RPGaDay2024 Day 30 - Person You'd Like to Game With

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Questions like this are always fun; there are so many interpretations and answers and none of them are wrong. In this essay, I'm going to provide a few options, some serious and some not.

Henry Cavill

This is my celebrity pick. Sure, he's a hot star in both senses of the word; he's famous and has been in several fan-favorite shows. But from what I can tell, he's just doing all that to pay for his Warhammer Armies, and would rather spend an evening playing D&D than attending a Hollywood premiere. And the beauty of it is that while there's a lot of hype about his geekiness, that's just the press focusing on it, rather than him trying to promote it.

There are other celebrities that would be amazing: Vin Diesel or Joe Manganiello for that same "well-publicized but personally quiet love of the game", Stephen Colbert for his oft-proven brilliance, Kevin Smith because...duh. Jon Favreau is a master director, actor, and chef, so he must be amazing at D&D too. Finally, Patton Oswalt, because he's clearly just a career D&D player who also gets cast in things. There are many other celebrities that I really respect who love the game, but I'm going to stick with Henry Cavill because he seems so genuinely nice and geeky, when he's allowed to be.

The MCG Creative Team

In general, I love playing games with the people who created them. I get the opportunity to do this a fair amount when I'm playing new and indie games at GenCon. But having spent the last 10 or so years experiencing and supporting the Cypher System products as they've come out, I would especially love the chance to play an RPG with any of the Monte Cook Games crew.

I'd love to play in an Invisible Sun game run by Monte Cook. The game is so deep, surreal, multi-faceted, and open-ended that it's a joy run or play, with opportunities for weird, fun, dramatic storytelling. Since Monte was the primary creative force behind it, I'd love to see what the stories would look like when he was the one controlling the world.

I'd love to play anything that Shanna Germain ran. She has so much emotional depth, empathy, and personal connection in her writing that I can imagine leaving the table joyful or broken (or both) from one of her stories; as long as I had enough tissue on hand, I'd be up for the challenge.

Bruce Cordell and Sean K Reynolds are both incredible creators and designers, and I'd love to play a game with either of them. Of course, I'd love to have them run a game for me, but because I know them both, I'd have just as much fun if they were one of the players.

Honestly, when I look at the others on the MCG team, I'd be thrilled to play with any of them on either side of the table.

Mary Shelly

This is my historic pick. I had a couple other names but realized this was the best answer. She was the mother of science fiction; she built an incredible alternate world with a delicious uncanny valley feel. I'd love to see the world she'd come up with, as GM, or the character she'd come up with if she was playing. A bonus to having her at the gaming table is that she's from the era when in-person salons were popular. Also, her husband was something of an absent stoner, so she'd probably not have the schedule conflicts that interrupt so many games.

My Invisible Sun Campaigns

This is my "Getting the band back together" choice. I had two Invisible Sun campaigns that I was running, and I loved both of them. Unfortunately, life happened, and I had to put off running them. This has stretched long enough that restarting them would be hard. But the characters in those games were so real, and the stories were so wonderfully personal and weird that they would be worth the effort. As a bonus, I took some pretty good notes as to what was going on, so it might be as simple as updating the World Anvil pages for the sessions, to give people what they need to restart.

My final answer is a bit meta. I've had SO much fun over the years, running games at conventions. 95% of the time, I don't know anyone at the table, and most of the time they've never even played the game that I'm running. And yet, so many of those people have been completely engaged, and made the game memorable. They've been creative, jumped into the spirit of both the story and the system, and they've engaged with other characters on a personal level. Anybody who has made running a game such an awesome experience, I'd play with them again in a heartbeat--and look forward to all the people I haven't met yet, who will provide that same experience.

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