When I look back at my gaming life, I have certain moments that I still remember clarly as interesting, intense and exciting. One thing that strike me when I look back at them is that they have very little in common. Some of them happened in very low key settings, others in high-action, epic drama.So, what makes a moment memorable? I don't know actually, and perhaps it's something that you cannot pin down with a formula.
- Long ago, my character was executed for a murder. It was a very low-key, realistic setting. In a tense mystery/thriller-adventure he finally had to murder a man to stop a mob lynching a young man. He did however get buried according to his religion, courtesy of the nobleman whose son he saved.
- The players in a Mage-campaign once had to kill an entire town in order to challenge an ancient dragon spirit.
- In a Marvel game, one of the heroes was a flyer with wings. No particular strength or protection. When a (small) comet fell against the earth he flew up to counter it, sacrificing himself. An extremely good roll (actually, draw of the cards, this was Marvel Saga) resulted in that he charged the comet, protected himself with his wings and managed to charge through the comet, splitting it into small pieces.
- Not a moment, but a character. In Everway, I once played a small halfling-like character called Fourclover. He was a storyteller with hidden wisdom, combined with the ability to control smoke, making it form pictures from the stories he was telling. Something with him just clicked, and even though I just played him a couple of sessions, he has stuck with me since.
These are but a few of my roleplaying highlights. The list is longer, but the only thing the different memorables have in common is that they are of different scope, genre and category. What they do have in common though is that they are personal, intense and dramatic.
2 comments:
All the situations seem to have in common that the characters sacrifice something or do something nasty to achieve something good. I'd call them character-defining moments, personally.
Any truth in this guess?
I'd say so. Things should be personal and mean something. On top of that, the character steps forward and makes a choice.
When I read about the setup in Dogs in the Vineyard it seems that some aspects of that game lends itself well towards those kinds of situations. I wonder how hard it is to distill those aspects and try to use them more in other games.
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