I knew it was going to be a mistake to kill off the characters in our Hardware Store Bonanza game. The players are naturally upset about it, but they refuse to make new characters and start the adventure again, even though their previous plan was terrible. The RPG system didn’t even have rules for fighting, and yet they wanted to go to war. I gave them many warnings, some obvious, some subtle, but they went forward with it. In my role-playing games, your actions have consequences.
So anyway, now we have to find a new role-playing game. Some of the players are literally begging me to make one up where everything revolves around marine welding. I’m not sure that will work out, even if a hardware store inspired game did work. If they want it so much, though, maybe I should make one of them run the game, and I can just play it instead. Then they’ll see how hard it is to deal with a group like them, all the while trying to tell a coherent and compelling story.
Running a role-playing game where you make snapper racks in the Melbourne area doesn’t sound like a fun time to me, personally. But what do I know? I’ve only been playing role-playing games for twenty years now. That’s certainly not long enough to tell that rolling a twenty-sided dice to determine whether you successfully put together a bow rail or not would be fun.
The thing is, Hardware Store Bonanza wasn’t fun because you were trying to sell electrical supplies and timber. It was fun because of all the politics, the negotiations between rivalling hardware stores. I don’t think you’d get that experience with a marine welding game. But then again, I could be wrong. Maybe my newbie role-playing friends know more about this stuff than I do. That seems really likely.
– Chad