The Witch Hunter adventure

Here's an anecdote from one of my past RPG sessions:

Several friends and I begin a Witch Hunter campaign. We have created our characters, the GM has accepted our backstories, everything seems to be in order. The adventure begins.

Our characters form a colourful team of scholars, members of secret societies, knights and magically gifted thugs. Our goal is to figure out what ancient and indescribable evil lurks in the streets of some sleepy Prussian town. We follow the trail of clues, stumbling upon one danger after another, at the same time trying to manoeuvre out of the way of the pesky Inquisition which is after us for some reason (well, for multiple reasons, each of them having a name and a backstory). Said Inquisition seems to have its people everywhere we turn and our party is forced to travel less taken (and more bumpy) roads in order to avoid them.

So, we ride on stolen horses which haul a stolen cart on which, covered with a blanket and restrained with a ton of thick chain is a kidnapped young man possessed by a demon. We would have one heck of a problem explaining that to the Inquisition, especially since the possessed man has been beaten up rather badly and there is a huge pentagram chalked on the bottom of the cart around his chained silhouette.

We are travelling cautiously down a road in the middle of a forest, when suddenly we come across a group of armed men. They look like thugs, but they are dressed in army uniforms. Some of us exchange knowing looks. The soldiers block our way and one of them slowly approaches us on his big, black horse.

"Good day, travellers. Where do you fare?"

"To [name of a bigger town, where we are hoping to find a priest who can exorcise our poor captive]."

"Ah... You may want to be careful, these tracks are dangerous. People seem to... disappear in these forests."

We play it cool, deciding not to mention our thrilling experience when something resembling a corpse nearly drowned one of us in the river earlier that day.

"Is that so?" says conversationally our scholar, who is otherwise a pretty useless member of the party, since so far we have not needed to beat anyone into unconsciousness with an ancient tome, or say anything nasty about their mother in Old Norse.

"Indeed. Say, what have you got on that cart?" Inquires the soldier, riding a little closer.

"Cabbages," replies our own thug, without missing a beat. He's holding a piece of straw in his teeth and eyeing the soldier with a dispassionate look of a person who does not particularly care whether his immediate future contains one more jaw broken by his iron knuckles.

"I see..." The soldier meets our thug's icy stare, then shifts his gaze to the friendly and helpful face of our scholar. "Well, then. Seeing as we only have your best interest at heart, wouldn't you, travellers, have any money to spare?"

Before any of us manages to reply, the scholar fumbles in his robes and produces a jingling sack. He fishes several shiny coins whose total worth probably exceeds the soldier's weekly income, and presents them to the man with a bright smile of someone who wouldn't know danger if it pissed in his cocoa.

All the players (and the GM) facepalm in unison.

Our scholar is incredibly surprised when the soldiers draw their swords and attack us. That is, he is belatedly surprised, because in his blissful obliviousness he neither notices, nor hears the warning shout about a fireball being shot by my character at the soldiers (with the poor bookworm standing in the way). As his partly scorched figure lays unconscious, covered in the dead soldiers' blood and intestines, I can't help but paraphrase a line from the (epic) Gamers II movie:

"So... How much experience do I get for the scholar?"

Kiddie games

My experience with roleplaying games dates back to the mid-1990s, when I was a shy, freckled little girl for whom made up stories were a way to find a gateway to fantastic new worlds, because the real one could not contain her rampant imagination.

As it often happens, it all began with books. The wonderful world of Narnia was the first one that had me reading under the covers with a flashlight in my hand, unwilling to put down the book even though my eyelids were heavy from sleepiness. Even during the lessons I would place a book in my lap and read while other kids were doing their schoolwork.

Needless to say, I wasn't a stellar student. If I ever received praise, it was for the stories I had created. They were naive, often tragic, and very, very unprofessionally constructed, but they were always written from the heart, adorned with illustrations which themselves were hilarious in their attempt to resemble anything passing for artwork.

After a while, creating complete stories for my (scarce) readers to enjoy was no longer enough for me. I wanted others to become part of my stories, and I wanted to be part of the stories myself. I had no idea that there was such a thing as roleplay; I didn't know there was more than one kind of dice, and that you could use them in storytelling. I hated numbers. To think that I would have to incorporate math into a story? As a plot point, perhaps, but not as mechanics (what the heck is "mechanics" anyway?). So, basically, my attempt at roleplaying looked something like that:

"Okay, so I play Susan, right? I can run very fast and swim pretty well, but I can't do acrobatics and I'm afraid of spiders."
"So... you're basically playing yourself?"
"Susan can do magicks, so obviously I'm not playing myself. Duh!"

These attempts were... cute. Often frustrating, especially when the other players refused to conform to my ideas, or when I refused to accept theirs. But they were fun, they were crazy, and they were incredibly creative.

My (then) best friend and I had even created a parallel world, inspired by Narnia, and filled with all kinds of original creatures with their own backstories, goals and connections to the characters we "played". And we "played" those characters 24/7, calling each other our alternate names and finding traces of the alternate world in our own dimension. There were clues left for us by our allies from the other world, there were traps set for us by our enemies, and the best thing was that the real world was completely oblivious to the marvellous, fascinating universe on the other side of the proverbial mirror. We were the only ones who knew! Thanks to our imagination, we were able to experience the best (and worst) of both worlds.

And now I am an adult (or so says my ID), but I know that there is still a lot of that little girl in me, and I hope she never grows up.