A journey through a land of fantasy…

(Spoilers)

(Note:  My descriptions here will be about both the character and player, because you cannot separate the two.  Thus, some of what I write may seem harsh or critical.)

The magic-user of the party was Zoriya, played by Mel.  I use the past tense because Mel is no longer playing and Zoriya has been replaced.  Mel did play for about 1.5 years before she decided to quit due to other obligations.

Mel was newly introduced to D&D 3.5 rules.  She had played tabletop RPGs many years ago, probably during AD&D, but her only recent exposure to a similar genre was her experience in Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft.  Thus, there was not only the difficulty of encouraging the player to develop a vibrant, three-dimensional character, but also that of teaching the player the rules.

Unfortunately, the experiment did not work well, and you’ll see why later in this entry.

Zoriya was half-elven in a world where elves were unknown.  The elves tend not to mix with humans at all, and haven’t for over a millenia, and thus they are considered creatures of legend.  Zoriya thus had to conceal her race by wearing hoods and head scarves.  As a child, she loved her parents very much and was devastated when they were killed during King Harold’s invasion of Valuria.

She always had studied magic, but threw herself into her craft after her parents’ death.  A second blow came when her cousin, a full human teen girl who had been studying in Nemeril, committed suicide after telling Zoriya that she had been raped by Prince Johnathan.  (I added this part to her background.)  Zoriya then left her homeland, travelling to find meaning as well as to exact revenge from the royal family that brought so much sorrow to hers.

Her story is a little trite — the angsty wizard driven to revenge by terrible circumstances — but it should have been interesting to play, especially considering the eventual conflict with Sparrow (and probably Falco).  However, this never blossomed.  A lot is to be blamed on Mel’s handling of the character, but you must also consider that I did a poor job of helping her along.

There were a number of problems, any one of which probably wouldn’t have affected anything much but together were devastating.  The first problem was that I assumed that, given a list of rules pointed out specifically, they would be read and understood.  For example, when we began character creation, I sat with Mel for two hours and went through all the rules on how to create a wizard.  At the end, I pointed out that there were things we didn’t cover, but this is what we haven’t done and she should read them and decide if she wants to use them.  The next day, she assured me that she had read them, and yet later, I found that she used none of them.  One of them was the rules on magic specialization — Zoriya wasn’t specialized until I gave her a quest to get specialized.

The second problem stems from the first.  If a player isn’t actually familiar with the rules (or maybe she just wasn’t thinking about them, only reading), she cannot apply them to her benefit.  This happened daily, with her inability to choose appropriate spells to use, and her forgetting from week to week what actions she can take in a round.  There were also instances in which she failed to use her character’s abilities correctly.  For example, once, when she was alone, a monster (large, “covered in scales and with horns and spikes bristling on its back”) stepped through a portal and landed in front of her.  Instead of using a Knowledge (Arcane) check to attempt to identify the monster (it was a demon or devil of some type) as something about 3 CR levels above her with immunity to lightning, she simply stepped back and threw a lightning bolt at it.

The third major problem was that Mel never actually was Zoriya.  To her, the game was throwing fireballs and cracking out-of-character jokes.  She never visualized what Zoriya was seeing, or felt what Zoriya was feeling.   She took no initiative (when I told what she had to do to get her character specialized and said that she’d have to ask the party to make some time for her to do it, she dragged her feet for nearly six months, and made two levels within that time), even when it was her character’s main goal (when I gave her the opportunity to assassinate Prince Johnathan, she discussed the strategy with the party for two sessions, then, when she finally got there, she did nothing, barely even speaking throughout the entire session.)

Here’s an actual exchange during a session. 

Mel: “Oh yes, the prince wronged my… who was that, my niece?” 
Me: “Your cousin.” 
Her: “Oh, and what did he do to her?” 
Me:  “He raped her.” 
Her:  “Oh yes, that’s right.  Wait, she died from the rape?” 
Me:  “No, she committed suicide.” 

While I don’t expect people to remember every detail of their character’s background, I do expect them to remember the single driving force of their life.

As we played, it became clear to me what the problem was:  Mel was expecting D&D to be like WoW.  In an online RPG, your character has a very clear role in the group, and very few options, with the rules being taken care of by the software.  Character interaction is rarely an issue, unless you’re part of an exclusively role-play group.  Scenes are displayed to you, rather than requiring your imagination to paint them.  Motivation comes in the form of wanting to gain experience to make level, or finding the items you want, or going with your friends to hunt or raid.

D&D, or at least my campaign, has very little of any of this.  The actual point of my campaign was to have the players live the life of their characters, through their eyes, and not as simply as statistics on a sheet of paper.  And the more you live your character’s life, the more options there are.  You don’t just need to choose which of your ten pre-loaded skills to use, you now must make the decision about whether or not to use it (“maybe we shouldn’t be killing this monster…”).

D&D turned out to be much more complex than Mel expected.  In retrospect, she should never have been allowed to be the wizard, which is arguably the most complicated base class to play (of the ones in the Player’s Handbook); Robert (my husband, whose character I haven’t yet discussed here) should have been the wizard and Mel should have taken the straight fighter.  Combining the three problems — ignorance of the rules, inability to apply the rules and her abilities, and lack of immersion — made the experience very frustrating for everyone at times.  When Mel’s personal life became busy, she found it was an excellent excuse to bow out of the game due to time constraints.  While I do think I could have done more to help here, there is a limit to how much I’m willing to hold the hand of a player over the lifespan of a campaign that is now into its third year.  I think it ended about as well as could be expected.

(Spoilers)

(Note:  My descriptions here will be about both the character and player, because you cannot separate the two.  Thus, some of what I write may seem harsh or critical.)

The next character to discuss is Falco Bors, played by Kyle.  The reason for this is that the other two characters, played by Robert and Mel, are rather complex and will take some time.  Falco is a lot easier to define.

Kyle assumed the mantle of rogue for the group, but didn’t want to play a classic rogue.  He instead created a scout/ranger with a tragic past.  Falco is a native of Lasquibur, the region which is perpetually in territorial and racial struggles with its neighbor, Chondheim.  Falco grew up in a peaceful fishing village, but it was invaded and razed by Chondian forces, and he barely got away with his life.  His anger over the event prompted him to join the Lasquiban military, where he specialized in scouting and reconnaissance.  However, he soon tired of bloodshed, and when he got the opportunity, he left the military and his home region, seeking peace.

I pegged him as the unknown wild card in the group and added a bit more to his background.  While he was in the military, his abilities were noted by those he didn’t know were watching him, and at some point, he was offered a position in the Obsidian Guard, the king’s secret service.  I thus had to create how exactly the OG worked, so that Kyle could adjust his character accordingly.

The Obsidian Guard (or kingsmen) live incognito among the citizens of the realm, watching for any possible treasonous activity.  They are unmerciful and ruthless, and those who speak against the king may suddenly disappear, never to be heard from again.  The kingsmen have a more open presence in Nemeril, where the officers of the corp run it day-to-day, but in the rest of the kingdom, no one knows if the person sitting next to him is a kingsman.

In order to make this plausible, I gave the OG a secret language, like a thieves’ cant, in which words and gestures made during normal conversation convey other messages.  Kyle was required to take the language normally (one of his starting languages).  Thus, one OG can identify other OGs by observing someone talking and seeing if their language makes OG-sense.  News and information is passed by word of mouth, which is often very slow — a piece of information, even when the OG is trying to spread it, may take weeks or months to travel to the next town, depending on the travels of the kingsmen.

The kingsmen are divided into two “ranks.”  One is the “observer” rank. These kingsmen live their lives and if they see a problem, report it in rather than do anything about it.  Thus, they are not required to have combat or stealth capability, and they are more successful at maintaining their cover.  The other is the “operative” rank, those that actively do missions, kidnap, arrest, or execute people, etc.  They are less concerned with maintaining cover, since their work is much more open.  Falco is actually a member of the second group, though he infiltrates like the first.

Falco does get paid for his work periodically (I’m not sure I’ve paid him recently; I better check).  He, however, has only met OG that either trained him in Lasquibur or he has established contact with on his journey.  He has never been to Nemeril and has never met the established Guard there.

Kyle accepted this bit of subterfuge very readily.  He decided that Falco joined them for idealistic reasons, believing that they actually are bent on doing good for the realm and the king, rather than being secret police.  In the course of the game, Falco has been discovering that all is not as it seems, and is wondering if anything in the world is good.  As yet, the party has not discovered his secret agent status, though, unbeknownst to Kyle, two of the party suspects him.

(As a note, this wasn’t the direction I was hoping Falco would take.  I wanted Kyle to use his connections in the OG to eventually start funnelling information to the party, but as it is, Kyle is straddling the fence, trying to live up to his obligations on both sides.  It is starting to crumble, but not completely yet.)