A Normal Day I

Well, I was kind of thinking. Yes, you know that think thinking that not everybody does. Well, not many I know of anyway. It’s that special kind of think when you use some parts of your brain most people does not use, or at least not very often. Most of everybody I know, that is. But there is some of everybody that does use it. But not many of the everybody I know.

In any case, the following part in Land of War (LoW) we’ll change the pace. I’ll try to let you take the initiative as much as possible. You could see this as a sandbox period in the game. When you arrive at one point or see one thing or do something, that might trigger something else. But there will be very few events that actually happen. If you can’t think of anything to do/act out then nothing will happen and we’ll sit around my table for 5-10 minutes until I decide I want to do something else and send you back home instead. You get it?

But let me elaborate, some of you are terribly bad with reading between the lines and understanding me correctly. Even though it’s simple as it is. But let me explain so the misunderstandings will be less. Since there is no way in hell I can safeguard myself against the stupid misunderstandings that naturally occur between people and other people.

If you ever have played the Game Zelda – Majora’s Mask you should have some idea. In that game you have 3 days, and during these three days the same things happen, over and over again. You can’t be everywhere at once and when you reset time and go back to day 1 everything is back to normal, except for the fact that you have acquired something or whatever you’ve accomplished before you went back in time. It will be almost the same, only that you won’t reset time, you will only go forward and forward and I’ll just say; “It’s morning, the weather seems dull, there are some people up and about outside. The Training Grounds are closed. Everything is normal.”

And then you decide what to do, or what you want to do or rather accomplish and lay it out in simple terms. If you are lucky something happens, or if you are unlucky you’ll just get a result from your decision. Things like training, hunting, working or resting will give you this result if I don’t decide you’ll have an encounter or special scene.

The purpose of this is exploration and free time to shape things. You have almost complete control of your circle and your environment right now and you can use this to get the hang of things or just discover, or in your characters point of view, rediscover something. I will ease up on my demands for acquiring stones by giving good imitative or training of the right kind in the right way stones. I will also give you the opportunity to put yourself in a situation and then ask me to describe how your character usually acts in these situations or things like that.

Heh, now I know that Daniel will misunderstand the last thing and do something like Ragnar goes to a solider and speak about X, now tell me about X. If something like this happens I will say; FU, and take one stone. This is now how I mean for you to use what I said. It’s more like… say that you’ll be given a task in-game to mock the stables. You don’t know squat about this and it’s actually not really important so I can just sum it up you mock the stables for a few hours before you go home, but you want to know more about your routine in the stables. I then describe more about the things necessary or small details. Not everything, just more. You understand? You can get very small information this way but it’s mostly about routine behaviourism or things you should be able to do that you as player isn’t. Hopefully this description now will prevent stupid things from happening.

Another thing is that many days should pass during the session. This means, do not hang up yourself on small details or play out unnecessary things or give unwanted description in wrong situations. You have control over your environment and can use people to your advantage, even suggest using other players, but with their consent of course. Things don’t need to be played out chronically either, as long as it’s smooth and well done. Some examples;

– Today I do some chores around the house and spend my hours talking or helping out with the men. Towards the evening I exercise some before I spend the final hours speaking with X by the fireplace before we finally go to bed.
– I do the usual stuff, but during the day my friends from the Stables comes by and wants to do what boys my age do for fun, can you elaborate please?
– You go out into the woods with slings and practice shooting down birds. This usually takes a few hours but you can stay out until the gates closes. For how long are you outside?
– A few hours.
– I think I exercise in the morning but visit player 1 briefly during the day to socialize, I help out for a while but leaves afterwards. Back home I do some chores and tries to score some points with my family.
– The day end, is there anything more in specific you want to do today?

I think you get the point. Do things, in a steady pace, play out your characters, but many days might go by without a social scene. It’s the actions that is the important things and you can use this to do a little of this, a little of that. You can, if you feel like it’s appropriate stage a social encounter, but if it’s not of a big importance or nature, I would recommend you to keep it brief, only to build on the relationship and the way you act with each other or other NPCs. But things that are long-winded or slow I would prefer only to describe things out of the ordinary or just mention small things. I will try to avoid unnecessary detailed descriptions unless you are somewhere, doing something, or something happens that require it. This is a setting, and there is a while (a session or so) before new events of importance will happen. It’s meant to be a normal, easy period for you all to settle down in and to get to know yourself, your friends, your family, the fort and its immediate surroundings (barely two hours out from the gates).

This post will continue in a second post. Please read this as carefully as you can (both posts) before you go to the session tomorrow¹ at 13:00.

1. Saturday ↩