Playing the Baddies

[drskull]

One of the things I find very interesting while reading the various stories, and the FFC, is the fact that while the Blackmoor campaign had fully developed individualized characters and dungeon adventures, nevertheless, players still "played the baddies."

I'm really interested in the details of how that operated. For example, if the "Blackmoor Bunch" entered the castle dungeon and met orcs, did the Orc-King Player, (Frederik Funk, I believe) ,then step up and run the orc attack? What was Mr. Funk doing the rest of the time? If this battle was going on, what was the player for the Egg of Coot doing in the meantime? Did Dave figure out who was going to show up at a given session and then tailor the game to those players? Did he just hand out baddies to the non-regulars who happened to show up, or to people whose other 'Baddie" character wasn't involved in that particular game session?

[havard]

Good question.

In a lot of cases, I think it was more about random people showing up getting to run monsters the way a DM would normally do today. That is, they would not be proper characters as such.

Some sessions of Blackmoor were played as more of a strategy game / war game. In these cases, playing the bad guy leaders were as viable an option as controlling some of the good or neutral leaders.

-Havard

[aldarron]

That's a lot of questions. I'll try to get some more info for you, but one quick point to make is that there is more than one answer. In Pegasus 1 IIRC, Arneson talks about keeping players with dead characters in the game by letting them run the monsters for a while. In some cases, the bad guys would give instructions for their character hours or days before the actual game night. In other cases they played in a seperate room or played other monsters in between the action with their main character.