Saturday, August 2, 1997 -- Gaming Day
Gamer's Decision Making Process: Ok, list the options, then roll an eight-sided die.		Azura and I made a quick trip to the Harris Teeter near my apartment this morning. I'd forgotten to put the meat away on Thursday, for the spaghetti, and it went bad. I just missed it, i got the milk, cheese, and pudding into the fridge. We bought some donuts and orange juice, some more meat, and some bananas and brought it all back to the apartment. I know, this is really mundane, but you have to understand. I've been living alone since February, the most complicated thing I've cooked in my apartment was Hamburger Helper, or a frozen pizza. Today, I'm making spaghetti for friends. Not overly complicated, but I'm finally really breaking the kitchen in. I got the first stage of the spaghetti done and all of the little ingredients in. Azura told me it was too salty, but that was because I'd wimped out and bought garlic salt instead of garlic cloves. Dumped the whole thing in the crock pot, grabbed my gaming stuff, and we were off to Shelby. Gaming went well, I had one of those GameMaster ethical moments. Role-playing is supposed to be about storytelling, but in such a way that several people take part in it. Depending on your style, there may or may not be a single 'leader' type person guiding the story, and controlling the minor characters and villains. This group likes to have the leader, or Game Master, and I'm him. My job, in general, is to make a story that's got enough going on that there is a world to interact with, and the players feel like they are important, or relevant to that world. They are the self-cast heroes of this epic. As such they occasionally die, and some of them are less heroic than others. We had a three new players, Azura was on, WolfGang another, and Drakkar was the third. At one point in the story all the players, acting in character, were poisoned, but Drakkar had decided not to drink the antidote. He didn't know it was the antidote, he thought it was just alcohol, and his character didn't drink alcohol. So his character died. As the Game Master, I could have done many things to keep his character from dying, but I decided that everyone was acting in character. This character's death flowed from the plot, so it was ok. [And anyway, this is good ol' AD&D and there's a half a dozen good ways to get him back...] Azura and I made it back around 10pm, which was much better than last time, when I got back at 3am... BTW: everyone liked the spaghetti!! cool... Generic Joe's A Typical Male