Old Style Improv Game

It’s September so its been a return to work for me as the students return to the clasroom.  This is the busiest time of the year for most educators as we prepare for the students to return as well as learn all the new policies and procedures for the upcoming year.   Because of these tumultous time everything else takes a backseat including blogging and gaming.  In the past few weeks we have had a hard time getting our group together for a full session.This week one of our group, Darren,  announced that he had accepted a new job in another province so he was going to be leaving our weekly game.  Two of the other players were not able to make it to the session so the Darren, myself and one other player, Denis, were left to fill the evening.  Usually we just while away the night talking about games but last night we decided we would just improv a D&D game.  While Denis and I made up characters which we generated randomly, Darren made some jot notes and framed out an adventure.

Denis and I decided we would randomize the characters a bit and let the dice decide what we were going to play.  I ended up with a half-elf Lawful Evil rogue while Denis was playing a Lawful Good Elven Ranger.  So, the first challenge was to figure out how to have these characters work together at all.  We decided they would be half-brothers from different mothers.  We quickly fleshed out that dear old Dad was a bard who liked to spread happiness wherever he went.  The problem was that he usually got himself in trouble doing that resulting in the hook for the adventure: bring dear old Dad back to Elven lands before he gets himself killed.

The evening was a blast.  The game moved along quickly with both Denis and I quickly falling into the bickering brother roles as we each chaffed at each others approaches to life.   We fed Darren stuff and together we built a fun little world in a couple of hours.  We finished off finally finding Dad but there’s a problem – he’s scheduled to be hanged in the city square during a festival for knocking up the local Duke’s daughter!  We had such fun that we have decided we will try to keep the game going online.

The point of this rather long-winded post is that we had fun without worrying too much about crunch.  We used 3.5 rules but point was the building of the story and the more complications got thrown at us the more fun it was.  It was a throw back to days gone by.  Nostalgia is fun and a nice palette cleanser every once in a while.