This week (14.2.2023)
I ran my first paid gig as a paid GamesMaster.
I have been Games Mastering since 1984.
Doing it for money feels like prostitution.
How would I know how prostitution feels?
Despite my many years of accumulated youth being a lifelong heteronormative I lived at one time with a gay rent boy for six months before he robbed me and the landlady, called the police and told them I had robbed him and the landlady, to cover his rentable ass. That’s a whole other story.
Doing it for money reminds me of that.
It feels like theft, somehow.
Apparently it’s easy money because I find GamesMastering easy.
I cobbled The Adventure Scenario together in the days before the session. It was last minute. Valentine’s Day happened and the usual gamesmaster being a heteronormative binary couple had decided to take the night off. I stepped in to fill the gap, offering to give the group their weekly entertainment.
In the incredibly busy year between the session and the write-up, Kraken Gaming are no longer hosting evening-time D&D type games because its a pain in the ass. Sessions always over-run due to popularity and doesn't make them enough money to pay the heating bill. That is fair enough. Talk with Kraken about booking your table slots in the daytime. Nobody likes to mention how over-popularity makes it boring to play while simultaneously proving a need for more gaming sessions for smaller groups. I suspect the group now continue to meet up in smaller batches without involving Kraken Gaming.
Nobody turned up to my session due to it being a last-minute arrangement with lack of advertising, the regular group having been told there was no group this week, and envious vocal parties not respecting my not actually being the lesser life-form they had pigeon-holed me to be.
“What’s in it for me?”
I was asked in the store by someone who has been regularly attending the weekly sessions.
What’s in it for any of us?
Why do we roleplay at all?
‘To do more of that,’
would have been the obvious answer.
I shrugged.
I explained how he would be given food, lodgings and a few bronze coins per day of his service to the village which are hiring adventurers to protect them from bandits. That’s a whole lot more than no food, no lodgings and taking your chances alone in the forest with the bandits, wolves and whatever other creatures.
That guy didn’t show up. I did the professional thing and took it all in my stride as you do when you’re being paid to run a professional game.
In my understanding based on a lifetime of research, to be 'professional' is a combination of ability, intent and experience. It has nothing to do with being paid for a job. To Profess is a Latin word which means ‘to make a public statement of aspiration’. Quality has nothing to do with it. Apparently my research is wrong, however. Around here 'professional' means charging money of it. That's the only criteria.
One guy from the store who I didn’t previously know volunteered to experience what he described at that time as his “first ever time of doing this sort of roleplaying game.”
He and my twelve year old son were the only players. That’s great as a smaller more intimate group makes for better storytelling anyway. The characters get exclusive focus without compromise. The problem is with larger groups where nobody gets airtime and the session is 90% waiting for your turn to roll a combat dice,
We had zero combat during this session despite there being woodland bandits in the story. That’s a win. Combat is nasty and violent especially in the Game System I prefer to use, Brains&BrawnRPG® which is realistic and often rapidly fatal.
Turns out BloodWolf the Wizard was rather more experienced at this sort of roleplaying games than he had let on. He sussed the rules in ten minutes which proves how quick they are to learn. The rules are adaptable to the players needs as play-style so it’s as much a case of the Gamesmasters adapting to that as it is to conformity to rigidity.
My son played Rolof the Rogue. He always plays a rogue.
Brains&BrawnRPG® encourages player ingenuity. The adventure scenario is a framework of non-player Characters, People with Motivations reacting to ever-changing Situations in Locations.
Fortunately the Wizard player had an idea that he knows one of the elders of this village from many years ago, they are old family friends. Immediately the world became more real thanks to this connection. It later became important in the developing storyline as the plot indicates the finale is either integration (the PCs agree to move into the village permanently) or annihilation (the Bandits kill them all, unless they escape).
The session is billed for three hours. This includes time required to create characters and learn the basics of the game system involved with that.
The session went accordingly with short-cuts occurring in the GamesMasters prompts because several of them were out-thunk by the players ingenuity so as to be irrelevant, their curiosity driving the plot through.
Essentially it is a mystery with a plot-twist. The village kids stole the show with mud-throwing and name-calling, fighting, following and running away in fear. With insufficient adults to parent the kids due to raids by bandits the village kids are an unruly bunch and highly entertaining. They provide predictable randomness and are useful catalyst for driving the plot along or distracting from it.
