So I Ran Another Game

Today's update is an off-site link: my account of a game of Men in Black I ran. It's on GM Mike's Men in Black site, natch; poke around for many more missions, debriefs and at least one instance of horrible filk. If enough people wander over there, Mike might even finish putting up the rest of the mission summaries.

A little background might come in handy. The game is set in the Men in Black universe, but it's a little up in the air whether it's the MiB from the comic book, the movie or the animated series. I am usually a player, and we have a little joke that if we ever do get to meet J and K, we need to play it very carefully until we see the color of J's skin. If he's white, we're in the original comic book and consequently as good as hosed.

For this session, Mike hung up his GM hat and let me run a game. We'd been expecting a lot of players - at one point the estimate ran at six or seven - so I was a little disappointed but mostly relieved when I heard it was only going to be Mike, my sister Matie and Ashton, a new guy from darkest Canadia.

Matie played her usual character, Agent V, a decent if frequently cranky gal with suspiciously large hands. V loves to help people, especially injured people, despite having absolutely no points in First Aid and very few in Medicine. What she does have is Hand-to-hand, so although she may lose a few patients, it's certainly not because they escaped. Why no points in First Aid? Well, she recently spent most of her free points to buy up her Piloting: Helicopter skill and generally spends the beginning of a mission trying to requisition or at least hotwire a helicopter. Different priorities.

Ashton was Agent A, a rookie. Rather astoundingly, he had a character history in mind - a mob doctor - and allocated his stats with that in mind. That's what passes for ace roleplaying around here, folks. Compared to the other two, he was a saint.

Mike was playing Agent U, one of the non-player character agents. The players had met U before in a few other missions; he seemed then like your standard gruff, stoic, most-of-my-points-are-in-hitting-people-skills kind of guy. But that was all when Agent U was an NPC - when Mike puts aside his GM screen it frees up a lot of CPU cycles and he focuses it all, laser-like, into his character. So far, they've all turned into incarnations of the first character I saw him play, the (2nd Ed) Chaotic Neutral elfin bard who had an entire Good-aligned party raskolnikoving plans for his murder after one session. Lots of pick-pocketing, lots of picking fights with the rest of the players' characters.

And then there was me. I've made no secret of it: I'm not a very good GM. I have a dislike of being in authority, an indifference to combat mechanics and a seething hatred of generating a fistful of point-based non-player characters. I also have a tendency to spend hours drawing up family trees and making sure dates align properly for NPCs who will probably be slaughtered immediately on meeting the PCs. If I mention someone in Wisconsin attending a university I will make 100% sure I know which one it was and that it was geographically close to the town I just mentioned. That leads to late-night web searches and plenty of needless anxiety; like I said, nobody cares if someone had kids when they were 18 or 36 if the players are too busy trying to figure out exactly what is removing people's heads so messily.

But, hey, like I said, it all turned out OK after all.