I had fun today. We had the second session of a really small D&D game—just me, sambear and B. B was in our main D&D game but dropped out because 1) she has this life thing going on, 2) her character (evil alignment) didn’t actually fit in with anybody else in the party (all but one good, and he’s neutral), 3) the group was too large for her to get as much character time as she prefers, and 4) she doesn’t want to have to censor herself.
I’ve only been gaming for three years, and only in the games sambear has run. Our Mage game grew to, um, 10 people, I think, total? Because of people who dropped out, then came back, but we’d added other people in the meantime. That was crowded—especially in the small living room of our old place. The main D&D game has been going on for two years now and has grown the same way. It started with 6 people and there have been 12 in it now. Most games there are just 5 or 6 players plus sambear, though. Thankfully. Because while we can technically seat 12 people in the living room, even with the gaming table in the center for the battle map, it gets a little claustrophobic that way.
Other than doing some out-of-game interaction between my character and NPCs on side stories in the world, I’ve never been in a smaller game. And there are folks in the main game who are—well, pretty conservative in some ways. We don’t edit everything to suit their tastes, but I really don’t want to make anyone too uncomfortable.
Playing off B is just a lot more fun than playing in the larger group. I love the larger game, I want to keep playing, I want to know what happens in the story, I enjoy some of the other characters and I like all the people who are playing. Some of them aren’t particularly into roleplaying, though, and B is deeply into it. And I think I’m getting a little spoiled by it. sambear is very much into roleplaying, but he’s a good enough GM that he responds to the needs of his players, and right now an awful lot of the folks in the main game want a lot more combat than story.
In the smaller game, we’re also able to follow the story wherever it goes without worrying about offending anyone, because there’s very little in this world that would actually offend any of the three of us that would ever come up in one of sambear‘s games. So while remaining aware that the four kids playing their own D&D game in the playroom were coming upstairs and right next to our area occasionally for drinks and food, we were able to have a far more adult game. More innuendo than anything else, but we all got and enjoyed the innuendo (which would go right over the kids’ heads even if they did overhear it). B was playing a character who is very sexually naive and stayed wholly in character, and her character’s reactions made it even more fun.
