Miscellany: Running a "Call of Cthulhu" campaign, part 3

I was caught off guard tonight. One of our regulars in the D&D group has recently found himself addicted to WoW (sound familiar?), and our DM canceled the regularly scheduled D&D game so he could craft more content for the next dungeon crawl. Suddenly, my "Call of Cthulhu" campaign took center stage, and with some haste I put together the finishing touches on the first adventure for my players. I ran the game...

Being the game master for any kind of tabletop roleplaying game is fraught with peril. There are so many risks - make the game too easy, and everyone gets bored. Make the game too hard, and you risk killing everyone in an hour (when characters have lifespans shorter than Wile E. Coyote, it's difficult to get even the best players to roleplay effectively). I hate manipulating dice rolls, but I don't want to seem arbitrarily unfair when resolving events.

There's also the improvisational skill needed. Imagine directing a play with a script that has no set plot, that has the outcomes of events change and fluctuate randomly, and in which you are playing the part of every character besides the lead actors. In tonight's session, I literally had to create and describe monsters, plot points, characters, and settings on the fly (with things spinning predictably out of control - one of the characters was one point away from death). It's only natural to feel "stage fright" or "performance anxiety" with such a tall order.

Some of this can be alleviated by thorough preparation, but once characters stray off your carefully manicured path, you will be forced to do a lot of work to keep the scenario believable while generating more stuff to do, and all this work will be done in real time. If everything goes well and the players have a good time, though, it doesn't matter how much or how little of the campaign's plot survived.

What's that they say about hobbies? That they're just jobs where you don't get paid? :-)