Ethnography Results Week 4:

The group that I was going to visit had to cancel due to a few of the members having schedule conflicts with the usual meet time. Again this speaks to the fact that while these people are very friendly they are at times rather unorganized and things do happen to get in the way of meetings. However I did receive a nice email from the group letting me know ahead of time so that I didn't show up and sit there for awhile and realize noone was showing.

So, I was talking with my roomates and I knew they played DnD but didn't know they had a group going. So I decided that I would actually participate in a small session that they ran Saturday nights. I am becomming more familiar with how the game works and was able to easily learn how to "play" the game but with much assistance. They started me with a pre-generated character and told me about its past, motivation, skills and other important information. They also explained that this system is, yet again, different not taking place in a world of magic but in the year 3000, where we are assuming the human race has explored the galaxy and space flight is an average encounter. The system is called GURPS and thankfully there was only one book so it was rather easy to do some quick research and learn the basics of the system and learn what everything meant on the character sheet.

My character was some sort of cat-race and I was a humanoid-tiger character that was able to speak (in common) and interact similar to a human. I guess we also assumed that in a thousand years of space travel the human race is rather used to different looking 'alien' races and they are accepted like any other race. I was a former military pilot and I was looking to be moved to a base to teach advanced combat maneuvers.

The system was also a bit different in that in DnD 3.5 (described in my earlier articles), the players want to use the different "ability scores" and roll a d20 + their score to try and try to perform whatever action they want to do. In this case, your ability score is derived from your characters base stats, and you want to try and roll below the characters score using 3 six-sided dice, so essentially the best role you can have is a 3 and the worst is an 18.

We started with the scenario and I was joined in, it was rather unusual the callous disregard for me the other players had as their characters would have acted disinterested to me so the players reacted the same way. Not until we had to steal a spaceship and they learned that I was quite the pilot and was able to navigate quite easily to the nearest "jump gate" to go between galaxies.

The DM for this had no notes whatsoever and did a rather good job of keeping the group organized. In fact while he had no system of apparent organization he did have a way to keep all the players involved and did a good job of being able to tell between meta-conversations and game play questions. He also had a very well defined story with lots of details that allowed me to understand what sorts of areas we were encountering and the intimate details of scenario pieces that allowed me to understand their significance to the campaign. It might have helped that our group was only 5 people but it was rather fun and we got to have a lot of good laughs. The DM was also great about keeping the story going and presenting challenges that we were not only able to figure out but we were able to use our characters skills to the fullest and really have to think what we could do in certain situations. The most interesting part was that each character has 'flaws' and even in social situation the DM was really good about remembering our flaws and playing to them to try to make the situation more difficult for us (or in this case, more interesting and fun).

The most interesting part of this system is that there isn't *really* an ordering scheme for when players do things until combat starts, then we just carry out the combat in turn based fasion. The other really nice thing about this is that combat didn't usually last but 4-5 minutes because we were simulating guns and each "round" only represented one second (ie: the amount of time it takes to fire a gun).

The other interesting part of this is while you would think that you would be involved in the campaign a lot each player really determines his/her own level of participation in meta conversations and game play activities. If there was an obvious avenue for me to use one of my skills (whether the players knew it or not) I was able to pick and choose my level of involvement and in some cases get away with things because the DM forgot to ask me about a flaw or some other skill. It goes to show that while these sessions look rather organized it is a lot for the DM to remember and sometimes things are skipped. I did ask about this and it was explained that rules sometimes are more of "guidelines" and that for the most part if one or two things are missed it won't affect the overall outcome of the game. I was also able to participate in what meta-conversations I wanted and was quickly accepted as one of the group when I was active and laughing along with the group. The interesting thing was that regardless of what my opinion on something was it was accepted and if it was a point of contention sometimes the meta-argument could turn into a brief discussion but no one ever got mad at another player for their beliefs(again speaking to how nice they are). I fact, the only time that the players did get somewhat upset was when I considered an action before doing it. Essentially, the more anyone slows the game play down for a silly action or a thought (that takes an excessive amount of time) is when the players show frustration. I have been told stories (because each player has them) of other players who do ridiculously silly things and the group ends up having to sort-of "send them away" because their personality doesn't fit in with their game play style. They don't mean this in a mean fashion but sometimes one player will ruin the game play for the others because of pointless actions.

In all my first experience playing was rather enjoyable. I felt like I was part of the community and learned that watching a session is not that much different from playing in one other than when I am playing there is a sense of companionship from everyone else that I should just jump in 100% and really participate and play my character rather than be the silent observer. Though even as an observer I was sometimes incorporated into the meta-conversation I didn't feel that sense that I should be participating and really enjoying my experience and as a player I did. I am not sure what I will do next week as far as participating/observing but more to come and maybe another new system!