Fictitious
Apr. 22nd, 2007 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI've been playing RPGs for almost thirty years now, and doing text-based RP for sixteen or so. Seven years ago I started playing on Sinai, where the roleplay took place in a structured, plot-driven environement with a GM. In January, I began playing, for the very first time, a play-by-email RPG -- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bard_bloom's excellent Terrible Butterflies.
I've been reading longer than I've been roleplaying, and writing fiction for not quite as long. and for the sake of completeness, I've also been involved in some cooperative writing forums, which have fallen somewhere between roleplay and round-robin story telling. Remember The Outpost,hotspurre? Or the Haunted House?
This is my life-long love affair with fiction, with fantasy and sf, manifested in myriad forms but all tracing back to that one root desire: to immerse myself in the story. To make it real.
In many ways, this internal life of fiction, of settings and characters and stories, is more real to me than my external one. I think I am beyond considering this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing: it's just a Thing. Sometimes it absorbs all of my mental energy, for days or weeks or even months. Sometimes I turn my back on it and do without, for days or weeks or months, and immerse myself in that strange place we call the Real World instead.
In my own experience, there's a huge difference between three broad categories:
* Reading: stories created by others that I experience as a member of the audience (this applies to movies, TV shows, webcomics, etc.)
* Writing: stories that I create on my own
* Roleplay: stories that I create in cooperation with others
All of my cooperative efforts, from the round-robin stories to tabletop RP to MUCKing to the PBEM, have been more akin to each othe than they have been to writing solo.
There's something about roleplay that, for me, has always made it feel like a game -- even when it's just as hard to produce as writing a story by myself would be. Even when it's harder. Even when the resulting story strikes me as being as good or better than anything I would write on my own. There are several reasons for this; perhaps the most important is that RP is never accessible to a broad audience the way a novel could be. Yes, the logs or emails or segments of a text game can be posted to the web and people can read them, but few who aren't participants will ever choose to. They are plagued by whatkoogrr describes fairly as a lack of editing. There's a lot of repetition and fluff that may be interesting at the time, but which doesn't contribute to the overall story. Those who are part of the game, who are creating it and watching it unfold, will enjoy (or at least overlook) the extraneous information. But for someone who is only in the audience, the overload of stuff is too burdensome. They're looking for a traditional narrative, where all the parts contribute to the whole. Where the characters don't spend half the book chasing down deadends, or arguing over red herrings, or rechecking all their facts to make sure they've got them right. Oh, the characters might do these things, but they won't take up much of the reader's time. The author will usually cover false leads in a few paragraphs, not twenty chapters. The amorphous, meandering nature of roleplay makes it harder for those not directly involved to become engaged by it. It's not what they're expecting. It can become totally unpredictable, because players do things gamemasters don't expect -- and vice versa.
It is, in large part, this very unpredictability that makes roleplay so engaging for those involved. No one knows what's going to happen next, and no one is completely in control. When all the participants are skillful, the results are amazing.
One of the things that fascinates me, though, is the way that participants in a text RPG will attempt to follow the tropes of conventional story-telling. In logs on Sinai, players and GMs alike will often labor over the word choices in each pose and sentence. They evoke mood, character, setting in much the way a novelist tries to. Sometimes this has odd results, with characters taking a paragraph to say "I agree" because it seems too uncreative to say it quickly.
But some phenomenons are more subtle. One of these is "Just Do It". There are many reasons why player characters are more prone to action than discussion: arguing is dull, it take a long time to agree, planning is hard work and not fun, and so forth.
But one overlooked reason is a trope of all fiction, which is this:
Any Detailed Plan Discussed In Advance Will Fail.
You name it, in books, films, TV shows, whatever, nearly any scene which describes a plan beforehand will be followed by scenes of said plan going horribly awry. If the Plan were going to work, the author would write something like: " Jackson said, 'Now, here's the plan'" followed by an immediate cut to the action, wherein the plan unfolds before the reader's eye. Why would the author bore you by describing the same plan twice -- once when it's discussed and again when it's executed? And why bore you with the dry details of planning when he can cover that in one line and skip to the exciting part of showcasing a brilliant plan?
No, the only reason to tell the audience about a plan is if the plan is doomed, and the audience needs to know how it was supposed to go in order to understand why it's gone so wrong.
The result carries over to roleplay. Even when players have a plan ahead of time, they're reluctant to share it with the GM or show it 'on camera' because everyone knows that means it's not going to work. Sometimes this fear is rational -- a startled GM is less likely to invent an immediate counter to a plan. But I think more often, it's that ingrained, subconscious fear that good roleplay is like good fiction, and that means any plan visible to the 'audience' isn't going to work. Successful plans are those deployed for proper dramatic effect, and revealed only at the moment of utilization.
This can be pretty frustrating for GMs, who as a whole prefer to be prepared for what might happen in their games, and can't prepare when the PCs are keeping them deliberately in the dark.
I know a lot of you play RPGs, too -- what tropes have you noticed that have odd consequences when translated from the medium of books to that of games?
bard_bloom's excellent Terrible Butterflies.I've been reading longer than I've been roleplaying, and writing fiction for not quite as long. and for the sake of completeness, I've also been involved in some cooperative writing forums, which have fallen somewhere between roleplay and round-robin story telling. Remember The Outpost,
hotspurre? Or the Haunted House?This is my life-long love affair with fiction, with fantasy and sf, manifested in myriad forms but all tracing back to that one root desire: to immerse myself in the story. To make it real.
In many ways, this internal life of fiction, of settings and characters and stories, is more real to me than my external one. I think I am beyond considering this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing: it's just a Thing. Sometimes it absorbs all of my mental energy, for days or weeks or even months. Sometimes I turn my back on it and do without, for days or weeks or months, and immerse myself in that strange place we call the Real World instead.
In my own experience, there's a huge difference between three broad categories:
* Reading: stories created by others that I experience as a member of the audience (this applies to movies, TV shows, webcomics, etc.)
* Writing: stories that I create on my own
* Roleplay: stories that I create in cooperation with others
All of my cooperative efforts, from the round-robin stories to tabletop RP to MUCKing to the PBEM, have been more akin to each othe than they have been to writing solo.
There's something about roleplay that, for me, has always made it feel like a game -- even when it's just as hard to produce as writing a story by myself would be. Even when it's harder. Even when the resulting story strikes me as being as good or better than anything I would write on my own. There are several reasons for this; perhaps the most important is that RP is never accessible to a broad audience the way a novel could be. Yes, the logs or emails or segments of a text game can be posted to the web and people can read them, but few who aren't participants will ever choose to. They are plagued by what
koogrr describes fairly as a lack of editing. There's a lot of repetition and fluff that may be interesting at the time, but which doesn't contribute to the overall story. Those who are part of the game, who are creating it and watching it unfold, will enjoy (or at least overlook) the extraneous information. But for someone who is only in the audience, the overload of stuff is too burdensome. They're looking for a traditional narrative, where all the parts contribute to the whole. Where the characters don't spend half the book chasing down deadends, or arguing over red herrings, or rechecking all their facts to make sure they've got them right. Oh, the characters might do these things, but they won't take up much of the reader's time. The author will usually cover false leads in a few paragraphs, not twenty chapters. The amorphous, meandering nature of roleplay makes it harder for those not directly involved to become engaged by it. It's not what they're expecting. It can become totally unpredictable, because players do things gamemasters don't expect -- and vice versa.It is, in large part, this very unpredictability that makes roleplay so engaging for those involved. No one knows what's going to happen next, and no one is completely in control. When all the participants are skillful, the results are amazing.
One of the things that fascinates me, though, is the way that participants in a text RPG will attempt to follow the tropes of conventional story-telling. In logs on Sinai, players and GMs alike will often labor over the word choices in each pose and sentence. They evoke mood, character, setting in much the way a novelist tries to. Sometimes this has odd results, with characters taking a paragraph to say "I agree" because it seems too uncreative to say it quickly.
But some phenomenons are more subtle. One of these is "Just Do It". There are many reasons why player characters are more prone to action than discussion: arguing is dull, it take a long time to agree, planning is hard work and not fun, and so forth.
But one overlooked reason is a trope of all fiction, which is this:
Any Detailed Plan Discussed In Advance Will Fail.
You name it, in books, films, TV shows, whatever, nearly any scene which describes a plan beforehand will be followed by scenes of said plan going horribly awry. If the Plan were going to work, the author would write something like: " Jackson said, 'Now, here's the plan'" followed by an immediate cut to the action, wherein the plan unfolds before the reader's eye. Why would the author bore you by describing the same plan twice -- once when it's discussed and again when it's executed? And why bore you with the dry details of planning when he can cover that in one line and skip to the exciting part of showcasing a brilliant plan?
No, the only reason to tell the audience about a plan is if the plan is doomed, and the audience needs to know how it was supposed to go in order to understand why it's gone so wrong.
The result carries over to roleplay. Even when players have a plan ahead of time, they're reluctant to share it with the GM or show it 'on camera' because everyone knows that means it's not going to work. Sometimes this fear is rational -- a startled GM is less likely to invent an immediate counter to a plan. But I think more often, it's that ingrained, subconscious fear that good roleplay is like good fiction, and that means any plan visible to the 'audience' isn't going to work. Successful plans are those deployed for proper dramatic effect, and revealed only at the moment of utilization.
This can be pretty frustrating for GMs, who as a whole prefer to be prepared for what might happen in their games, and can't prepare when the PCs are keeping them deliberately in the dark.
I know a lot of you play RPGs, too -- what tropes have you noticed that have odd consequences when translated from the medium of books to that of games?
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-22 11:53 pm (UTC)I cannot think of any particular instances, but I know there have been at least one or two occasions when the players have planned things out so meticulously, and been so well prepared for, that I hadn't the heart to subject it all to the random roll of dice to see if it'd work. (Well, that and the fact that it would likely take hours upon hours of combat rounds to play out, in at least one case.) I think the reaction to my rough-summary approach to the conflict, after the plan ranged from indifference to extreme disappointment on the parts of the players involved.
I think that there are some stories that could be gleaned from roleplay, but heavy editing would be most appropriate. My main concern is the matter of getting appropriate permission from all those involved; in some cases, in my own games, I never knew my players by anything other than an alias. My nightmare scenario is that, having no way to contact these people, the only way I might ever hear from some of them again would be through a surprise lawsuit years on.
Better yet, I would look at roleplay sessions as simply some inspiration to draw from - a few elements here, a few elements there - to make a story that doesn't feel beholden to the "truth" of the fictitious events. (I feel like "Rulesbreaker" could have been a much better and even more coherent story, for instance, if I hadn't been so beholden to some sort of "authenticity" to the dreams it was based on. But ... that would have required me to think, to make decisions, and I suspect I would have been paralyzed by the choices and never written much of anything at all.)
I do wish that there weren't such pressure to write huge paragraphs. As a GM, I want to write descriptive narrative to set the scene ... but from the players, I feel like things would work better if there were more of a "transcript" mode of exchange. (Kind of like the early "transcript" examples I remember from an older version of D&D, showing how a sample game session might go ... and rather poorly for the dwarf, as I recall.)
Record of Lodoss War, by the way, was actually based on the transcripts of a D&D campaign. (Deedlit's player was a guy, by the way. I wasn't terribly surprised.) How accurately or how loosely, I have no idea.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 02:46 am (UTC)I do remember the Outpost and the Haunted House, by the way. :) The latter a little less well, largely since I wasn't as invested in my characters, I mostly just threw things at our hapless victims. I wonder if anyone ever saved the logs from that?
Good times. Interactive fiction, and I don't recall anyone ever getting too nasty. I do recall people taking liberties with other people's characters, though. Tsk, tsk. :)
Regarding RPG logs, I have occassionally considered taking a hatchet to them, cleaning them up, and rendering them as "fiction" rather than "play." It can be done, I'm sure, you just need to distance yourself from it enough so that when you're reading it, you're just reading it, and not remembering it.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 03:38 am (UTC)Is this referring to a sort of "shared story" environment, or a play-by-mail or other shared-authorship setting, rather than a "traditional RPG"? That sort of creative environment has intrigued me for a long time, though I'm mostly conscious of the potential pitfalls. I think it really requires that the participants have some remarkable social skills as well as creative skills ... and if ever someone manages to combine the two, the outcome could be pretty cool. =)
Alas, my experience is to have read the first few books of a train-wreck of a novel series called "Wild Cards", and to have observed the clashing egos and violent shifts in characterization taking place with the change of authors between each chapter. (I consider the true villain of this series to be the writer who invented the "Fortunatus" superhero. I cannot explain his powers in polite company. The writer was not merely content with having his hero to be more powerful and unbound than any other superhero in the series, and to be the only character capable of taking on his uber-powerful archenemy; he had to turn rival superheroes into cretins - or kill them off - while he had creative control ... oh yeah, and get his own superhero into bed with their superwives. And then, next chapter, I would watch with morbid fascination as the other authors tried to do damage control with their own characters ... or else I'd notice that some of the authors stopped contributing further.)
Oh yeah, and I took part in this shared-setting fanzine project called "Tai-Pan". I originally was just going to contribute art for others' stories. I really wish I'd stuck to that. I really wish I hadn't created my own character and then developed an ego-attachment to the character and how it might be portrayed by other writers. (Sigh.) Silly me. You'd think I would have learned my lesson from reading "Wild Cards", but I just never made the connection until much later.
Anyway, "Outpost" and "Haunted House" sound interesting. I know absolutely nothing about them. (Perhaps Rowyn might enlighten the readers a bit? =) )
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 03:47 am (UTC)E.g., Gyuu the Warrior makes a Knowledge (tactics) check to choose the best location to set up an ambush. I grant him and his allies a +4 circumstance bonus on their surprise check to start the encounter.
I've had it in mind that I might similarly give circumstance bonuses to the PCs for actual planning, because it just doesn't seem fair that the universe should "punish" them for planning.
(And if their plans seem "hare-brained" to the all-knowing GM, it might have to do with the fact that this group consists of a couple of engineers, a housewife, a chemistry teacher, a secretary, and an unemployed guy trying to put themselves into the minds and senses of battle-hardened heroes who should be intimately familiar with the details of their own universe. Their perception of the universe is filtered through what I imagine and then through what I tell them - and details inevitably get lost in translation. I cringe when I realize that I'm pantomiming and gesturing toward things that I imagine on the table, in my mind's eye, but which of course nobody else can actually see ... or when I crudely try to emulate sounds that I can clearly imagine in my mind - but which sound nothing at all like the sounds I'm actually able to make. Argh.)
In some systems, like Deadlands, things like "fate chips" help to even out such things. WoW d20 has "hero points", which can be nice, though they're usually given out as rewards for surviving conflicts - not as bonuses for spending an evening planning first.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 04:14 am (UTC)* Storybook and especially movie heroes don't work well as PCs, in general. In movies and some books, there is ONE star, with some supporting characters. In the typical RPG, however, there's a "party" of PCs, all of theoretically equal import (unless you're playing Ars Magica). In online environments (MUCKs, play-by-mail), it may be possible to get a more "novel" feel, since it's possible to have gaming "threads" where only one PC is "on stage" at a time - just as a novel might flip back and forth between multiple story threads, from chapter to chapter without bewildering the reader too much. (I was able to GM multiple "holodecks" on Sinai, with one or two PCs in each room, relying on the fact that I could type a lot faster than they could, so I could multi-task and entertain multiple players at a time ... without requiring them to suffer the indignity of having to be in one room together, competing for the spotlight.)
But with a tabletop session, everyone is around the table at once. I, as GM, am required to make sure everyone gets attention. This is very difficult to do, since some players naturally hop into the spotlight. (Others gravitate toward the couch and claim that, honestly, no, they won't doze off.) At times, due to chance and happenstance (who showed up this week, who had to leave early, who is showing up late), I might have fewer players to deal with at the moment, and I can focus on them some more ... but no one of them is "the star".
(This is not a complaint, just a factor. I'd much rather be in a room with a bunch of players and share some pizza and crack jokes about unrelated things and socialize, even if it means the outcome of our game won't be "the perfect story".)
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 04:14 am (UTC)* Conversations work differently. In an online game with several PCs in the room at once, reading a transcript of conversations can be utterly bewildering.
Player One says, "Point A. Point B. Point C. And, oh, by the way, Point D."
Player Two says, "Point E. And then I throw a hand grenade into the room!"
Player Three says, "Response to Point E. Response to Points A, B, and C. And D, too. And then I dive for cover."
Player One says, "Response to Point E. Response to Response to Point A, B and C. I pull out my ray gun and instantly vaporize the hand grenade before it even hits the floor, thus removing any necessity for anyone to dive for cover."
Player Three doesn't dive for cover after all.
Player Four gives a very long monologue, responding to Points A, B, C, D, E, and F (which everybody else missed, because it was whispered by Player Five), gasps at the hand grenade, and then giggles at Player Three diving for cover.
Okay, maybe not quite exactly like that, since a GM might call a hard stop to all the discussions going around as soon as a grenade is tossed, but it's something like that. In real life, people don't ask four questions in rapid fire, and then expect someone to go, "Yes, yes, no and yes, in that order," as a matter of normal discourse. And yet that's how it goes in online games, because people want to just throw everything on their minds out there. (In real life, you may have 10 points you want to bring up or questions to ask, but the conversation excruciatingly weaves around according to the wills of different people involved and you may not be able to fire them all off. Small wonder that people succumb to the temptation to just shotgun-blast them all at once online - just because you can.)
For tabletop games? Conversations behave strangely there, too, but it's mostly in the difference between PC-to-PC talking, and PC-to-GM talking. Any number of players can converse with each other, with varying results. But only ONE PC can talk, at a time, with anyone who is not a PC, unless he doesn't really care that the universe notices his action. (There's only one GM to handle all those NPCs.)
This was especially brought to my attention Saturday when there was one NPC and each of the players was firing off his or her question without bothering to wait for the NPC to respond to any of those questions ... or, for that matter, for the previous PC to finish asking his question. If it had been a less favorably disposed NPC, it would have been a prime opportunity to shout, "FIREBALL! 10d6 fire damage! Reflex DC 14 half!" ... Okay, maybe not, but I get frustrated sometimes. ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 11:16 am (UTC)One important difference between books and games is that books tend to gloss over a lot of stuff that players want to play out. The characters in books usually don't go shopping for ammunition, bedrolls, flint & tinder. They don't listen at doors and check them for traps. They don't search every inch of a room for that one treasure hidden in a strange place, &c., because that would make for an extremely dull story.
But a game can't do that -- since the players don't know what's the important stuff and what isn't, and because you never know when some McGuyver in the group is going to use that barrel he randomly picked up in room 12 to cleverly circumvent the trap in room 46, you have to let them do eeeeverything. Memory will edit out the "boring parts" later.
-The Gneech
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 07:12 pm (UTC)I've tried to shorten up my poses, it just doesn't make sense to cover everything in one laundry list of a pose - it's much better to address one thing at a time, for brevity and clarity.
At some point you have to go round by round, call for people to give their actions. Everyone has a different reaction speed, after all.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 07:48 pm (UTC)If I were to get back into online roleplay on Sinai again, I think I'd do like raid groups on Warcraft, and ask that everyone get on "Ventrilo." (I realize that this would not be beneficial to you, but I'm speaking "in general," and "in theory," and I realize that every plan eventually has its exceptions anyway.) That is, it'd be nice to be able to get feedback from people on another "channel" of communication that doesn't interrupt the slow (but recorded) process of typing.
"I'm still typing!" "I'm getting a sandwich." "Phone rang!" "You done yet?" Those are the types of things that it would be useful to be able to communicate without interrupting those carefully-worked paragraphs of prose. (Especially the first. If you stop to say, "I'm still typing!" then presumably you've had to abort everything to fire off that statement, and you'll have to start all over again immediately after making it.)
However ... it wouldn't work with my usual multi-tasking "holodeck" arrangement that would separate everyone. It isn't a medium that keeps a "buffer" that I can check. (I can't switch channels, pop back to one channel, and see what I missed. No, if somebody said something on Ventrilo and I wasn't there, then I missed it.)
Oh well. Still, I'd like to think that a few of the problems with the MUCK medium could be solved if only it were a little more "multi-media" (or multi-channel), advancing the technology a bit. It might require everyone to upgrade their client programs, but if there's only a handful of people involved, and everyone uses the same program, it just might work.
(That is, it'd be nice if a client program might, say, have a few buttons you can hit that can send certain "pings" to other users on the system, without interrupting the main channel where you're typing. E.g., a way to say, "I'm still typing," or whatnot.)
I'm reminded, though, of a tele-typing feature that was on the VAX/VMS system at my old college campus: It was called "Talk", and it would let the screen go into a split screen mode, with my own typing scrolling by on one half of the screen, and the other person's text scrolling by on the other. The typing was updated in realtime, so you could see that someone was still working.
It also led to some silly possibilities, such as racing to make ASCII art, and doing "cursor animation". Fun. =)
Boy, if there were some way for me to be able to see the players' text lines (in progress), it would give me at least some reassurance that someone is taking so long simply because he's a slow typist, as opposed to that he's left the keyboard entirely without telling anyone.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 07:58 pm (UTC)Or perhaps you'd use slash commands like '/gm Hey, is it okay if I do so and so?' and '/tell playername I think this is a bad idea' and nothing after a slash would be displayed to other players/the GM.
A more sophisticated version might include the facility to have a map and move characters around on it, and URLs could get inserted into the log output to show the map and the characters at a given time...
Normally I use TrebuchetTK and I can just cut-and-paste with the chat box, so it doesn't bother me to cut the whole thing, insert a quick OOC comment, and paste it back in.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 08:58 pm (UTC)It'd be a nice touch, but it doesn't really add anything new. The player could just as easily pose his statement for everyone, then type a /whispered comment to the GM (or "w GM=Blah blah blah") on the next line. It's not a new channel of communication. The GM won't get the note until the player has finished typing his mini-novella and hit carriage-return.
Now, as for the map ... now THAT would be pretty awesome. =) There were times in online roleplay when a map was really necessary to try to keep track of things. (And if it wasn't necessary ... then it was a nice touch, if only it weren't so awkward to implement.) It'd be fun to have some sort of a "map board" interface, with a library of predefined "tiles" and "sprites" for a more grid-centric map approach. (Either that, or some way to upload a GIF of the map, drawn elsewhere, and a way to position some "thumbtacks" on the map as pointers.)
I guess I'd need to shell out the money for Flash or something like that, to be able to make a program that others could use. (Last I checked, though, Flash was pretty expensive.)
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 11:07 pm (UTC)And it would provide two windows - a 'working' spot for your in-character poses and says, and an 'out of band' buffer when you wanted to type something quickly for others to see.
I don't think this kind of tool would be best written with Flash; I'd look at Java applets. This for instance is a fairly primitive MUD interface.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 01:18 am (UTC)Oh yeahhhhh. Heh. Silly me. That WOULD be a problem! =) I should have thought of that.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 11:42 pm (UTC)These two settings were on a Bulletin Board on the SUNY Albany VAX VMS system in... oh, it was probably 1988 or 89 or so. Essentially, those of us with accounts (most of whom knew each other personally, if we didn't at first, we would eventually,) would post little story bits on the BBS. Ideally, each person would continue either a general story arc, or our own side plot. "The Outpost" came first, it was a space station where we could play with Science Fiction characters. Rowan made a new bboard folder after a while of this (and people occasionally stepping on each others toes by messing with their characters,) the "Haunted House" was a bunch of teenagers in a creepy old house, and Rowan gave everyone else permission to do whatever we want with them. Most of the work we did there was horribly derivative, but it was fun. :) This would be before either of us discovered the MU* community, though I think the Haunted House extended into that a bit...
It did suffer from a number of the weaknesses you mentioned, all the more so since we actually knew each other. There were also very twinky concepts, I'd like to say my own work was better than that, but I don't think I can. :) Still, all in all, it was fairly civil and I don't think we ever got into any knock down, drag out fights over it...
*lightbulb over head*
Date: 2007-04-26 08:24 pm (UTC)Wow! In all my years of roleplaying (which, in contrast to you, has been a whopping seventeen years, off and on), I've NEVER made that connection; yet it seems so obvious now.
And here I thought the plans never worked because the GM hated us. ';P
(Though among my gaming friends there are those who see GMing as a battle between the GM and the players, rather than a cooperative effort.)
BTW...
Date: 2007-04-26 08:31 pm (UTC)*sigh*
So yeah, I'm feeling just a tad envious at the moment. ';)