summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2011-03-27 12:28 am
summercomfort) wrote2011-03-27 12:28 am
My first time role-playing
So Chris, Jono and I have started playing Mouseguard with one of Chris' friends, who had never role-played before. Thus far, we've played two sessions, and had to fight against weather problems, a fierce river, town intrigue, a scary fox cub, and an even scarier fox mother. The last one resulted in my character sacrificing herself to save another mouse, which was the thing she would have done, but it still hit hard, emotionally.
What was interesting these two sessions is watching the new guy slowly figure out the spoken and unspoken social expectations in role-playing. I feel like it's something that he's still working out and trying to find the right language to describe, but it brought up memories of my first role-playing game.
So... below are the lessons I learned and how I learned it, from my first time role-playing.
Before I get into it, some background: I was in college, and just started hanging out with Alexis, Isaac, and Cat. Alexis invites me to do this "Dungeons and Dragons" thing which was run by Julian. Mark was also in the party. I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I wanted to spend time with these new friends, and they seemed really into it, so I said, "Sure!" It was DnD 2. The game itself involved going through some dungeon-type thing with lots of fighting and riddles and stuff. I hadn't really played anything similar before, not even computer or video game rpgs.
Realization 1: I play a specific character, and what I make up about that character becomes truth.
Isaac (or was it Alexis?) emailed me and told me to come up with a character that would be in a village in a medieval fantasy/LotR type setting, and bring that to the character-making session. Coming from reading a lot of fanfiction, it was really weird for me to realize that I was to play an original character. Sure, it was a Lord of the Rings type setting, but I'm not playing Merry or Pippin or whatever! And I can say whatever I want about the character's backstory! So I made up a female dwarf who was working as a blacksmith in the village and trying to keep her head down because she had done something horrible in the dwarven community.
Then I show up to the character creation session and got things that I thought was appropriate to my character. It was a very powerful feeling to be able to say, "Hey, I know how to wield this axe" and BAM, my character knows how to wield that axe.
Realization 2: Your character needs to be "optimized" in some game mechanics way.
I didn't really get this at first. Everyone was getting ropes and stuff, so I got that, too, although I wasn't sure how useful it would be for a blacksmith. Then there was some stuff about being a fighter and calculating a bunch of numbers, which didn't really make sense, but I just kinda went along with it. People would tell me that I should put a higher number under CON so that I can get a certain bonus point that was exclusive to dwarven fighters and how that would work really well for the whole party because Isaac was a half-orc cleric or something, and that I should get a weapon that would do more damage.
This was when I got the inkling that I needed to "optimize" my character for some future situation. I wasn't just creating a blacksmith dwarf was had tribal/belonging/guilt issues, I was creating a blacksmith dwarf who for some reason had to be good at fighting, and "suit up" with the appropriate numbers. Not only did my character decisions become truth, but (1) it became truth that had numbers attached, and (2) the numbers needed to work with the numbers of the rest of the party and with the predicted encounters in the game.
But I still didn't quite get it. I think I loaded up on a lot of languages because I thought that we would be traveling LotR style through elven and dwarven lands. I think I picked Heraldry as a skill or something because I thought that knowing something of the history of the land would be cool. Looking back now, I realize that this is really the part where you are preparing yourself for the stuff that the GM was going to throw at you, and that Heraldry probably wasn't going to be an issue.
Realization 3: My character backstory didn't match the GM's goals and didn't help in interacting with other characters. (But playing character archetypes is helpful during social interaction scenes.)
So we start our first session. Alexis the elven ranger and Cat the elven thief show up to our village and recruits me or something. I remember this moment where I said, "I don't think this is something that my dwarf would want to join. She's trying to keep her head down and not attract attention. This is the opposite of that. What happens if I don't join?" And the GM just kinda looked at me and was like, "Then you're not part of this adventure, and you'd have nothing to do."
Oh. So I found myself doing lots of things that went completely against my character's story and personality in order to be part of this adventure. And we were quite a motley group -- a serious elven ranger, a silly elven thief, a somewhat bumbling half-orc cleric, and a taciturn dwarf fighter. But that was okay. The fact that our party probably had nothing to say to each other didn't really matter when we were fighting a minotaur or trying to cross a river in a cave that lead up to a tower.
It was kind of disappointing to realize that my backstory was never really going to come into play, and that this was really about cooperative combat. This was when I noticed that Cat's character, the elven thief, had a lot more fun because her character was perfect for this sort of thing -- mischievous, treasure-hungry, curious, etc. Also, it was easier to figure out how to react in non-fight situations if I pick a few archetypes and stick to them. So I abandoned my backstory and instead became Stoic Dwarf Who Liked to Smoke Pipes, Eat Hardy Things (dwarf bread and minotaur meat), and Wants to Learn Axe-Throwing.
This of course isn't true for things like PTA, but really, it's about figuring out (1) what is the character's relationship with the world / GM's plans, and (2) how does the character interact with other characters. If the game is about traveling from town to town solving problems, you create a character who would do the traveling and would have the skills to solve town problems. If the game is about exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters, or if the game is about court intrigue, very different sets of skills would be involved, and really, you'd create very different characters. Of course, for me the first time, I had no idea what the game would involve, so I created a character that didn't want to have adventures. Oops. I had also written my backstory with no knowledge of the other characters, and no connection to them, so of course it was hard to interact with them, so I had to develop "personality archetypes" that would work well with the group.'
Realization 4: There are assumptions that the game makes. Those things don't need to be played out.
So our party goes towards the cave or whatever, and we need to stop because it's nightfall. The GM asks, "What are you doing?" So I think, "Hey! I packed only 3 days worth of rations, and that might not be enough? Can I hunt? Do I have the hunting skill? Do I have bow and arrow? Do I have a way to cook stuff?" So I go about trying to do that, and the GM humors me. Of course, I later realize that this was all pointless -- it is assumed that we would eat and poop and do all that. What was more important was what Alexis was doing, which was setting up watch and making sure we were camping in a safe(r) place in case of orc ambush.
Both of those actions were logical things to do when you camp: find food and set up watch. But one of them doesn't really affect the game (yay, we eat food. Now what?), and the other one does (if we don't set up watch, we might be killed in the night.) Just like how my backstory wasn't useful in the game, but my axe with d8 damage was definitely useful. Figuring out the useful things and the useless things was hard then, and it is still hard now, sometimes. In that game, there was a part where we went to a town, and I was totally at a loss as to what to do in a town. Am I supposed to go talk to someone? Am I supposed to go learn a new skill? More recently, Jono struggled with Night Fragrance sometimes when he was pursuing some logistical thing that really should have been handled with a scene wipe.
Realization 5: The game is really about an interaction between the players and the GM (mediated by the rules), and who has the power to do what.
This sounds kind of "no duh", but it took me a while to realize that it wasn't just about what was happening *in* the campaign, but really what was happening on a meta level.
A few moments:
- When the GM made a puzzle that none of us (the players, not the characters) could solve
- When the GM planned to have an NPC sneak out in the night, that NPC was going to sneak out no matter how late I made my character stay up.
- Getting into a dangerous place, it was all about checking for traps, and lining up so that the fighter as in front and the cleric was in the back.
- The GM would describe a camp of orcs, and Mark the sorcerer would ask, "Are they in a cone with range of 10 ft?" or some equivalent as he checks the game rules for some spell.
- When we killed a minotaur too fast and the GM had to take a break to think up new challenges.
- Realizing that the GM was assigning Experience Points kind of willy-nilly.
- When Isaac touched the magic liquid, the GM looked super-embarrassed and and asked us all to roll saving throws, and everyone ended up falling into a coma except me, and I had to cart everyone home.
Sure, we played individual characters who explored a world created the GM, but really, that was just a front for us the players to engage in a battle of wits with the GM. His job was to think of appropriate levels of challenges, and our job was to solve them by working together. In a way, it is also about trust -- trusting that the challenges can be solved, trusting that we will do our best to solve them, and trusting everyone to abide by the rulebook.
I can make my character do stupid things, but the GM is the one who decides if that has any relevance. The GM can decide that there are two dragons fighting in the sky, but I am the one who decides how to react to that. The GM can set up an interesting scene, but he still has to decide how hard it is to open a treasure box. And these are all decisions that were happening outside of the story that we were telling.
Realization 6: I am not my character, but the story is about my character.
My character can be smarter than me or vice versa. I can know more things than my character. On the other hand, sometimes I (the player) has to ask the GM about things that my character probably knows. I may know something that the character doesn't know, and that's a really weird feeling, because it makes me want to "game the system". For example, I knew that Axmander (an NPC) snuck out to meet with someone, and I really wanted to make my character do something she wouldn't do in order to follow Axmander, but I have to stay true to the fiction that we had created in the game.
Looking back now, a lot of this seems very basic and obvious, but I remember being very confused and muddling through much of this in that first game. And then being confused again when I played Mountain Witch at ACen because it involved a very different set of assumptions and expectations. I also remember the sense of empowerment and joy in figuring out what I could do in these settings. But is this something that should be explicitly explained to newbies -- the relationship between the story and the numbers, how in-world relationships work, and how meta relationships work, and all of the different assumptions that come with this, or is this something that is better discovered through experience?
What was interesting these two sessions is watching the new guy slowly figure out the spoken and unspoken social expectations in role-playing. I feel like it's something that he's still working out and trying to find the right language to describe, but it brought up memories of my first role-playing game.
So... below are the lessons I learned and how I learned it, from my first time role-playing.
Before I get into it, some background: I was in college, and just started hanging out with Alexis, Isaac, and Cat. Alexis invites me to do this "Dungeons and Dragons" thing which was run by Julian. Mark was also in the party. I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I wanted to spend time with these new friends, and they seemed really into it, so I said, "Sure!" It was DnD 2. The game itself involved going through some dungeon-type thing with lots of fighting and riddles and stuff. I hadn't really played anything similar before, not even computer or video game rpgs.
Realization 1: I play a specific character, and what I make up about that character becomes truth.
Isaac (or was it Alexis?) emailed me and told me to come up with a character that would be in a village in a medieval fantasy/LotR type setting, and bring that to the character-making session. Coming from reading a lot of fanfiction, it was really weird for me to realize that I was to play an original character. Sure, it was a Lord of the Rings type setting, but I'm not playing Merry or Pippin or whatever! And I can say whatever I want about the character's backstory! So I made up a female dwarf who was working as a blacksmith in the village and trying to keep her head down because she had done something horrible in the dwarven community.
Then I show up to the character creation session and got things that I thought was appropriate to my character. It was a very powerful feeling to be able to say, "Hey, I know how to wield this axe" and BAM, my character knows how to wield that axe.
Realization 2: Your character needs to be "optimized" in some game mechanics way.
I didn't really get this at first. Everyone was getting ropes and stuff, so I got that, too, although I wasn't sure how useful it would be for a blacksmith. Then there was some stuff about being a fighter and calculating a bunch of numbers, which didn't really make sense, but I just kinda went along with it. People would tell me that I should put a higher number under CON so that I can get a certain bonus point that was exclusive to dwarven fighters and how that would work really well for the whole party because Isaac was a half-orc cleric or something, and that I should get a weapon that would do more damage.
This was when I got the inkling that I needed to "optimize" my character for some future situation. I wasn't just creating a blacksmith dwarf was had tribal/belonging/guilt issues, I was creating a blacksmith dwarf who for some reason had to be good at fighting, and "suit up" with the appropriate numbers. Not only did my character decisions become truth, but (1) it became truth that had numbers attached, and (2) the numbers needed to work with the numbers of the rest of the party and with the predicted encounters in the game.
But I still didn't quite get it. I think I loaded up on a lot of languages because I thought that we would be traveling LotR style through elven and dwarven lands. I think I picked Heraldry as a skill or something because I thought that knowing something of the history of the land would be cool. Looking back now, I realize that this is really the part where you are preparing yourself for the stuff that the GM was going to throw at you, and that Heraldry probably wasn't going to be an issue.
Realization 3: My character backstory didn't match the GM's goals and didn't help in interacting with other characters. (But playing character archetypes is helpful during social interaction scenes.)
So we start our first session. Alexis the elven ranger and Cat the elven thief show up to our village and recruits me or something. I remember this moment where I said, "I don't think this is something that my dwarf would want to join. She's trying to keep her head down and not attract attention. This is the opposite of that. What happens if I don't join?" And the GM just kinda looked at me and was like, "Then you're not part of this adventure, and you'd have nothing to do."
Oh. So I found myself doing lots of things that went completely against my character's story and personality in order to be part of this adventure. And we were quite a motley group -- a serious elven ranger, a silly elven thief, a somewhat bumbling half-orc cleric, and a taciturn dwarf fighter. But that was okay. The fact that our party probably had nothing to say to each other didn't really matter when we were fighting a minotaur or trying to cross a river in a cave that lead up to a tower.
It was kind of disappointing to realize that my backstory was never really going to come into play, and that this was really about cooperative combat. This was when I noticed that Cat's character, the elven thief, had a lot more fun because her character was perfect for this sort of thing -- mischievous, treasure-hungry, curious, etc. Also, it was easier to figure out how to react in non-fight situations if I pick a few archetypes and stick to them. So I abandoned my backstory and instead became Stoic Dwarf Who Liked to Smoke Pipes, Eat Hardy Things (dwarf bread and minotaur meat), and Wants to Learn Axe-Throwing.
This of course isn't true for things like PTA, but really, it's about figuring out (1) what is the character's relationship with the world / GM's plans, and (2) how does the character interact with other characters. If the game is about traveling from town to town solving problems, you create a character who would do the traveling and would have the skills to solve town problems. If the game is about exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters, or if the game is about court intrigue, very different sets of skills would be involved, and really, you'd create very different characters. Of course, for me the first time, I had no idea what the game would involve, so I created a character that didn't want to have adventures. Oops. I had also written my backstory with no knowledge of the other characters, and no connection to them, so of course it was hard to interact with them, so I had to develop "personality archetypes" that would work well with the group.'
Realization 4: There are assumptions that the game makes. Those things don't need to be played out.
So our party goes towards the cave or whatever, and we need to stop because it's nightfall. The GM asks, "What are you doing?" So I think, "Hey! I packed only 3 days worth of rations, and that might not be enough? Can I hunt? Do I have the hunting skill? Do I have bow and arrow? Do I have a way to cook stuff?" So I go about trying to do that, and the GM humors me. Of course, I later realize that this was all pointless -- it is assumed that we would eat and poop and do all that. What was more important was what Alexis was doing, which was setting up watch and making sure we were camping in a safe(r) place in case of orc ambush.
Both of those actions were logical things to do when you camp: find food and set up watch. But one of them doesn't really affect the game (yay, we eat food. Now what?), and the other one does (if we don't set up watch, we might be killed in the night.) Just like how my backstory wasn't useful in the game, but my axe with d8 damage was definitely useful. Figuring out the useful things and the useless things was hard then, and it is still hard now, sometimes. In that game, there was a part where we went to a town, and I was totally at a loss as to what to do in a town. Am I supposed to go talk to someone? Am I supposed to go learn a new skill? More recently, Jono struggled with Night Fragrance sometimes when he was pursuing some logistical thing that really should have been handled with a scene wipe.
Realization 5: The game is really about an interaction between the players and the GM (mediated by the rules), and who has the power to do what.
This sounds kind of "no duh", but it took me a while to realize that it wasn't just about what was happening *in* the campaign, but really what was happening on a meta level.
A few moments:
- When the GM made a puzzle that none of us (the players, not the characters) could solve
- When the GM planned to have an NPC sneak out in the night, that NPC was going to sneak out no matter how late I made my character stay up.
- Getting into a dangerous place, it was all about checking for traps, and lining up so that the fighter as in front and the cleric was in the back.
- The GM would describe a camp of orcs, and Mark the sorcerer would ask, "Are they in a cone with range of 10 ft?" or some equivalent as he checks the game rules for some spell.
- When we killed a minotaur too fast and the GM had to take a break to think up new challenges.
- Realizing that the GM was assigning Experience Points kind of willy-nilly.
- When Isaac touched the magic liquid, the GM looked super-embarrassed and and asked us all to roll saving throws, and everyone ended up falling into a coma except me, and I had to cart everyone home.
Sure, we played individual characters who explored a world created the GM, but really, that was just a front for us the players to engage in a battle of wits with the GM. His job was to think of appropriate levels of challenges, and our job was to solve them by working together. In a way, it is also about trust -- trusting that the challenges can be solved, trusting that we will do our best to solve them, and trusting everyone to abide by the rulebook.
I can make my character do stupid things, but the GM is the one who decides if that has any relevance. The GM can decide that there are two dragons fighting in the sky, but I am the one who decides how to react to that. The GM can set up an interesting scene, but he still has to decide how hard it is to open a treasure box. And these are all decisions that were happening outside of the story that we were telling.
Realization 6: I am not my character, but the story is about my character.
My character can be smarter than me or vice versa. I can know more things than my character. On the other hand, sometimes I (the player) has to ask the GM about things that my character probably knows. I may know something that the character doesn't know, and that's a really weird feeling, because it makes me want to "game the system". For example, I knew that Axmander (an NPC) snuck out to meet with someone, and I really wanted to make my character do something she wouldn't do in order to follow Axmander, but I have to stay true to the fiction that we had created in the game.
Looking back now, a lot of this seems very basic and obvious, but I remember being very confused and muddling through much of this in that first game. And then being confused again when I played Mountain Witch at ACen because it involved a very different set of assumptions and expectations. I also remember the sense of empowerment and joy in figuring out what I could do in these settings. But is this something that should be explicitly explained to newbies -- the relationship between the story and the numbers, how in-world relationships work, and how meta relationships work, and all of the different assumptions that come with this, or is this something that is better discovered through experience?
no subject
It's pretty cool that you're writing this up, because for me, and I'm sure a lot of gamers, we don't even remember these realizations needed to be made or these ideas explained.
no subject
4 is especially interesting to me, because my experience is that many people who play games have different ideas about what falls under #4, and it sometimes causes stutter in gameplay.
Well, except for pooping. I think everyone agrees about that one. Then again, there's probably some game somewhere where you save vs. dysentery :P
In the example in #5, why did the GM look embarrassed?
no subject
I am struck, as always, by how clear Sushu's memory is. I have only vague hints of how the game went in my brain.
no subject
Oh man, remember the statue that we had such a hard time figuring out -- turned out that you had to push AND turn the gemstone at the base? Or when we were captured by those gnomes with poison blow darts, and you pretended to be catatonic as a diversionary measure? I don't think that second campaign ever finished...
no subject
Yeah, the assumptions in #4 has screwed with plenty a game. Most recently, Jono, Chris, and I were in a game where Chris and I assumed that "having money" meant "infinite money", but where Jono assumed it meant "a little bit of money", and it made various things awkward. Maybe in a trench warfare game you'd have to remember to poop in a reasonable way. ;P
The GM looked embarrassed/awkward because I don't think he was expecting Isaac to touch the darn thing with his hand -- he was expecting Isaac to do various checks with magic first. So I think it backfired on him a bit.
no subject
no subject
The game started as a read-aloud Choose Your Own Adventure deal, where you picked what your character did out of sets of pre-written choices. (This expedites Realization 1, and also hints at Realization 4 by defining what the important choices are.) Eventually the choices you make lead to Zanzer Tem taking your character prisoner. (Realization 5.) As other players make their own choices, you learn about the setting, but are powerless to change your fate even if you're going last. (Realization 6 -- you know what a basilisk is because it got Bob the last time around, but because your character doesn't know, s/he inevitably makes the mistake of looking at it.) Only after everyone is a prisoner are you set loose into the RPG sandbox where, in principle, you can choose to make your character do anything -- and this is now more easily understood, sort of a limiting case of an n-branched Choose Your Own Adventure choice where n approaches infinity.
One could say that the boxed set elided Realizations 2 and 3 by using prefabricated characters and motivations (everyone wants to escape from Zanzer Tem's salt mines). But you can also frame it differently: the game presents you with a set of characters and motivations that are considered "acceptable." When you graduate from the boxed set into original adventures, you think along the lines of the character you played in that introductory dungeon crawl. Without even noticing, you build a character around the assumption that s/he will need both the motivation and the talent to go hack-and-slashing in catacombs of some kind. Realizations 2 and 3 hard at work.
So by the end of my first gaming session, I'd also had your realizations, fed to me subtly through clever scenario design. But mine were more implicit than yours, and it took a long time before I thought to ask the questions you did -- questions that are necessary to take a game apart and put it back together. On the other hand, I came out of it feeling less befuddled and more like I knew what I was doing. I was like a guy who's determined to live by a Zen proverb about wisdom, thinking that the proverb is a solution when it's actually a riddle. I perpetrated quite a few really bad gaming sessions before I figured out that the GM should actually question the content of realizations like yours, and longer still before I realized that this questioning was something the whole group could participate in!
no subject
I believe my character was recruited with the promise of baked goods or the lure of treasure, something to that effect. I recognized it as a necessary step to invent a reason for the party to get together, so that the party could get together and the "dungeon crawling" and adventuring could begin---this first step was up to the players, almost as if backstory included everything up to the point where their character joined the party.
I kind of lump #2 and #4 together in my mind, because they are both ways to render facts or plot into a game format. Where I had trouble was figuring out when it was appropriate to simplify something into a die roll, and figuring out what representations of skills were distilled into the rolls. I still have a problem with determining when I should roleplay vs roll dice to overcome an obstacle.
#5 and #6---oh man, do those trip people up.
#5 is harder, because the relationship between the players, the GM, and the fiction is so complicated and often in flux.
Even in the Werewolf campaign I'm in now, these still crop up, and we're all experienced gamers.
Myself, I find #6 easier than many others do. If you're willing to stick to your guns and react only as your character would, it may get you into all kinds of trouble---but if you're doing it right, it's the kind of trouble that makes for a good story. It may generate friction between players though, especially if one or more of the players don't grasp #6. (Upon more than one occasion I have broken character during a heated argument to check that it's understood that Stella---not Cat---is pissed, and then resume shouting and throwing office furniture.)
#5 is a continual challenge for me, which becomes a bit easier when I get to know my fellow players, and gets more complicated depending on the game, and doubly so when communication breaks down between players and GM or when someone falls victim to #6.
(Jono here)
(Anonymous) 2011-04-03 04:21 pm (UTC)(link)Some thoughts of my own, inspired by this post, at http://evilbrainjono.net/blog?permalink=957
no subject
(Anonymous) 2011-04-03 09:08 pm (UTC)(link)The scary part about all of this is, not everyone picks it up this quickly. Just last night actually, I was in something of a pick-up revival of an old D&D(3.5) campaign to give the GM of my usual saturday Eclipse Phase game a much needed break to get a better handle on the system. Pretty straightforward approach. Two new people popping in was handled pretty painlessly. This seems more dangerous than usual, so we've put out a call for more volunteers. OK. Go get some water from that like out that away, it's said to have healing properties. OK. Here's the lake, pretty obvious landmarks, a little testing shows it seems to work. However, there's also what is obviously the entrance to the dungeon the GM planned on everyone checking out on an island in the middle of the lake. Whoops. It seems the GM has gotten mixed up, and placed the dungeon inside the treasure. There is absolutely no in-character reason for us to go in there. OK, technically there's the Worst Possible in-character incentive: The GMPC thinks you should explore this place! Since I'm of the mindset that it is the duty of the players to fill in the holes in the GM's plans to make sure everyone has a good time, I back this up with "Well, I suppose we should let the horses rest up a bit before we head back."
This still leaves the problem though that since there's really no reason to poke around inside this place, everything bad that happens inside is going to stir up in-character resentment between whoever encouraged exploring it and those whose thinking was "We got what we came for, let's go." In this case, even working out a little in-character rationalization, it's pretty much "Gee, because this guy here was so keen on poking around this hole in the ground, my sister got her face scratched up by bats, I got kicked across the room by some unholy abomination, and I had to dip pretty heavily into my very limited pool of expensive supplies fighting these things off." I'm not saying every campaign of every RPG has to keep the characters happy, but in a game where the PCs are working together, it is really important to avoid situations where a given character clearly would have been better off sitting the whole session out.
This is also why I was particularly impressed picking up the rules to the usual Saturday night game here, Eclipse Phase. Very first thing in the book is a little short story to help set the mood. Very next page after that, minimalist splash page with a couple quick little paragraphs. "Here's what this game is all about thematically." "Here's the default assumption of who the PCs are and what they're doing. The next 25 or so pages just go into more detail on that, followed by a huge info-dump to help get your head around what would otherwise be a pretty darn impenetrable setting. Actual rules don't come up once until page 114. Honestly, even then it's a bit hard to get one's head around, but seriously, all RPG rules should start off this way.
no subject
As a GM, I just feel horribly guilty when somebody has written up this deep and involved character, with incredibly awesome backstory, and [i]I can't use it in my game.[/i] It's a terrible thing for me, because it's like I've wasted this person's creativity!