OOC Thread 3a: Characters and Stories from Other Games
I've been privileged to have been in many incredible games with dozens of very talented role players.
I can talk about many of them, but the first one I'll talk about is one of the first ones I joined on Rpol. And, funnily enough, it turned out to be also the first game I GM'd here on Rpol.
It was a freeform superhero game called "Every Girl For Themselves", that was similar to the TV show "Heroes", where ordinary people living ordinary lives found themselves suddenly with superpowers. We were to make up a regular person, with one Major Power and one Minor Power.
The other caveat was that the character had to be female. This was no problem for me, and I created Kayla Elizabeth Stone, a nerdy and somewhat frazzled ER doctor who, after a particularly traumatic night in the ER, developed the power to summon disks made of solid light, roughly the size of manhole covers, that she could hurl at people, use as shields, or even stand on to fly.
I'd only playing for about a month when the GM sent me a message, asking if I'd like to be his assistant GM. He wanted some extra help with NPCs and plotlines.
My new character, GM Mercy, was born.
I played both as a player and an Assistant GM for another month, making sure I kept the two identities separate. Kayla, for obvious reasons, took a bit of a backseat in the game setting.
Then the main GM vanished from Rpol. Apparently a victim of that horrible affliction we call "Real Life". I was the only GM left, and he and I had barely spoken about the game, so I had no clue what his plot was, who his Big Bad was, or even what he'd planned next.
Luckily, I had two things going for me.
One, I'm not a totally inexperienced GM, so I've improvised sessions many times before.
Two, the players in the game were a dozen or so of the best role players I'd ever gamed with. They loved their characters, and these women reveled in their interactions with each other. Even the simplest plots and diversions were treated like an exciting adventure, with lots of in-jokes and friendly chatter.
We had some characters leave the game, and I found myself interviewing new people.
I decided to keep the previous GM's rule of "female characters only". It seems like an odd rule, but he explained it to me like this:
"I wanted a way to screen out bad role players. It occurred to me that most of the worst role players were, and still are, immature younger men. And most of them would absolutely loathe the idea of playing a girl character. Or, at least, they'd want to play some weird, misogynistic fantasy of a woman. In other words, they'll show themselves out."
So, that's what I did. And it worked very well. There was an occasional "stripper with hypnotic boobs", but otherwise I added another half dozen wonderful players.
About a year or so later I revealed to everyone that I was both Kayla and GM Mercy, and was gratified that no one had suspected anything.
Interestingly enough, I used Amber as the plotline for the game, deciding to make the game Earth an experiment, trying to make a new, more powerful kind of warrior/minion. And the random powers on random people was collateral damage.
I was making it up on the fly, but I had plans to eventually have two Elder or two Amber cousins battling in the streets of "the great city of Centropolis", with the players getting involved to level the playing field.
As it turned out, the game, despite two years of soap opera style fun and thrills, eventually petered out, as I ran out of ideas.
The game ended amicably, and we all went our separate ways. I still talk to some of the players, from time to time, too.