Sharing is Caring
It’s funny. I wrote this one on Monday, then on Friday I was invited to a Vampire: The Requiem one-shot. We found ourselves gathered around a very particular campfire.
This was the “Reap the Whirlwind” introductory adventure, and we were a bunch of neonate kindred. We were also a bunch of neonate players.
I hadn’t touched Vampire since my personal Masquerade ended back in college. My fellow vamps hadn’t touched much of anything. I believe there was some D&D experience scattered among the group, but they were were equally unfamiliar with Roll20 and dice pool systems. It was the dramaturgy that really struck me though.
If you’re not familiar with “Reap the Whirlwind,” it’s a classic World of Darkness intro. You wake up in a dark New Orleans alley, freshly vamped and without context beyond a gnawing, inexplicable hunger. After the inevitable you-must-slake-your-thirst-upon-the-blood-of-the-innocent scene, you’re shunted through a series of NPCs before landing in front of the local Prince.
“Confess your sins to me,” he says, because of course he does. “Everything that has happened between your Embrace and this moment.”
In context, it’s a lovely bit of thematic storytelling. The PCs in “Whirlwind” have been vamped by parties unknown, and this Lancea et Prince is doing detective work, trying in his own way to find out whodunit.
Knowing my own tendency to diva things up, I waited for the others to make their confessions.
“I tell him everything,” says dude the first. That was it.
After the awkward who-wants-to-go-next pause, dude the second says, “Ditto.”
“Where’s my van?” says dude the third, because he’d lost his car and because the Prince had “promised to answer all our questions.” It was a fine bit of comedy, but by the time the Prince had finished telepathically extracting van-dude’s confession, I was feeling more than a little empathetic with Wizard. I mean, here was this golden opportunity for everyone to get a spotlight moment. To put their own spin on events. Explain their motivation. Establish character. I know that improv acting isn’t for everyone, but this is friggin’ Vampire! The game made out of goth drama and self-important bluster.
“And what of you?” says the Prince to my bewildered college co-ed. “What sins can you confess?”
My pregen character sheet informed me that I was motivated by vengeance and self-centered survival. I decided to go with that. “It’s against the rules, what happened to us. Isn’t it? We weren’t supposed to become this. Somebody out there did it to us. They’re the ones who made me… I can still taste that poor boy’s blood. It’s why I didn’t desert y’all,” I said, turning to the others. “When I went back to get my bag in the alley. I thought about high-tailing it. Calling my mama. Going back home to the University of Knoxville, where I apparently developed my very-southern-but-weirdly-inconsistent accent. But knowing the monster that made me into this is still out there, laughin’ at me behind my back… I want them dead. I’ll confess whatever you like. Just let me be the one that finds ’em.”
It wasn’t anything profound, but it was my best stab at injecting theatricality into the scene. Minds were not blown. I did not win an Oscar. I doubt that Ranger is out there somewhere vowing to change her silent-protagonist ways in deference to my example. But it did serve as a powerful reminder to me.
People game for different reasons. There are varying comfort levels with RP and voice acting and amateur theater around the gaming table. The guys I played with this weekend were a great bunch of dudes, and I’ll happily go back for part two of the one-shot. But I do think there’s value to be had in grabbing those moments when they’re offered. The characters in these stories grow not just from the actions we take in-game, but the things we say in-character. That’s a useful tool, even if it’s one we all come to in our own way and in our time.
So what do you say, Handbook-World? What makes a good “campfire scene?” When the narrative calls upon you to tell the table what’s in your character’s head, do you seize the moment? Play it close to the vest? Or do you like to snark at the self-important NPCs trying to wrest a confession from your character sheet? Whatever your story, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
Edit: My GM friend has informed me that we were running the first chapter of “Danse De La Mort” converted to 2e, not “Reap the Whirlwind.”
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It depends on who my character is talking to, and how private I’ve decided they are with how much I share. I generally find it fun rather than eye-rolling though.
Balancing this mess isn’t easy. When folks cross the line from dramatic moment to bloviating, it gets uncomfortable for everybody. Learning the difference is a matter of experience and empathy and taste, and that mess isn’t easy to nail every time.
I like a good campfire scene, I know I’ve hammed ot up myself quite a few times, and I normally dislike Assassin… a lot… but for once, I’m with him. There’s being a diva, and then there’s being Sorcerer.
With his sky-high Charisma, you’d think Sorcerer would be a little more likable. 😛
I’m sorry, Claire, but… gramma’s boy is such an egotistical little weenie. 🙁
Now Wizard is a diva who occasionally gets it right, and goes to bat for her friends and loved ones. Sorcerer just blows stuff up or whines to DQ — which he can’t do anymore. Hmm… ideas~
And I guess I’m still sore that nobody in the Anti-Party tried to persuade Paladin to stay.
It’s funny. When I originally conceived of Sorcerer, he was supposed to be an egotistical womanizer.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wizard-vs-sorcerer
He slowly became a pyromaniac and (as you aptly put it) gramma’s boy. Never quite got around to giving him a properly sympathetic backstory moment. I fear it is too late.
Well, maybe now DQ isn’t available anymore to wipe his nose everytime he stumbles into something he can’t handle, maybe he could become more sympathetic in the present? ^^;
Witch might have scared him of that trait.
Some Players (or Characters in this case) mistake having a high Charisma for having a personality…
Here we have a failing to ‘read the room’: If it were Wizard, they’d be trading backstories all night long (or not as there is antagonism betwixt the two), but with Assassin, Fighter, or Ranger, maybe Sorc is best advised to “shut thy pie hole”.
But who knows, maybe Ranger would love to sit quietly listening to other’s tales. Or maybe enough of Sorc’s self-importance would toggle her mic on long enough to make a threatening growl of “shut it!”. Who can say.
Maybe Ranger could summon a cute woodland critter to chew on Sorcerer’s throat until he stops making noises. :p
My partner and I love spot-light stealling, to the point we have to watch out for each other, lest we overdo it and don’t give the other players a chance.
In lieu of a player group made of am-drama students, a good campfire scene needs solid prompting by the DM and someone to break the RP ice. I imagine that if you’d been the one questioned by the Prince first, the rest of the coterie might have felt a bit more comfortable telling their story in similar detail once the fear of ’embaressing for trying’ would be out the way. Or maybe not, you know the group better than I do!
> solid prompting by the DM
That’s why I was impressed by the module. “Confess your sins to me” is a great open-ended line, and immediately activated my “let’s do some RP” reflexes.
Of course, “breaking the RP ice” is tough when you’re a new player. Maybe that’s where a more experienced gamer is *supposed* to take the lead in these moments for that reason. But like you say, spotlight stealing is a real concern.
It was ultimately a fun game, and an illuminating one. And even if I was chucking dice with newbies, I still learn something in the process. 🙂
Not a huge fan of those moments, since I’m not much of an in-character speaker, nor am I good at responding to such things on the spot. Though if I have some warning — e.g. knowing that something is likely to be coming in the next session — then I can gather my thoughts together enough to respond adequately, albeit usually out-of-character.
This is one area where play-by-post games (e.g. forums, email) excel, though. They have a lot of challenges, but one thing that works really well is that players have enough time to think, and to compose good in-character dialogue, including dramatic oratory or heartfelt confessions.
It can be hard for players like me to remember that this is a skill. It feels second nature, and I always find myself vaguely disappointed when others are less engaged by these spontaneous moments. But by the same token, I don’t show up at the gaming table to make others feel uncomfortable.
On some level, I think it’s worth cultivating a willingness to compose *bad* in-character dialogue, and accepting that the price of immediacy is the occasional verbal misstep.
I cope with them better when the situation itself is more natural. I enjoy Masks, for example, where to some degree this is part of the system… exposing vulnerabilities and reacting to them is just something that goes with young supers. You know your hooks with the other characters… you know there are trust issues due to your past life as a villain (or whatever), so it’s relatively easy to respond when someone wants to talk about how you threw her boyfriend off a rooftop a few years ago.
On the other hand, something like your “confess your sins”, I’m probably just going to freeze up. It’s not something I’ve thought about, and even if I can come up with something, it’s going to make for an awkward scene rather than the dramatic one a GM might have envisaged.
Different strokes. I always feel like the prescribed relationships of Powered By games put a straightjacket on my improvisation. It’s as if I’ve got to ask permission from my playbook before I can RP, and that little bit of delay comes at the cost of my immersion.
My group is a very mixed bag in terms of enjoying the sound of their own voice, so I’ve found that the solution is to only talk about things that the group as a whole doesn’t already know. If youre just recapping things in character, it can sometimes be an interesting exercise to see what the players took away from events, but a lot of people will check out fast for that because they were there.
But if youre telling them something new, they get invested. Suddenly its interesting. They can ask questions, try to understand, get as confused as their characters theoretically are. And then the dialogue flows.
I see. So “confess your sins” has a cost associated. Treating it as “tell me what happened” risks becoming “we literally just lived through that and gamed it out, can we please move on?” I could see how it would garner that reaction. What read as a solid “tell me about yourself” prompt to me could just as easily be “plot recap” to someone else.
Well, there was this first session, Call of Cthulhu this time, in which the group was traveling from London to Scotland. We basically spend the whole session “reacquainting”. All the PC’s were supposed to be friends from school, and so we did catch-up, in which everybody told the group what they did “since leaving school”. It also more or less defined the in-group relationships that were not clear, or thought of, during character creation. It certainly set the mood for the rest of the campaign.
It was also so successful that the GM now more or less gets us in similar circumstances during one of the first sessions with a new group to give everybody time and opportunity to bond and tell their back story
> the GM now more or less gets us in similar circumstances
I feel like this kind of prompting is a useful skill for GMs and players alike. Sorcerer in today’s comic is a bit heavy handed with it… What does the “good version” of getting acquainted look like from a GM’s side? How do you set up for it and prompt it smoothly?
I know that I’ve been asking my players ahead of session a basic question about their characters to warm them up. Getting participation has been …interesting in my Avatar: Legends campaign. As was trying to come up with new questions in the process of learning that the game’s combat system suffers from Decker syndrome.
Also why does this strip feel so familiar? I’m getting deja vu here.
So before the session recap, you’ll do reality TV style Q&A with the PCs? What do the questions look like?
As for today’s strip: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unwatchful
It’s easier to come up with scenarios when you’ve got something to work with. I’ve recently taken to scrolling through the backlog for backgrounds that fire the imagination. I figure, if we’ve already got a good setting, why not use it?
So, I call it the Weekly Character Question, and it’s generally a flavor sort of question? Well, depends on the game really, but here are a few samples.
From my Glitter Hearts game:
“Likelihood of your character dragging the plot back to the Beach Dimension™?” (This was the session after the Beach Episode)
“Your plan to take over the world?”
From my Avatar: Legends game:
“What does your character think the future holds?”
“Once you get the deed, how do you plan on establishing that you ought to have the right to use it?”
So it’s less Q&A and more …the metaphor that immediately comes to mind is an ask on Tumblr. At least the way I see it.
As someone who hasn’t played Avatar: Legends—what do you mean by Decker syndrome?
Reference to the original Cyberpunk: basically, it’s an issue where a mechanic is only suitable for a few characters and not the whole party, which inevitably means that it drags down the game because most of the party is reduced to eating popcorn.
Avatar: Legends has a complex combat exchange system that I learned the hard way is not conducive to full party brawls.
Seriously, a campfire is for chumps who cannot cast Leomund’s secure shelter.
Heck, even Leomund’s tiny hut can provide a temperature-controlled and weather-free bivouac.
Hard to cook dinner with a tiny hut as your heat source.
Prestidigitation can at least warm it.
And casting heat metal on a cooking pan is probably enough to cook most meal.
Heck, I’m pretty sure you can find some cookbooks solely with spellcasters in mind.
Purify Food and Drink is level 0
When I think about a nice hot camp meal cooked over an open flame, and when the chef asks me if it’s any good, the highest compliment I can think to give is, “This food has been rendered free of poison and disease.”
My fellow gamers will sometimes grab the mic and begin the tragic saga that is their new character’s backstory. Some don’t bother, even if they have one in mind. I find I can get more attention than eye rolls by dropping oblique references to “the lessons learned from the monks who raised me” or “like my Aunt Mirabelle’s perfume–” “Pleasant?” “Nope. OVERPOWERING.” And such. I can drop little hints (“Just like Budapest”) that give a hint of background but raise even more questions that my teammates will eventually want answers to.
I like dropping the hints… But you’ve got to be overt about it. Go too subtle and wait for the perfect moment to make your exposition dump, and you may find yourself waiting forever.
I love a good campfire scene. When I was first running my 5e game a while ago (which, alas, I fear will die the death of the unending hiatus), I was going to throw some random encounters at my party while they camped, and had them set up a watch schedule.
Thankfully, I asked them what they were doing during watch, and ended up with something much, much more fun than rolling for random encounters: they started roleplaying with each other. I threw out my random encounter tables and focused on watch scenes as chances for them to interact as characters and it’s probably the best GM decision I made.
Those watch scenes provided so much character growth, it ended up driving a lot of the action! Two characters, best friends, coming to terms with the fact that they have conflicting ideals; one character consistently alone on watch, quietly brewing a betrayal the others never talked to them enough to see; the ongoing question of whether goblins—who come from a kind of alchemical stew—have bones, and the ongoing drastically failed medicine checks to figure it out.
Then in the morning I’d roll to see where the dragon they were supposed to be dealing with was and all my players would go “the dragon! we forgot about the dragon!”
Hard to nail that Perception check on the dragon when you’re gazing squarely at your navel. 😛
For real though, the drama the comes from these quiet moments feels so much more earned than the cheap excitement of a manufactured combat encounter. And even if wolves do randomly attack, it’s nice when they interrupt a dramatic conversation for a nice “to be continued” feel.
Most of my groups have had to be strong armed into RP. I tried to make opportunities developed around each character, but seldom did any take the bait. Did have one guy who was the silent type in real life finally start having his equally silent ranger interact with more than single syllable responses. I considered that a major win.
As for me, I’ve had few DMs that made RP opportunities in their games. The only one that sticks in my mind was my Marvel character. He was first generation Irish/American and one of his attacks was a flung bottle of Bushmills :). Only time I’ve ever managed a fairly believable brogue to deliver the copious amount of snark he had. That whole game was filled with “characters” and the DM just dove headfirst into it. God that game was fun.
What is it with the silent rangers? Must be all that time spent alone in the woods.
As for the brogue… My strat is just to watch Boondock Saints again. Gets the accent in my head every time.
“What makes a good “campfire scene?””
Whatever works. It’s rarely around a campfire though (in my experience – we have the ‘who’s on watch’ discussion once and never again) so it’s usually “Same watches” and as long as nothing happens it’s next day. Moments sometimes present themselves in oblique ways… called before the [IMPORTANT FIGURE] or while the GM is busy setting up for the next encounter, food was just ordered but those two are still IC talking, etc…
I’ve found that LARP and message-board rpgs tend to have far more IC discussions about ‘nothing important’ and thus lead to backstory teasing more so than tabletop rpgs, since there is a lot more ‘downtimes’ between the action.
“When the narrative calls upon you to tell the table what’s in your character’s head, do you seize the moment?”
Always, but the loquaciousness is very PC dependent. My soft spoken, timid, or ‘person of few words’ characters don’t usually say much without someone dragging it out of them, inversely when I play verbose PCs getting them to shut-the-hell-up is impossible (and usually 90% of their blather is just that, nothing important). And of course there are characters in-between.
The “campfire scene” is cemented in my head because of this biz:
https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Party_Camp
It’s explicitly designed as a pause in the action to play out character interactions. But you’re right on the money: there’s nothing that says it has to be a literal campfire.
My players decide to have their “private” heart-to-heart sat the strangest moments. While in the waiting room of the secret police. While climbing a cliff side. While crawling through a desert or just before they planned on kicking down a door and fighting whoever was on the other side.
For what works, I think everyone buying at least somewhat into it and it not coming out of nowhere. A memorable case of that was a Fighter in a game I was a player in (He was a first time player), who made up his tragic, and very brooding backstory, on the fly. And sharing whatever part he had just added to it, almost immediately whenever it struck him. Such as suddenly declaring that warlocks killed his family, the moment we met a very nice and helpful warlock. Or starting ranting about how he saw his whole family and village burned and butchered by demons, in the middle of an otherwise fun and lighthearted conversation. It did add a lot to his character, through. In that he became a very Batmanesque “I don´t even know the meaning of the word fun” sort of character.
On the other hand, what I think works well is just the characters sitting down and asking each other “So, who are you? What are your goals?” and being curious about each other. Recently I tried making a character who is overly, almost psychotically, supportive of the other party members. Which the other players seems to like, as I ask them a lot of question about who they are and what their goals are. And how we can help them fulfill them. So I think the biggest help for such a scene is curiosity from the other players. That and the typical roleplaying advice of not being afraid of putting yourself out there.
> I tried making a character who is overly, almost psychotically, supportive of the other party members.
In a world full of brooding, I’ve been toying with the idea of making a really NICE character. Like… preschool teacher levels of nice. No idea what kind of barbarian she would be other than “an awesome one.”
I find it really fun to be helpful to others. The “almost psychotically” part comes from the fact that my character is totally on board with whatever mission the party members (ie, their friends/crew) are on. Be it treasure seeking or bloody vengeance. I ask questions because I am interested in learning more about you, not to judge you.
If the pre-school teacher is a barbarian, then one could flavor the rage as her suddenly becoming very stern and giving a Paddington style “stare”. While also beating people to death. If it is 5e, then the Ancestral Guardian have a focus on protecting others, which might go well with it… And now I am picturing her ability to summon ancestral spirits as summoning a bunch of kind little grandmas.
“Want to share tragic backstories” just feels like such a *usable* line with RPGers.
It’s the bardic equivalent of two dogs sniffing each other’s butts.
“I was an orphan!”
“Well I was a poverty-stricken orphan.”
“My parents died in a fire.”
“Mine were gnawed to death by marmots! Hark! Mine ears can still hear their squeaks!”