When There Is A Critical Role To Play
This happened several months ago at my college, where the local club had organized a ‘first annual’ large game day on Saturday with demonstrations of board games and other activities that were free to attend for anyone attending the college.
I’d been tempted by a chance to play D&D for the first time in a one-off campaign, but at first it sounded like they were canceling some of these last-minute, only to then hear that the games were back on. To quote the GM of the table I finally got to join on the matter:
GM: “Okay Ladies, Gentlemen, not so gentle men, and any non-binary folks we have here tonight you probably already heard this by now, but just in case you haven’t our regularly scheduled GM’s could not make it because they were more interested in not triggering another global pandemic than more important things like guiding you all through wanton murder of chaotic evil species for fun and profit. I’ve been bullied into filling in for them due to reasons that may or may not involve someone who possesses compromising videos of me from that time I got dragged to a kegger. I know the rules, but I’ve only multi-classed to GM recently, so you are playing at your own risk; please don’t give up on D&D entirely if I’m only semi-competent. I promise if you all go easy on me because I forgot the obscure flying unicorn race you insisted on playing got a plus five to friendship roles I will only declare rocks fell and everyone died if you do something really really stupid after I asked you ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ or I just think it would be really funny. Sound like a deal?”
[GM] did seem to fumble a bit here or there, but he was quite open about it when he did, and he was friendly, happy to help new players like me with any rule we hadn’t quite mastered, and kept the game flowing with only a few minor hiccups.
My personal favorite was when he basically admitted to being terrible with coming up with names, and so the NPC elf he clearly just invented got named Bob. He then proceeded to give Bob bizarre titles and otherwise draw attention to how terrible his name was. There were also these two lines:
GM: “Okay, so our rules para-legal over here has pointed out I’m wrong and incompetent. However, I am also the god of this table, so I’m using my godlike power to rewind time by half a turn so that I always correctly declared that [correction for mistake he had made].”
GM: “That concludes our adventure, and miraculously, everyone survived. Well, other than [person he clearly knew prior to this game]. I’ve decided your character just had an aneurysm and suffered one D12 plus a million damage because the gods of this table are fickle and cruel.”
All things considered, I enjoyed myself. Thank you, Mr GM, for filling in so I could still play the game I’d been eager to try for a while.
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