Your characters are heroes in a world of make-believe, not soldiers in a video game or pieces on a chess board. They are capable of things that ordinary people are not, so start trying those things.
Be reckless, have fun, do something crazy
I want you to think outside of the dice box.
Tell me what your character is doing before you ever roll the dice, then how you would do it. I will give it a chance unless it is completely possible. Then and only then do you roll the dice.
You are a team, work off of each other, help each other, and great things could happen.
I was getting ready for this weeks game with the boys when I started thinking of how I wanted to get the point across to the boys to loosen up a little. Start thinking more like heroes, and less like play pieces on a chess board.
It is easy to fall into that habit with D&D and Pathfinder. Combat starts, you spend a turn or two maneuvering into contact with the enemy. From there it just becomes a matter of rolling the dice each turn until you or the bad guys are dead. But this is not a game of Warhammer Fantasy, this is role playing.
There are 2 sides to blame in this. As the GM in the boys game, I admit to failing some in my role of describing the situation better. Setting the scene each turn so the players can picture what is going on and match my description. I am working on that, it is a slow process, but I am trying. Training myself to give each player a one sentence summary before asking how they respond.
But it is also on the players side too. As the player in my Pathfinder game, I am equally guilty of just chucking the dice, reciting damage, and then kicking back until my next turn. I know I could be doing more, even with the limits of the system that I have discussed before. So I need to take this to heart myself before we play next.
After spending a couple of weeks talking about how role playing needs to be more about the Heroes this would be the manifesto that I end up with. Sure there are role playing games where you could play more mundane figures, for whom combat should be feared, your vertical jump is measured in inches, and the excitement comes from solving a minor crime. But that is not what I want out of role playing. And I don’t think that is what most people want either. They want to be the heroes in a story. So why not treat them, their characters, and their activities like the actions of superheroes?
That is my goal moving forward. To be a hero in a game of heroes. To treat the heroes as heroes, and give them chances to act like that. Make the games fun for everyone, not a slog of hit point attrition or feel like a game of real life.
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