This has absolutely no relevance to any game being held on the Inn. As a matter of fact, it really isn't about much of anything of consequence. I just had to share the experience I've had with my past two tabletop games.

Now, I've been running the same core group of players through various campaigns for the better part of 24 years ...seriously. My long-time friend who actually introduced me to RPGs, his wife, and now my two eldest sons are our current player group. We play using my own concocted rules meshing FUZION and D20 together so I can avoid the(warning: harsh opinion pending) idiotic rules inherent within the D20 systems, and the strange malfunctions found within basic FUZION rules making the game more personality-based and not so number oriented. For new players (my sons) this has been where they cut their teeth on RPGs, and I'm proud to say that I'm grooming them to be role-players, not rule-players.

In any case, there are always lulls with gaming groups as real life gets in the way of entertainment and such. Over the past few months I've felt that this has been the predicament my tabletop group has been facing as they all started out with new characters, we transitioned into my new rules, and we moved from the Forgotten Realms to my own campaign setting. This combined with the challenges of real life, resulted in some pretty rocky gaming sessions over the past year or so that have actually made me uninterested in preparing for each game (I'd normally spend a couple of hours over the course of two weeks preparing for the games as we got together every two weeks). Last week it changed.

My eldest (known around the Inn as Ts'Ah) decided that he didn't want to play his "boring old fighter" anymore and wanted to introduce a new character. The problem was that the party was already en route between locations where it made sense for me to introduce that character and remove his current one from play. I could tell, however, that he really was quite intent on this new character being brought into play and since our time was drawing short I was trying to hurry the party forward to the main city before the session ended so that he could at least introduce the character as we'd previously established. However, there were a few more obstacles planned for them to overcome before they did so, and one such obstacle was the retrieval of a dangerous, evil artifact that had been recovered by their party from a ruined temple, then stolen from them by a wolf in sheep's clothing who had a couple hours head start on them in his escape. As it turned out, the thief was delivering the artifact into the hands of those they were most trying to keep it from: a small army of about 150.

The setting that the party found themselves in for that particular confrontation was at the top of a 200 foot hill with a steep incline serviced by ancient stairs at the bottom of which was a mile wide valley. Center in this valley was a small ruined archway, and on the opposite side, the stairs continued up into the jungle once more. But this wasn't all. The thief was 150 feet down the stairs, and the 150+ enemy force was at the foot of the stair waiting for the delivery. It seemed a rather daunting task, but the party was fully prepared to see if the Dice Gods favored them, and quickly concocted a plan that killed the thief (thus stopping the artifact's progress towards the enemy force), and sent an invisible, flying magic-user after the artifact while the rest of the party tried to distract the enemy force long enough for the ruse to work.

That's when my friend's wife had the idea that turned the whole session on its ear in a very good way...and I wish I'd have thought of it on my own.

To truly understand the genius behind this you have to understand that my world is riddled with gateways and portals that offer opportunity for things to come and go from other planes, dimensions, and geographical locations around the world. Ts'Ah wanted to play a character whose race originated an ocean and half a continent away from where the rest of the party was, and the way we were going to introduce him involved them meeting at the epicenter of magic and trade within the world which happened to be where the campaign is being run and the other characters would be. We'd figured it made sense that he'd found his way there after developing an elaborate character history that forced his constant movement in that direction. However, at this point, my friend's wife just casually stated, "Wouldn't it be funny if Ts'Ah's character just happened to appear through a portal right at the location of the artifact and was able to bring it to us?"

OK, so this sounds like it is leading up to meta-gaming, right? Only, in my game, I've adopted the Firefly rule that I call Creative Currency which promotes player involvement in the storyline in a way I've never seen before in any other system (it's called something different in the Firefly system). I like the players getting involved, challenging me by helping to develop the story through character play, changing dice rolls when necessary through the expenditure of hard-earned creative currency, etc., and when she suggested this a mental movie played out for me depicting the scene, and I wondered if it would play out as I'd imagined it. Ts'Ah seemed fairly despondent having to continue to play his current character, and the rest of the players appeared to me to be only partially invested, so I awarded my wife's friend some Creative Currency for thinking outside the box, and described the dramatic entry of my son's new character; appearing not in the magical hub as we'd originally planned, but on the step hacked out of the tropical hillside, staring down at the rather ornate and expensive-looking artifact lying at his feet (the party had already incinerated the thief) fifty feet from the large, imposing enemy force (a race that is well-known to be evil).

Ts'Ah acted in the exact way I'd expected him to with his new rogue/ranger type character which--in short hand--consisted of:

Oh! Pretty, valuable item. Mine!

Oh! A lot of baddies not too far off. Run UP the stairs!

And so, he grabbed the artifact being the first player to have their character touch it with their bare hands. He barely made his save versus possession by the artifact, and the players resolved any hesitation about having a new character join their party by being his saving grace once he arrived at the top (they had horses waiting to escape the army which was on foot having used Mount), and he had what they wanted. The artifact's natural powers protected him from the spells and arrows sent his way by the enemy, and the party made their escape.

As simple as this sounds, it involved a lot of laughter, a lot of character interaction and role-play, a few rolls of the die that required some pretty dynamic luck, and some very real danger to the characters. It was a blast, and one of the most fun-filled sessions (not to mention one of the most interesting ways for a character to be introduced to a party that I've been involved with) we've had in a while. We resolved to get together in two weeks, excited about the game we'd just played, only to have my wife (who doesn't play with us anymore) suggest we game again this weekend instead. So...

This time the gaming immediately started with character play, and maintained it throughout the six hours we gamed. It was filled with fun character interaction, great wit, and even one fantastic and amazingly lucky transaction with the die that caused all of us to do the "Oh! No way!" exclamation when it occurred, the catalyst of which was some excellent role-playing by my friend's wife (who wasn't letting the meds she was on from having a root canal done a couple of days ago stop her).

The game left me laughing and looking forward to our next session: I love tabletop gaming when it all comes together.

Sounds very, very, very nice, Brom. Oh how you made me miss the golden old times of table top playing. It's been way too long since I've had the chance to play a really, honestly good role-playing game face to face with some friends.

Thanks for sharing your lovely gaming experience with us, old friend.

Just an evil note: You could've made this a Blog entry too.

This reminds me of the ridiculousness my old tabletop group got up to. Three other ~15 year olds and me DMing (this was a while back as you can tell). We didn't so much have "creative currency" as "a plot that changed randomly whenever something awesome could happen". I can distinctly remember attempting to houserule how much damage as caused by the wizard turning colossal and using a magic fueled windmill as a chainsaw to fight a dragon.

OK, I'll make it a blog article.