Hi everyone!
Today was an interesting trip down memory lane for #RPGaDay 13…
#RPGaDay 13: Describe an experience that changed how you play.
I have a few choices here, but as many people who have listened to interviews with me know how I became a GM, I thought I would tell a different story this time…
I played a Paranoia game while at university. This was some time after I GM’d for the first time, but I had not played much.
Most veteran players find that RPGs stop being a power trip at some point and become more about playing the character, doing things you would never do.
In this game, I was instructed, as my secret mission, to kill a prime number of troubleshooters without being exposed – specifically as high a prime number of troubleshooters as possible…
I am quite good at explaining my actions away in a character-plausible way and, as it happened, my character had super persuasion as a mutant ability. So I set about my work.
By the end of game debrief, I had been forced into killing one more than I had wanted, sitting at 14. With 17 quite a long way off, I did the only logical thing: I put my laser pistol to my head 3 times, eliminating troubleshooters!
I happened to have 4 clones remaining and I persuaded Friend Computer that the reason had been one of my previous clones had been so traitorous that my clone line had needed to remove all trace of him.
I totally got away with it!
It totally changed everything for me in the way I play – I didn’t need to be the most powerful character any more, I was fine to work as a team because I knew I could do it!
– Ed
