Orkpiraten

I’m a pen and paper role­player, been it for nearly 20 years now, and I love it.

As most of those who are into this hobby, I’m play­ing with fri­ends. Fri­ends who are usually fri­ends first, and fel­low gamers later. Not neces­sa­rily in the tem­po­ral sense though.

Thus I’m often arri­ving at a strange con­un­drum: What to do when con­flicts arise out of the game?

It’s com­pa­ra­tively easy to be nice about loo­sing a game of pool, or shaking hands after a nice round of Sett­lers of Catan. But role­play­ing games are by their very nature very emo­tio­nally intense games.

This, cou­pled with a great bunch of dif­fe­rent player types, can create con­flict. If left unat­ten­ded, these can des­troy fri­endships. I’ve seen in-game con­flicts spill over into the real life fri­endship often enough, so I know bet­ter now.

This brings me to the „now“ in this story: The group I cur­rently play in con­sists of 5 play­ers, who come from diverse back­grounds and have quite dif­fe­rent ambi­ti­ons regar­ding the game. Some only join for the fri­endly com­pany, some want to solve logi­cal puz­zles, some live for being able to do fla­vour­ful role­play­ing, and I love to see a good story evolving.

Such a group can work toge­ther just fine, with each mind con­tri­bu­ting when it is nee­ded. Alas, we cur­rently keep bicke­ring at each other over how dis­mal the adven­ture was, how the other play­ers get all the goo­dies, how player A gets more atten­tion, how Player C dis­rupts the adventure…

..it’s a pain in the ass, really, and seriously sub­stracts from my fun. It’s fine to spend time over the week figu­ring out how to let my cha­rac­ter behave in the story, won­de­ring where that would lead. It’s no fun at all broo­ding over what went wrong among the play­ers, and how to pla­cate everyone.

In an online game environ­ment, I would have sim­ply moved on and see­ked ano­ther group. The chicken-out-solution really, but the one with the least amount of stress invol­ved. But in the sce­na­rio at hand, that would trans­late into not mee­ting all my bud­dies once a week at a fixed time. I’d miss that, so I’ve got to tackle this ano­ther way.

I did try speaking up outs­ide the game, rai­sing the issue in a fri­endly way, try­ing to sample thoughts and ideas of how we could all pull together..

How do they say? „No cigar“.

I’m going to try ano­ther venue next: App­ly­ing in-game social intel­li­gence to the solu­tion. Wed­nes­day, my cha­rac­ter will instead ask his bud­dies (ie the other play­ers cha­rac­ters) what they want, as the big mys­te­rious dra­gon has offe­red a reward! Let’s see what each cha­rac­ter wants (which ulti­mately is what the player wants any­way), and then I’ll figure out how to get it for them.

More work for me still, but at least it’s in-game work, instead of dicking around with irate fel­low players.