RPGaDay 2019 Day #1 First

(I'm abandoning my old set of prompts for a new set of prompts. It's time for the annual RPGaDay blogfest and I've participated every year.)

Today's theme is "First." I could talk about the first game book I ever bought (GURPS Horror), the first RPG I played (Rolemaster), or even the first RPG I ran (D&D 3rd Edition). But I'm pretty sure I've covered all of that already.

So instead, let's talk about you, dear reader. Your first RPG. Your first session.

What should you know when you sit down to play for the first time?

First of all, resist the pressure to be amazing out of the gate. Especially if you've watched or listened to some of the popular Actual Play shows out there, you might think that you need to have a voice and a backstory and so many more details than could ever fit on the back of your character sheet before you sit down to play. Just a sense of the character and a direction that they're heading is all you really need.

Secondly, the game mechanics are not a physics engine, but are instead a Magic 8 Ball. You formulate a question, add a random element, then interpret the answer. Some parts of the game are designed such that a lot of questions interlock and interact with each other, with combat rules being the typical example, so it might seem like the physics engine behind a video game, but it's still just a Magic 8 Ball.

Thirdly, your character is a playing piece, but also a character. It's tempting to think that the numbers on your character sheet are the sum of your character, but they're not. There's also how you choose to play your character. That can have an impact on how you formulate the questions and interpret the results of the Magic 8 Ball without necessarily going in to the Magic 8 Ball themselves.

If there's one thing that every fledgling gaming group needs, it's a Game Master. But what if this is your first time? What if you've never been a player and all your friends need you to run the game so that they can play in it?

Don't think that you have to have a grand storyline of epic awesome laid down before your first session. And if you do, be prepared to discard it as soon as it stops being fun or relevant. Your players are going to make decisions for their characters that you would never have expected. The dice are going to create results that neither the players nor you could have foreseen. Your best skill is improvisation.

One of the simplest ways to create an adventure is to create a goal and then give it a context. A goal might be recovering a magic sword. The context is the dungeon that the sword is kept in, full of traps and dangers. Or maybe goblins have started stealing cows from the local villagers and you have to put a stop to it. The context is that the goblins are being pushed away from their typical food sources by some other, bigger monster.

The more you understand the context of your adventure, the easier it is to improvise when the unexpected happens. If the players set off the rolling boulder trap in the dungeon, you should have an idea of what other traps it's setting off as it rolls down the hallway. If the players decide to talk to the goblins, you can have some idea what they're going to say. If they decide to fight the goblins, you can have their problems influence their tactics. They could try to run away and lead the adventurers to the bigger monster, hoping that the adventurers fight it off.

If your characters get some lucky rolls and good tactics, they might simply defeat all the goblins before any of the context can be communicated. That's fine. Maybe that monster is still out there causing more trouble that can be another adventure. Or maybe the adventurers wander away to another village to solve another problem and that monster is never heard from again.