More Backstory? More Backstory
A year ago I was an old-school D&D DM who was coming back to a hobby he loved. I'd been WANTING to game again for years and I knew what I was looking for - I wanted to play my version of The Classic RPG Game From The 70s. I was after the kind of loose and low-crunch version of the game that I remembered from the Basic and early Advanced editions of the game I had played in high school. I realized that a lot of the players I was working with would be people that I would be introducing not only to *my* game, nor to D&D itself, but also to the WHOLE IDEA of role playing games as a tabletop activity. Frankly, they had no idea how tabletop RPGs worked and why should they? Many of them had played World Of Warcraft and had the basic jist of the combat and "Hit Points" and rewards and that all down pat, but some of them had never actually rolled dice physically at a table with someone else before. As a point of illustration, I had one of them asking me at one point if it was more like a kind of "combat chess" where one group of players would be fighting another half of the players at the table with me refereeing the goings-on. This was all going to be new. During the six months I ran D&D for that group, three out of five of the people playing had either never played a tabletop RPG before, or, if they had, it had been so long ago and they had been players so briefly that it was like they had to be taught again anyhow. Fortunately, I like a challenge. More importantly, I saw this as a great opportunity to build a new group and if I made it easy enough that ANYONE could sit down and play within 15-20 minutes after making a character I knew that we would get even more players.
With that in mind I
came up with a quick and dirty rule set for my gaming group. This was
something cobbled together from the source material and other
material and house rules that I would be incorporating from other OSR
games and things that I had found on the plethora of DIY D&D
sites that were cropping up like mushrooms overnight at the time. I
like to think it was really successful, and I know that some of the
people playing welcomed the fact that a majority of the crunch was
kept low while still not pushing the burden of the storytelling onto
them. What it also did, was allow me to introduce concepts that were
specific to my game (like, say, using DCC magic in an otherwise
Ascending AC reworking of B/X D&D rule-set like in LotFP - I've
just found the gamers reading this if that alphabet soup I just typed
made any sense to them). This way, everyone going in could learn the
new game , that is to say, MY game, my "MURDERHOBOES"
campaign (as I'd had decided on the name before another group had
published rules under that title). It allowed the house rules and the
new rules to work together organically. It worked for the six months
we managed to keep meeting as a group.
Bearing this in mind, I
decided to do something similar with my CALL OF CTHULHU game. I've
cobbled together parts of the Quick Start rules for 7th Edition CoC,
along with the character creation rules and the listings of
Investigator Occupations from the 7th edition Investigator's Handbook
to give everyone a fair start going in. Having taught some of those
early original new D&D players how RPGs work, these same people
have recruited a few of their friends who, like them before, have
never played CALL OF CTHULHU before, and who'd been away from gaming
for a long time themselves. I'm still looking at, roughly, a ratio of
about three new players for each two experienced ones at the table.
That's a lot of newbies, but so be it.
