Special Features 5 - Shut Up & Sit Down

How to Get Started with Roleplaying!

Artwork from Jason Morningstar's Night Witches

[Our header image is official art for Numenera.]

Hilary: So, you wanna play an RPG.

You’ve read the Shut Up & Sit Down reviews of Fiasco or The Burning Wheel. You’re daydreaming about a campaign of Apocalypse World. The idea of playing a baker in Ryuutama makes your heart melt.

You’ve bought the game, you’ve read the rules, you’ve gathered your friends, you’ve sharpened your pencils and now the magic happens. Well, uh, you assume this is where the magic happens. See, the rules didn’t necessarily explain how you were gonna “roleplay”. Just “then you play out the scene” or “make choices as your character” or “someone decides when the scene ends” or …hmm.

Hmmm.

It turns out there are spaces between the rules of any game left for you, the players, to fill in. Which is all well and good, but what if you have no idea what to do and you’re kinda worried maybe you’re gonna fuck this whole thing up and oh gosh maybe you’re not cool enough or nerdy enough or experienced enough or what if you forget which die is which or…

It’s okay! I’ve got you. Deep breaths. We’ve got this.

Sometimes magic just needs a helping hand.

Dumb Games, or "Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You"

[Brendan returns! The author of Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess and The Correct Way to Scratch is back, this time talking about Dumb Games. Enjoy, everyone.]

“Did you ever play ‘Butt Comin’ at Ye’?” said Colly. We were walking through Lurgan, my hometown, and we had begun to talk about some of the more esoteric memories of our shared childhood. Fifty metres away, the town’s police station rose like a fortress out of the street, surrounded in green sheets of amoured metal, steel grates and breezeblock walls the colour of the Irish sky. We walked on past it.

“Butt comin’ at ye?” I said.

“Dave and I used to play it. You finish smoking your cigarette and you say ‘here Dave, butt comin’ at ye’ and then you just…”

He mimed flicking a cigarette. I laughed.

Leigh & Quinns collaborated on Life Hacks last year, a very personal article about learning to play Netrunner. They return for this article about the 2015 UK Netrunner Nationals.

Quinns: I am slumped on the floor of the Birmingham Hilton. My head almost between my knees, I break into an orange by pressing my fingers into it until the skin splits. I begin eating. The flesh is both dry and watery in my mouth.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it,” I tell Leigh. Then a pause, weighing my next words with the pulp in my mouth. “And I don’t know if I want to play.”

Pip: I hadn’t really thought of what I did to my copy of travel Guess Who as modding – it was just a fun project which saved me from a gift-giving conundrum. But Quinns thought other people might fancy doing something similar so he asked me to share the instructions. First, though, some backstory:

Sometimes there are people in your life who are impossible to buy presents for. These people are terrible jerks. They often have a single big main interest or hobby. “Hooray,” you think. “I will buy them a thing from this interest or hobby and all will be well. This is genius!”

Then you realise that actually they buy everything they value from that hobby the second it comes out and if they don’t own it it’s because it’s not worth having or is beyond the reach of a mortal wallet.

“Don’t worry,” they say magnanimously. “I’m sure I will love whatever you get me.”

These are the words of a terrible jerk.

Thrower: Do you find numbers scary? Do you dread the pointy 1, the razor-sharp 7, the misery of an unsolved sum? If you do, you’ve probably realised that most board games are just fearsome equations wearing friendly grins.

Designers, however, understand this, and more. They welcome it, glory in it, roll in it like pigs in mathematical mud. Because it’s what they use to build the foundations of something fun, yet something real.

Take Volko Ruhnke, designer of contemporary wargames Labyrinth and the Counter-Insurgency (or COIN) series. “Most board games and video games that are about something are models,” he told me. “Trading games, railroad building games, shooting games, strategic war games. They all communicate the game designers’ model of certain aspects of human affairs.”

Paul: I can’t count the number of chips I have. There are too many.

The croupier has smeared them across the felt toward me and I’m hurriedly scooping up these coloured disks as if they were spilled bonbons. I’m trying to arrange them in piles of five so that I have some idea how much I have, how many I have, except I’ve forgotten to return my cards and now the croupier is reminding me that he needs them before he can deal out the next hand. So I’m now trying to collect my chips, arrange my chips, return my cards and also put in my blind bet. If I was an octopus I could pull this off. Instead, I’m more of a puppy, flailing at my winnings. I must look so clumsy and everybody can see.

The noise was the first thing that got me. Forty-seven people entered this tournament, spread across five tables of ten or nine players. Before the first hand came out there was nothing but the sound of chips clacking. So many chips clacking as dozens of players flipped and fingered and meshed them together like mantis mandibles. I was pretty sure the young man in a black hoodie to my right was good, but I couldn’t quite explain why. Opposite me sat someone who could have just slithered off a Harley Davidson. His face was the greying crags of a cliff. His rings would mangle anybody he swung at. His top was as ragged as his features. His clothes were worn. His cap was worn. His face was worn. His indifference was underlined by a mustache that never, ever moved. He looked like Danny Trejo.

Hello, Danny Trejo, I am English, what what. I weigh less than 130lbs and yesterday I was so tired during my fencing class that I couldn’t hold my sword up.

Imperial Assault: Joining the Dark Sidekick

Matt: Initially, I didn’t spot the mistake. Enthusiastically firing out a message that proposed a date for a day of Star Wars: Imperial Assault, I was met with five excited replies. I looked at the box. “2-5 players”. Bums.

Telling one soul that Christmas was cancelled while their sisters unwrapped a BMX mountain felt too cruel to be any kind of option – I had to make six players work.

Quinns: Hello everybody!

It’s been a slow week on the site due to a scheduling snafu, so I’m here to wave a white flag and apologise. But wait, what’s that written on the white flag? Why, it’s news that Shut Up & Sit Down just passed 100 published videos!

While SU&SD is very precocious for a four year old, able to tell simple stories and bend over without falling (mostly), it’s the videos that we’re most proud of. Since we receive a ton of emails about how to do what we do, I thought I’d do an FAQ.

Behold! Everything we’ve learned pratting around on camera for four years.

Paul: This week, Pip is also sharing one of her early board gaming memories. Here’s a story about a game we don’t talk about much here, but which we’re sure you’ll all know. I don’t know about you, but I certainly share some of Pip’s frustrations about this…

Pip: I think the first board game I ever thought of as a favourite was The Game Of Life.

We had a copy which I think my brother and sister and I had worn my parents down until they bought, then played properly only a handful of times (thus neatly adding fuel to their “board games are awful and we won’t have anything to do with them” fire). But I kept coming back to the box and opening it up at odd moments, sometimes working my way along the track on my own.

Following the lovely responses we’ve had to our other spoken word pieces (see Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch, Leigh’s Month as an Assassin and Quinns’ favourite drinking games) this week in the podcast section we have Paul telling us about the quite singular way that he remembers the most influential, most important board game in his life. And how it lead him astray.

Here’s the story of how I bunked off school to play a board game and how that board game changed my life.

Saying that immediately makes me excited to tell it.

How to Get Started with Roleplaying!

Dumb Games, or “Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You”

On Playmats: A Netrunner Story

Crafty: How Pip Made Guess Who Better!

Interview: Volko Ruhnke’s Modern Wargames

Spent: The Story of a Poker Tournament

Imperial Assault: Joining the Dark Sidekick

Some Tips From SU&SD, 100 Videos In!

Pip Remembers When Life was Just a Game

Paul’s Greatest Gaming Memory

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