#RPGaDAY 2017 Day 7 What was your most impactful RPG session?

Hi! This wasn't written on the day in question; I'm backfilling here. I didn't start writing these until the 16th, but I decided to give it a whirl anyway; hence, filling in the backlog.

This one in particular touches on some pretty personal stuff. For those with no interest in reading such, I've tried to make it pretty easy to get off this train, long before it heads to mental-health-town. We good? Good. 

Let's blog, homies.

#RPGaDAY 2017 Day 7 What was your most impactful RPG session?

I feel like (surprise surprise) there are a couple different answers I could give. Do we mean:

• Impactful in terms of storyline impact? 
• Impactful on me as a gamer? 
• Impactful on a personal level?

Let's break it down.

Storyline Impact

So, I can be a bit... unorthodox in comparison to other gamers, and I can think of no better illustration than with this story.

The Birthday Game

So, as I've mentioned before, I can get a little ridiculous around my birthday. So when an L5R game that I was in had a game falling on my birthday, the GM asked if there was anything that I wanted to happen in the game. So I told her.

"You sure?" she asked. 

"Absolutely," I replied.

"Okay, if that's what you really want..."

And thus, did the birthday game commence.

A little background

To say that my character, Yoritomo Keiko, was something of a maverick is an understatement. The unlikely child of a geisha and an Akido strategist, she was adopted by the Mantis clan as a means of securing an otherwise unlikely marriage alliance¹. So her own marriage - to a Shosuro actor of the Scorpion clan - was quite the political coup in its own right.

Fast forward to the game. An Emerald Magistrate, Keiko is investigating a cult of bloodspeakers who are led by a charismatic, enigmatic, masked figure. She's narrowing down suspects, and while she loves her husband, he's one of the few people who could be pulling this off. She doesn't want to suspect him, but she kind of has to. Even more so when he's suspiciously unavailable when she wants to ask some questions.

She doesn't want to think it.

But she kind of thinks it.

Anyway, she's leading a raid on a bloodspeaker stronghold, and it's a horrorshow. Arrows are flying everywhere, she's doing her action samurai thing, when she sees him.

Her husband. Juro. Strung up in some kind of horrible blood sacrifice.

There's a fight - it's brief, violent, and bloody - and Keiko makes her way to her beloved, the man that she'd distanced herself from, whom she wrongly suspected of the evil that was assuredly claiming his life. Cradling his bloodied body in her arms, he manages to squeeze out a few words.

"This isn't your fault."

But she knew damn well that it was.

Gamer Impact

Like many new GMs, I was seriously worried that I couldn't pull off running a good game. I wasn't sure if I could deliver anything close to what I'd seen others do. Since this is already getting pretty long, I'll try to be brief; my players had worked with two NPCs - long-exiled monarchs, now living as Final Fantasy-style eidolons, or summonable spirits - and they finally managed to bring those two back to their respective domain. My players had worked tirelessly for this moment, and I wanted to give it the weight I felt it deserved. Every GM advice on the planet will tell you to never do "NPC theater" - everything is about the PCs, always. 

But they worked for this. So I felt that, in a way, it was.

So I played the scene slow, with a building pace and crescendo. I timed my description with the music I'd selected beforehand. I told the story of the two monarchs; irrevorachably changed from their strange journey, wondering if they were unrecognizable to their former citizens. The silence, the slow walk, the lack of recognition.

And then, one by one, they began to kneel. 

Surveying my players, I saw several things; respect, a sense of accomplishment, cathartic tears. But they'd earned that moment, and I'd delivered it. We built this thing together, and it was massive.

It was in that moment that I first really felt like, "yeah, I can do this thing."

And on a personal level

So, fair warning, my friends; this is about to get into a discussion of personal issues, mental health, and other stuff that you might have little to no interest in.

Fair warning.

...

We'll still be friends if you wanna dip out.

...

Still here? Ok then, let's not waste anymore time.

I think of this one as "the Panic Attack game"

So, I've done LARPs off and on for a pretty large chunk of my gaming history; it's how I started out, and it became a constant presence. A link to my friends, the university I didn't attend (but still holds a place in my heart), and the introduction of gaming to my life.

It was pretty important to me.

I also came from a pretty rough background. Sparing you the details, pretty much all of the adults from my youth are serving prison sentences that they're unlikely to survive to the end of; and it was exclusively about what they did to kids.

Not great stuff.

So when I made it to university, I was a hot mess of a human being; an emotionally unstable, fragile creature, completely unaware of any of this. I was a cheerful, extroverted guy; on the surface, my friends and peers had no idea where I came from, or what was going on inside of me. And when people started to get some idea of these things, and suggested that, you know... maybe I wasn't ok, I ran. I changed universities, I cut people out of my life; I was still in the middle of some of this, my father was refusing to sign basic financial aid paperwork, so I ran off to the world of music. If I couldn't get an education, I'd chase my dreams. And I did, and it was great. 

But it was also a great way to avoid dealing with anything.

Through it all, gaming was my link to stability; coming back "home" to game with my friends twice a month. 

The Game itself

So, the game itself hardly matters in this story. It was a V:tM LARP, in which I played a dubiously trustworthy independent character; in a city with two warring factions, he played both sides to varying degrees of effect. Good times.

In the game, it was time to politically argue for independent rights; there was going to be a fight in word, if not deed, and a lot of people were looking forward to it, including me. Inside, I was a churning mess of emotion, but my plan was to ignore it. This had always worked before. Anyway, it's a great scene; two people with acting backgrounds in a clash of ideals, as various characters find ways to signal their allegiance; some subtly, some with surprisingly overt signaling. In the midst of it, my character utters the line "it seems like you don't care if we live or die." The Camarilla prince looks my character (me) square in the eye, and with barely restrained vitriol, simply says "I wish you would." It's a great moment in a great scene, and the kind of stuff I absolutely love in gaming.

And as a human being, I crack. 

I don't remember much of the scene after that. I know that my "side" and I leave the scene, though I don't remember what happens. I remember some conversations occurring. But mostly, I remember having my first-ever panic attack. 

Not great. Me, in my infinite wisdom, attempt to stay in character, because I don't know what's happening. I don't understand why I'm sobbing, or what the hell is even happening. But I understand what happens next. The people around me, strangers, friends, and everything in between, begin to do something that I never expected.

They try to help me. 

They listen, they care. They tell me that I'll be all right, that it's ok to not be all right, and that doesn't make me a bad person. Through my stuttered apologies, they tell me not to worry, that it's ok to get help if I need it. That I have value as a human being.

More than a decade later, I'm still incredibly moved.

Epilogue. 

For the first time in my life, I confront my past, and get some mental health care. I start on the long road to wellness; a road I still walk today. It's a one step at a time thing. And I know that the RPG scene possesses many toxic elements, that it has huge problems that need addressing. Gamer culture is very much a work in progress, and I'll be the first guy to admit that. 

But at its best, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more supportive, caring, understanding group of human beings anywhere in the world. I've seen it first-hand, and it's not hyperbole to say that it might have saved my life. 

I'll always remember that game. There remains a mix of embarrassment and shame - I wish I hadn't lost myself in the midst of what was by all accounts a classic game - but more than that, I remember the human kindness and empathy that came when I needed it the most.

Hard to get more of an impact than that.

~Killstring

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1 - Damn, I love L5R's setting politics.