Workshop #3 - Character Development

On Sunday, spontaneously as it happens, we had another Gamesmaster Workshop on IRC at the MagicStar network. It was once again a lot of fun, and really good practice. We ran the workshop for four participants and had a couple of lurkers who wanted to scoop the logs. The way I run it each participant gets a Trope, in this case a standard NPC, such as "The Black Knight", or the "Paladin of the King", or "The Whimsical Flute-Girl" (I tried to create mostly standard tropes, but threw in a few oddballs to illustrate the diversity that I think Worlds can benefit by). We have a bot in the Channel named Igor. He's great. What he does is randomly select a trope and then send it to the participant so that no one else can see which one is selected, including the moderator. This makes it more fun as we don't know what we're up against. Once Igor sends the trope then the participant gets 5 minutes to think about how they want to frame the scene and describe the character. When they're ready to start they type (Start) in the channel and then send off the three or four sentences to us. When they're finished they right (done) so we know it's our turn. We, the peers, act as a pseudo party and discuss what we think we should do. We spend a few minutes (at most) in deliberation and then decide to do xyz. The GM then gets 3 minutes to compose a response and types (start) and sends the description back to the channel, and then writes (done). The moderator then writes --- Critique ---!!! and we discuss. Comments, criticisms and suggestions go on for a about five minutes. We then move on to the next participant who acts as GM and do the same. We do this until each of the four participants gets a turn. For four of us it takes about an hour. And its a LOT of fun!

For more information regarding how the Workshops are run please read GM Workshops on IRC. More will be coming along as time and resources permit. We schedule these through the LRGPSW Meetup on Meetups.com.