Recreating the Providence of the fiction of my youth
Joshua A.C. Newman:
When I was 16 or so, probably around 1988 or 89, I had one of the best RPG experinces in my life. The following is told largely in fiction because that's the part I want to address.
I'd come to Gary, our perennial GM, and said that I wanted to do a vampire story. Kevin was there, too. Someday, I'll write about the hierarchical nature of our gaming group that any primatologist would recognize. But that is not this.
The game took place in Providence, RI, a place the players knew well. My character was a vampire. I ate people and got strength from them. This chafed some sort of occult authority, which evacuated Rhode Island, leaving my character (and Kevin's alligator-like monster character) more or less alone, to steal old cars and eat National Guardsmen.
Eventually, though, my character was caught. Some sort of extradimensional critter was put into the body of a little boy, and he turned me into a mandrake root.
I got a lucky roll (we literally called these "divine intervention rolls." You roll d100 and the GM decides what happens based on the result. I got 100, so he had to make up something good.) and before my consciousness is snuffed, a National Guard tank comes around the corner and scares the creepy little boy off.
So, here I am, a root.
Kevin's alligator character and I have a psychic link thanks to my vampire magic. I say to him, "Hey, I'm stuck here on Wickenden St. being a mandrake root. Can you come pick me up?"
When he does, I ask him to make tea out of me and put me in a bottle.
Then we hit up some art supply stores and get some vinyl tubing. We break into RISD and steal a skeleton, then run the vinyl tubing around the skeleton to make a circulatory system. I can now move around on my own, but I can't see or hear. so I replace the skull with a cow skull and put a 1988-sized video camera in it with microphones in the ears and run the cables into the tea bottle that is my heart. I make muscles of pipe insulation and duct tape. On my fingers are hypodermic needles (I'm a vampire, remember).
We travel around Rhode Island with Kevin following me around, cuz that's what he did. We make some magic items by saturating them with me-tea. We steal an antique car and a tank. I possess people by injecting me-tea into them, or I spray it through the keyhole to sense what's on the other side.
I believe we stole a Coast Guard boat in order to get out of RI.
We had a good time.
OK, so.
Gary, Kevin, and I were running at full-tilt creatively. This was a vampire story the way Baron Munchausen is about Turkey. Once we had a thing we were doing, it was our thing. We tossed back and forth bits of world, bits of character for week upon week, playing for twelve hours at a time on Saturday nights.
The world was vivid. The weird shit we did was easily agreed upon.
We were all motivated to explore, to create the entire time. There were times when things felt unfair or the rules-as-"written" (more or less D&D rules with a lot of handwaving) were deliberately obscured and it felt like I didn't have a tremendous amount of control but they were few and far between.
So, I'm trying to recreate this experience that I remember so clearly from 20 years ago with Xenon: Alien Science Fiction. And I'm trying to figure out what the fuck it is that we were doing that worked so well.
Jasper Flick:
Vampire tea! Now that's an original character!
Let me have a guess...
You were all on the same page. You made shit up together. And you didn't really care if it didn't make sense or if it went anywhere. You played for the fun of the moment. You got to have your teenage power fantasy and get away with it, because you were were in it together.
You had a strong shared agenda and easily drifted the rules to accomodate that, instead of being tricked into another mode of play. You weren't yet trained to behave, so you just had fun.
Does that make any sense?
Paul Czege:
Real, true fantasy (not post-Tolkien trope fantasy) exists at the intersection of psychological desire (and need) and the imaginative (creative) extension of cause-and-effect and plausibility.
Paul
Joshua A.C. Newman:
There were occasional clashes of CA, but this went on for a good part of a summer, I think, and that's to be expected from time to time when you haven't figure out what it is in a system that mattered.
The power fantasy part was, of course, fun to a 16-year-old nerdy punk. I mean, I liked Nitzer Ebb, fer Pete's sake.
The thing is that we were intensely creative. That's the important part. The "power fantasy" parts weren't where I beat up a bully, though I did at the beginning of the story, now that I think about it, but that Gary would come up with an insoluble problem ("The guys are in a tank") and I'd come up with a solution ("I stick one of my needle fingers into the rubber seal around the hatch and squirt some of myself inside to give myself a psychic link to the guy so he'll open up.") and he'd say, "Weird!" and then we'd go with it.
The thing is, it *did* make sense. It was a simple sort of sense (and maybe that's important), but the whole deal was, we were monsters, we were the last people in Rhode Island, and there was some sort of monster hunting monster that had been summoned by some sort of authority to exterminate us. The situation was violent (we were, after all, monsters), which might have meant that we knew what to do, but the way we — I, in particular — did it had not only tremendous latitude, but my creation was more or less accepted as we barreled along.
Paul, that's a thickly distilled thought. I'll chew on that.
Callan S.:
Hi Joshua,
With that divine providence roll, if you had rolled low, would the creepy kid just have come over and stomped on you, killing the character - ie, none of that following creativity would have happened?
I suppose I'm being fairly direct and asking if this is creativity while at risk, or this is creativity while just under the perception of risk?
How often did you die? How often did the tank move/move against whatever insoluable problem not work and it's fifty mil machine gun just cut PC's to ribbons? Did you ever feel a slight incredulity that there are all these insoluble problems in life threatening situations, and yet there's an uncanny winning streak and still surviving PC's?
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