RPG Blog Carnival: Ordinary Life

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival: Ordinary Life In RPGs.

One option here is to talk about how life can impact gaming, and there’s good advice there already.

The other big suggestion here is ordinary life for the PCs outside of adventures.

This only tends to happen with my games when they run long - otherwise the PCs are in near constant trouble, with little downtime. The PCs lives’ are... eventful.

A lot of players are less interested in the mundane side of their PCs’ lives. When I get a decent number that are interested, I’m happy to run with it. It’ll still tend to be melodramatic, or comedic, as appropriate.

If the players are hanging out in character, sharing jokes or romantic woes, I’ll sit back and let them relax. Going to the pub will still probably be interrupted by monsters if it goes beyond a brief scene, but the brief scene can at least exist without it.

There are also games where the PCs’ ordinary lives aren’t all that ordinary. Vampires need to drink blood to exist, and their work meetings can involve beheadings. Superheroes often have to hide who they really are, and those who don’t are often celebrities. Not many of them get to go home and watch a box set, or indeed play RPGs...