Elvish, motherf*cker, do you speak it?

Face it, it takes a lot of time and energy to weave a story together with plot, characters, drama, and twists the audience doesn't see coming.  This is definitely more difficult when the audience is your high school friends who easily get bored and distracted and are hopped up on Mountain Dew. This was the challenge on most weekends when we got together for a night of role-playing games.  

My very first RPG was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. We cheated all of the time. Most of the time we just got together and shot each other with full automatic weapons.  Pretty stupid.  I just remember tons of D6's. We finally got our shit together and started to create some interesting campaigns when I bought the Palladium RPG.  The only reason I bought this game was because they had an expansion book on ship-to-ship combat.  That's right - I liked pirates before it was cool.  


I definitely had a lot of free time in high school, so I was able to develop some detailed campaigns.  Classes were a breeze for me so weekends and most weeknights were wide open.  That sounds nerdy.  I guess that's the cold, hard truth.

I looked in the mirror and this is all I saw

Some of the other RPGs we tried were Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Earthdawn, and the old standby, D&D.   After awhile we did decide to shift our focus to something less nerdy - Magic: The Gathering.  If you've ever played Magic before, you know that it's pretty fun, but there are no characters.  No rolling for initiative.  And most importantly, no story.  No plot.


Once we got to college there was just no time to develop plots, characters, storyline twists and maps and mazes and so much more supporting characters and data.  I'm experiencing that now again as I try to dive into script writing.  It's very time consuming.  I will make a big push again in April for script frenzy.  I think my experience developing RPG campaigns will help me, but I'm confident none of my characters will speak Elvish.