A fun little divergence of a gamer story: I have mentioned previously that my first experience playing an RPG was West End Games Star Wars. How exactly that ended up being the game and how we got a several years old copy of the 2nd edition rules in an era before eBay is beyond me. But that was the game that the four of us settled on.
There was myself, enticed by Kohut and Dooley's nearby conversation, but I wasn't the only brand new gamer in our group. Sitting right behind me were two more that got the bug, James Bradley and Bart Clark. Both part of the football team and members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, so your stereotypical roleplayers. Our fourth player was Ian Bollinger, a quirky character in his own right and an occaisional player in that Kohut/Dooley game we were hearing about but not terribly experienced.
All in all, we were a pretty inexperienced gaming group, figuring the game out together. From the start we rotated GM's because we didn't know if that was normal or not. One of us had an idea so we played that.
Bart is probably the most natural GM I have ever seen. From the start of his gaming experience, even playing in rules-heavy simulationist games, Bart could sit down and run a game with no prep, just making up content as he went along. I can't vouch for the exact quality but I do know that on more than one occaision he just jumped in and ran a game with no notice. I think he just chose not to worry if he was getting the rules right, trusting the resident rules lawyer would keep him roughly on track.
And not caring about the rules too much led to a gaming moment that twenty years on I still cherish.
Bart in particular was a big fan of Force users but not necessarily Jedi. Those goody-two shoes were all about Control and Sense powers. Bart was into Alter. Specifically telekinesis (and later pyrokinesis but nothing you should worry about) and he had an idea.
Again, the exact kernel of this is lost to the vagaries of time but somehow our crew of The Grizzled Mongoose were playing football. Bart had reverse engineered football skills from our normal base stats like Strength and Blaster (classic gridiron attributes) and put together rules for plays and action. But to make the final game particularly tough we had to contend with a team of what felt like superheroes and a Wookie.
I need to back up just a moment and expalin the wild die in WEG Star Wars. In that game, players assemble a pool of d6's based on skills and attributes and roll all of them together plus one additional die, the wild die. On this die, if you rolled a 6, you added the result and rolled it again.
You probably see where this is going. At some point James' character was running with the ball. He was the strongest character but not in the same class as the Wookie running head on into him. The die pools for the tackle were assembled and rolled. And James' wild die hit a 6. Excellent, roll again.
Another 6. Nice! Roll again.
6! Sweet!!!
Rolling three sixes in a row on the same die I think qualifies as a rare event (C-3PO would tell us of course that there is a 1 in 216 chance that it would happen). I remeber all of us howling in excitement, Bart included as he declared that James trucked the Wookie and ran the ball in for a touchdown. Sure it was just random chance but it brings a grin to my face to this day.
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