Notes on a Game (Part four of a game that failed)
Now I had to break it to my players that I was going to be using Openquest rpg instead of RQ2 Classic. I lost one player to a switch in his jobs hours. The other two decided to stay and try the game out. In conversation with one of the players I admitted that I had some misgivings about the switch away from RQ2 Classic. We discussed possible ways to handle RQ2 Classic, that would please us all (maybe dropping to three Players). Shockingly my player had a solution that has been eluding me with RQ2 Classic character sheets, a Roll20 sheet. I was swayed back to the Dark side! We would do RQ2 Classic! I expected my other player to give up in frustration, but he also decided to stick with the game. We began looking again for a third player. I reset all the Deleted looking for players Posts. I decided to fork out dough to create character sheets on Roll20 by upping my subscription level. We were able to meet for Character roll up for the new game on Roll20. One player decided to be an Orlanthi Sartarite, he rolled a peasant background, and he was able to get into the Mercenaries for previous experience. We were able to mostly finish his character in about 30-45 minutes. My second player decided he was an Esrolian, and I let him use the Cult of Lodril from the New Cults books. He rolled his background and got Poor Noble (this is awesome in RQ2). He also decided to go Mercenary for previous experience. He had so much money he spent a while deciding what to buy. The character generation process went quite smoothly. I decided a few days later to place an ad on the RQ sub-reddit looking for players, and I was able to find two more guys who seemed cool. Lessons learned by me as a GM: One, be as honest with your problems with your players as you can (they might surprise you); Two, if you have a little spare cash open your wallet if you need game supplies (my Roll20 subscription); Three, be willing to put time and effort into learning new skills (for me this was learning Roll20); Four, divest your players of funds, their PC's need reasons to adventure; Five, finding new players can take time and a lot of advertising; Six, when you're using an older game (RQ2 was published in 1979) jump in and embrace all the crunch of it for a truly wild experience.