Exchange of Realities

This wasn’t a very good week for writing things relevant to my current game; I have a few dissectable speeches, but nothing that I feel like sharing offhand, and the rest of the week has been rather chaotic. Busted plumbing tends to do that. Not realizing that the things the group wants to do before the things you’re actually prepared for them to do will take the entire session can do that as well. (On the plus side, pulling batty gods out of thin air is fun.)

So instead, I’m going to ramble a bit about my observations this week. One, as I said before, pulling batty gods out of thin air is fun. Especially when I manage to deliver references to Hamlet, chemistry lab, and standard safety in the span of about three comments. Everything’s better when I can drop references without breaking the Fourth Wall.

Two, I like to be able to mess with my players’ heads. Normally, this isn’t too big a problem; give me long enough with most characters, especially if they start settling down and getting into involved conversations with the NPCs, that I can start figuring out things the player wasn’t quite aware of. (I did it to a fellow player in a different game once. To be fair, he and I were in a lot of offscreen scenes together, and I’m known for rereading old chats and overanalyzing details. It was still fun to see his reaction.) But when I get a PC who doesn’t have any obvious hooks or buttons to push, it stops being quite as much fun, and I start getting testy. People don’t like playing under me when I’m testy.

Three, canonical settings are very much a mixed bag. On the one hand, I like using them because it gives me a world I can work off of, and that means I can focus on little details and solid characterization rather than spending so long on the world that I forget to start the story. On the other hand, every now and then I get a situation where I assume one thing of an existing set of facts, discover it contradicts what’s already out there, and spend a while twitching over how to resolve it without contradicting myself.

And last: I know an NPC is way too involved with the storyline when one of the players refers to her as a PC while discussing other matters, particularly when none of the others comes up in that way. Blast.