Reading a little about Corvus Elrod and Zakelro’s innovative storytelling game Bhaloidam over on Kickstarter brought to mind my past experiences with tabletop roleplaying. I haven’t done as much of it as I’d have liked to over the years, but the few experiences I have had were excellent ones.
I was a member of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign at university for a while. My character, a thief named Singol Nithryan, was something of a cheeky chappy and there was some excellent banter and rivalry between him and my friend Tim’s character, who was a pompous prig who thought himself better than everyone else. The characterisation of the rivalry between these two characters was completely unscripted, but with each session the plans to outfox each other (well, mostly for Singol to outfox the other chap, whose name I have sadly forgotten) became more and more elaborate. Most times the party settled down to camp tended to end up with Singol cutting his compatriot’s purse and “borrowing” some money — the absence of which his companion often didn’t notice for some time. They weren’t enemies, though — it was good-natured friendly rivalry for the most part, and it made for a fun inter-party dynamic.
To be honest, I can’t remember a lot about the campaign itself and I’m not sure we ever finished it — but we certainly had a blast along the way, and that’s sort of the point. While computer RPGs are all about powerlevelling and reaching the cap as soon as possible, a tabletop experience is all about the storytelling, the interacting and the emergent gameplay that results from cutting loose and improvising a little bit.
The best example of this came with what our mutual friend Will called his “freeform” roleplaying system. It was a system he’d come up with by himself, and it was very simple, requiring, as I recall, only three stats: attack, defense and power. According to the situation, points from each of these stats were spent on various actions, with more points (usually from the power pool) meaning a greater chance of success.
Again, though, it wasn’t about the mechanics, which were almost irrelevant. In fact, the simplicity of the mechanics meant that it was possible — and indeed encouraged — to play bizarre, leftfield characters that simply would have no place in a traditional, say, D&D campaign. As such, our adventuring party — whose backstories we each provided to Will beforehand for him to weave an improvised campaign around — was not your typical RPG lineup to say the least. No, it was a wildly disparate group of… things, that I’d hesitate to call “adventurers” even.
Probably the most normal of the bunch was my character, Rush Hurin, who was born from my wondering what might happen if you combined traditional fantasy tropes with sci-fi. Rush was the last of the elves, and he came from a futuristic Deus Ex-style setting. As the last of his kind, he was a highly sought after commodity. People wanted to do research on him, in other words, but he had absolutely no desire to submit to the demands, prods, pokes and scalpels of some scientists. Consequently, he spent a lot of his life on the run, but, being an elf, had immense agility and was a badass with a sword.
Alongside Rush came Tyrael, played by my friend Tim who was (is) somewhat obsessed with Diablo at the time. Tyrael was a fallen angel in human form who had the ability to, I quote, “go all big and flamey” and also suffered from something of a lack of self control. In one memorable sequence, Rush was fleeing from a skyscraper while Tyrael was turning into his full, multi-storey “big and flamey” form in order to cause some chaos and allow me to escape. That was interesting.
Next up was Arryth (I don’t know how you spelled it), who was an animated suit of armour. Was he a ghost possessing the armour? Was he a sentient suit of armour? We never quite found out, but he proved to be a valuable ally on more than one occasion.
Not as valuable as the Luggage from Discworld, however, who had a predilection for devouring our enemies and, occasionally, spitting them back out again, somewhat confused, into the midst of a tricky situation. He also proved useful for carrying our gear.
Finally came a character I can’t remember the name of, and who was simply an amorphous cloud of pink gas. It didn’t talk much, but it made a good spy and also had the useful ability for flying down opponents’ windpipes and choking them from the inside.
Together, we endured some bizarre adventures which Will was clearly making up as he went along, placing signs in rooms he wasn’t ready for us to visit yet which said “come back later!” and getting his mental challenges from one of those massive puzzle books your parents would buy you on holiday to keep you quiet — before handhelds and smartphones came along, of course. To call our adventures chaotic would be an understatement, to say the least.
But you know what? Those are some of the fondest memories I have of my few sessions roleplaying. It wasn’t about grinding for experience points, making use of my abilities or powergaming — it was about improvisatory, collaborative storytelling, and it was one hell of a lot of fun.
The reason that Bhaloidam has given me such cause for curiosity is that it sounds like something strangely along the same lines to Will’s system. It’s a little more complex, sure, featuring a system to determine how much players influence the game world (and each other) prior to “performing” their actions, but at heart it’s, like our experiences, designed for freedom. It has the scope for telling interesting stories that move far beyond traditional fantasy and RPG tropes and into something that’s not quite roleplaying and not quite improvisatory theatre. It’s a highly interesting concept, is what it is, and I’ll be very curious to see how it turns out in the final project.
If you’re interested, too, check out the Kickstarter page for the project here — you can even help fund its first production run. If you’re a Google+ user, I also strongly recommend popping designer Corvus Elrod and his amazing moustache in your circles.