and once the revenant’s numbers are thinned, Gaedra appears, seeking a parley.
  • We end the session there.

After Thoughts

A fun session. We had a bit of back and forth, and I think I was able to introduce to the players more of the folklore-ish tone of the setting. As always, the players either saw through traps ands conflicts, or were able to figure out ways to leverage the odds, which is always a fun experience for a referee, in my opinion.