The Normies Take Nighthaven

My normie theory of gaming gets road-tested

As I have mentioned a few times, my latest Nigthhaven campaign currently consists of two non-gamers; my dad and my little sister’s boyfriend. Neither of them have much in the way of gaming experience, although both of them do have baseline knowledge of the fantasy genre. I outlined the in-game actions of my new party in The Rake’s Report 001, but I wanted to discuss some of the out-of-game stuff too, especially since this is my first time using Shadowdark. I found the experience of making characters to be very intuitive, not too time-consuming and easy to teach. I also found that my players, inexperienced as they were, picked up on the basic idea very fast, especially with a couple pieces of advice that I gave to them. I’ll explain exactly how as we proceed, but my ultimate conclusion from this experience is that normal people with few preconceived notions about the game are actually pretty good at picking the game up and playing in a pro-social way. To find out how, let’s dig into how the session went.

Before game day, my sister’s boyfriend, who I will call Jordan throughout the article for expediency and anonymity, reached out to me to ask how he should prepare for the game. I was really impressed that he reached out as I figured he was playing just to get to know my dad and I better, but he seemed genuinely interested in not just playing the game but playing it well. I told him two things to help him get his head right. The first was to always say “I want to do x” instead of “Can I do x?” The habit of what’s often called “Mother-May-I roleplaying” is an early development from not knowing the rules and it can be a hard habit to shake. It’s the wrong framing for the table-top too because your actions are unlimited. You aren’t tied to a handful of possible inputs, you just need to call your spot and I’ll tell you what to roll. The other piece of advice I gave him was to treat character creation more like discovery. Yes, he should look over the classes, think about what he’s interested in, etc but because we’ll be rolling for stats, it will be much more rewarding and much less frustrating if you let the dice lead. To his credit, that’s exactly what he did and he had some serious beginners luck on his rolls. I had both players roll 3 stat arrays and then choose which one to use as their first character and he rolled a character with a natural 17 as his highest stat and no single stat under a 12. A true miracle character.

Unlike Jordan, my Dad was coming in with some RPG experience, mostly in the form of MUDs. Because of that, Dad was approaching the table with a handful of ideas forming in his mind about what kind of character he wanted to play. I gently discouraged this though and, to his credit, he didn’t play the “But that’s not what I had in mind for my character” game that I’ve dealt with in the past. Dad was also not as lucky with his dice rolls. While Jordan rolled about as well as anybody could, Dad’s first character had single-digit stats in everything but Wisdom. He created the world’s best bartender or the world’s worst Priest. Of course, he went with one of his alternates that had a respectable 15 high stat with only one negative modifier coming from a 9. Dad was a good sport and this illustrates why I believe in creating multiple characters for the first session. Generating 3-5 characters up-front instead of just 1 reinforces the idea that this character isn’t supposed to be your idealized alter-ego. He isn’t your OC, he isn’t particularly special (yet), and his perspective is a borrowed one. If he dies, you have a number of replacements on the bench. If he’s in time jail, you have another character to utilize while you wait for his timer to run out. If he survives and thrives, then you have a special character that you can tell stories about. The problem with conventional play is not that it values cool, powerful characters and epic stories. The problem is that it puts the cart before the horse because of a high time preference.

There were two things that genuinely surprised me. First, both Dad and Jordan read The Rake’s Codex. I’ve given experienced players 1-2 paragraphs of primer material on a campaign setting that they never read, but these guys read a 152 page book of their own volition without my suggestion that they do so. Granted, one of them is my father who was likely to read the book anyway, but it’s nice to know that they wanted to interface with my campaign. The other thing that surprised me was that both of them chose to play classes I created instead of one of the default Shadowdark classes. I almost cautioned them against doing this. After all, I’m one of the loudest voices calling for people to play RAW before adding and subtracting parts. That being said, I do plan to publish these classes in the forthcoming Shadowdark editions of The Rake’s Codex. Somebody’s got to playtest these classes and they seem happy to do so. It’s apparent that they’re putting a lot of trust in me to keep things fair and they’re willing to engage with my work. I think this is the core of this new group that has me excited to keep playing with them. As Billy Joel would say, it’s a matter of trust.

We talk all the time about high-trust roleplaying, but trust is something that’s built over time. It’s hard to trust people you just met, even if you share a mutual love of RPGs and a common goal of creating a fantastic game. Again, I must reiterate that RPGs are games and when you treat them like games then it’s not so bizarre to play them with family. Games can get competitive but we ultimately trust each other to play fair, follow the rules and be good sports. So who is going to be introduced to this game in the future? Exclusively friends and family and I mean that very seriously. My dad has already invited a handful of people from his church that may join us in the next couple weeks, I may invite some close friends, and we are going to proceed with that as criteria for joining. I know that they’re willing to engage with the game and with my the stuff I come up with. They know that I’m experimenting. They trust me to be even-handed in my application of the rules. I trust them to follow the rules, even in the event that they get competitive with me or with each other.

If you read my campaign report, you’ll see roughly how things worked out during the first session. For the record, my Dad is Argonne de Gasse and Jordan is Ghostblade. I’m impressed with how they’ve adapted to the game and I’m really looking forward to the next session and, especially, what happens when we introduce new players. They know that the clock is ticking and events are moving. Will they want to play more when they see what happens in their absence? What factions are they going to buddy up with? Who are they going to piss off with their actions? I think they’re going to find themselves in-over-their-heads in much the same way their characters are. You know what it’s called when the lines are blurred between character and player? Immersion.