When your mother dies, what do you do? You have a funeral, you mourn, you’ll visit her grave. What do you do when a player character dies in an RPG? You hand them a new character sheet and leave them to fill it out.
You know the situation. Your characters are facing a bunch of goblins you threw in there just to have a combat encounter, because you feel like you should have one here. And what happens? One of those apparently harmless goblins crits and would deal deadly amount of damage to one of the characters. So, what do you do? Well, okay, maybe you didn’t roll the maximum, maybe he just rolled poorly on damage instead…
You know, no-one’s ever going to know…
After having toyed with the idea for a while, I think yes, but of course, its not quite that easy.
We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading