#RPGaDAY 4 2016 – Most Impressive Thing Another Character Did
RPGaDay asks what was the most impressive thing another character did? I ran the first role-playing session for my nephew using Hero Kids. He was playing a ninja (custom-made for him) and I was running the first adventure. He faced a group of rats and managed to sneak past them, but then the next group noticed him, so he was stuck. Was this going to be his first battle?
One of my biggest complaints about RPGs designed for kids is their emphasis on battle. Unfortunately, I want to like Hero Kids, but it is designed almost exclusively for combat. Every stat is focused on combat, every power and there’s a loose skill system that covers other areas, but it’s overshadowed by the rest.
As a result of the game design (and boy’s tendencies toward destruction), I thought surely my nephew would opt to ninja-style fight the rats. But, no, he said, “Could I use my disguise skill to pretend to be one of the rats?” I let him roll to see if it worked and sure enough, it did, and he managed to talk his way through this encounter and then rolled well enough to fool the next bunch of rats too. He demonstrated the first old school rule of dungeon-crawling – don’t fight when you don’t have to and that impressed me.
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.