There's nothing I like better than getting together and killing off a few friends.
I'm talking about roleplaying, of course, but most of my friends know nothing about roleplaying, and would probably not react well to an invitation to come and be killed. Those friends I talk to about roleplaying have the usual reaction of, "That's nice", followed by an implied, "for you". I've struggled for years (okay, decades) to get in my regular fix of gaming since moving away from my original group of gaming buddies.
At last, I can finally report a form of success.
Several of my friends came over for an evening of live roleplaying, taking on the characters of archeologists celebrating the opening of a previously hidden tomb. By the end of the evening, there were several deaths intentionally caused by these non-roleplaying friends.
How did I do it? Bribery? False advertising? Not at all. I finally realized that I needed to put live roleplaying into terms that my friends could understand.
I invited them to a murder mystery party. See, where "roleplaying" had a connotation for them of being a bit strange, "murder mystery party" was a perfectly acceptable social event.
Murder mystery games have gotten a bad reputation among the roleplaying crowd, and with some reason. Most of the games available to the general public are not really roleplaying, but simply revealing facts at predetermined times. There are companies, however, that are creating murder mystery games that are true live roleplaying, essentially equivalent to the four hour games you might play at a gaming convention.
The game I picked for my first experiment in roleplaying with non-roleplayers was called Curse of the Pharaoh, and is published by Freeform Games.
The Freeform Games website (http://www.freeformgames.com) has descriptions of their games. Purchasing games is done online, and you'll have a PDF file containing the game minutes after the purchase. All prices are in British Pounds, so your actual cost will depend on the conversion rate at the time of purchase. Luckily PayPal takes care of the conversion automatically. Since each game requires a certain minimum number of players, it's quite useful to be able to buy a game the same week you run it, after you know how many last minute cancellations you've had. Be sure to allow yourself a few hours for preparation, since as the host you'll need to print out and cut up the game to fill character envelopes.
Curse of the Pharaoh puts the players into character as either members of an archeological expedition, or as guests invited to the celebration of the opening of a hidden tomb. Each character, of course, has their own motivations for being at the celebration, and each has secrets to hide and goals to pursue. The closest to an NPC that you get in this game is the role of the host. The host is the GM, but has an in-character identity as the Servant. The Servant handles questions from the players and adjudicates any of the rules as needed (if needed, the host can play a regular character as well, doing double duty).
One of the recurring problems in live roleplaying is the necessity for players to reveal more than their characters might want to reveal. In a four-hour game, you often need to give up something your character would never reveal in order to get what you really want. People new to roleplaying often have trouble with this. Curse of the Pharaoh uses a simple ability mechanism to solve this problem.
For example, every character has a Secret that they do not want known. Left to their own devices, characters would never reveal those secrets. A character with a suitable ability, however, can talk to another character for a few minutes and then take a look at the other character's Secret. Most abilities work in this way, spending a certain amount of time engaging in some form of conversation with another character, and then gaining some insight into that character. This ability-based mechanism works well to put information into play that characters might not want to reveal. It provides for a great simulation of characters giving away more than they'd intended, whether it's due to a moment of passion or a moment of intimidation.
Abilities can be mutually played, as well. If I have an ability that requires spending three minutes talking with another character, they might also have an ability with the same condition. At the end of three minutes, we could find that both our characters had given away more than we'd intended.
The abilities cover more than just the social graces. Pickpocketing, for example, is an ability that simply requires you to have passed close by your target. You then see the Servant to specify what you're trying to steal, and the Servant retrieves it for you. Poisoning is handled in a variety of ways…in Curse of the Pharaoh there's a scorpion that can be used to poison characters. Other abilities may allow you to resist the use of certain abilities used against you.
The host's materials include a timeline of events. This is a guide to when certain events should happen, such as when dessert is served, or when the natives grow restless. The timeline helps to keep the evening flowing. The host should also keep an eye on his players, though, and advance the timeline if the players seem to be winding down, or delay it if they're still having a good time. Properly gauging your players' moods is a big part to keeping this sort of game enjoyable for the group.
Curse of the Pharaoh does use the old Rock/Paper/Scissors mechanism for taking care of actions that do not fall under the scope of abilities. Combat, for example, is done via a Rock/Paper/Scissors challenge. Before you start putting down the game for its use of such a mechanism, remember who the audience is. My group of non-roleplaying friends found it extremely easy to handle such things using Rock/Paper/Scissors. If I'd given them character stats and dice, they'd have spent more time trying to remember the system than playing the game. So, while your regular gaming group would hate Rock/Paper/Scissors because of its lack of discrimination between characters, it also has terrific advantages for people new to roleplaying.
Combat damage in Curse of the Pharaoh is fairly simple; each character dies after taking three wounds. Some characters have abilities that allow them to heal others, or shrug off some of their own damage. I used sticky stars on nametags to indicate how much damage a character had received, which kept the bookkeeping to a minimum. Other games from Freeform Games have different ways of handling combat…some, in fact, have no combat system if the genre of the mystery isn't one where combat would be acceptable. If you feel your group would do best in a game without any combat, look for one of the other games, such as Snow Business.
Combat requires the most work of the host. A combat with multiple characters interacting requires some thought as to the sequencing of events. For example, if Joe is trying to punch Jack, and Jane is trying to interfere with Joe's swing, you'd resolve Jane's action first. If she succeeds, there's no need to worry about Joe's punch. Ties in Rock/Paper/Scissors could go to either party in a conflict, depending on the action being attempted. Someone trying an easy action would succeed on a tie, while they may fail on a tie when attempting a difficult action. It all requires the host to think on her feet.
My experience has been that actual combat is rare, and extremely complex combat situations are rarer still. With Curse of the Pharaoh, the majority of the combat comes in the last ten minutes of the game as players scramble to accomplish their characters' goals before the end of the game. To ensure that nobody is killed too early, the game has a "No dying before dessert" rule. This is helpful for new roleplayers, to ensure that everyone has the majority of the evening to play in relative safety. If your group is anything like mine, by the time dessert was served several people had already picked their targets.
My group had a great time playing Curse of the Pharaoh, and since then we've had a murder mystery party every couple of months, which is a lot more than I've been gaming lately.
So if you're looking to recruit some non-roleplaying friends into your hobby, you could do much worse than a "murder mystery" live roleplaying event. Eventually you may get them to pick up some dice, too.
