The most fun I’ve ever had playing a tabletop role-playing game was during a solo session for my friends Call of Cthulu campaign. While I can’t remember the name of the module the premise was simple: the party was all for their own reasons signing up for an expedition to the arctic, the Starkweather expedition, and at the time we were still in New York, preparing for the expedition. I was playing a man named Winters, a Pinkerton agent and general bastard pretending to be a humble, wheel-chair bound expert on arctic drilling. In the session prior the party had found out that a rival expedition was bound to leave on their ship before the Starkweather expedition could get going, possibly taking the glory of first arrival and of any discoveries found. Seeing a threat to his paycheck and an opportunity for mischief, Winters decided he would stop the opposing expedition in its tracks. A short amount of planning between my DM and I and we ended up in a Discord call, where I happened to have the funnest, most luck-fueled and ridiculous session of any TTRPG I’ve ever had.
To describe the events in full would take too long, and even in my mind the session blurs together in singular, remarkable events: scaling the side of the ship after tricking a night guard, breaking into the captain’s quarters, raiding the ship’s mess for bottles of alcohol which my character then proceeded to use to set fire to the ship’s communications. What brought the session to a whole other level of fun however was not just what my character was doing, but how he was doing it. Winters, a sort of juvenile James Bond archetype I suppose, strutted about the ship in complete confidence; whistling as he strolled down corridors, wearing the captain’s coat with bottles of whiskey in both hands. Winters is still one of my favorite characters I’ve ever made, and the reason is he was both a part and apart from the world. His story and background fit perfectly into the world my DM had concocted, but Winters constantly pushed against those bounds just slightly, with an amazing sort of confidence.
Looking back on these events, I suppose it is a perfect descriptor of why my top two playstyles are Fantasy and Expression. I love creating a fantastical character, someone who fits in the world around them but still isn’t an average joe, before putting said character at odds with the world and finding new and creative ways to get them out of the situations they work themselves into. I like my character to feel badass, but never unjustly, and I love for there to be a real element of danger, the idea that my character might die at any moment. As a result of this, I tend to lose interest when my character and the party as a whole loses agency, when we’re reduced to simply completing tasks or being cogs in a much larger machine. I don’t mind being minor, but I love for the minor to be awash with opportunities for self-expression.
Ian's Writing 