Last Saturday's episode of Slaying Solomon was a real treat. While I am the series creator and usually run things, we regularly feature guest directors. This allows me the pleasure of playing Erik as a real PC, which is an absolute joy. There's just something wonderful about playing that lovable, stinky, muscle-bound slacker that couldn't keep a secret if the fate of the world depended on it.
Anyway, the last episode (entitled "The Ghosts of Christmas Future") was directed by Greg*, who normally plays Drew. It was a brilliant, high concept episode involving a very focused application of time travel. We started the episode in the middle of an oh-my-god-we're-going-to-die brawl in the we hours of Christmas Eve/Morning. An established NPC demon with time travel powers was available to facilitate a desperate evacuation to 12 hours prior, whereby we had to relive the previous day's events as our past selves and struggle with our future selves to find a way of winning the battle once we had caught up with real time.
I had been hoping to run an episode something like this for a while because it seemed like one of the few genre TV tropes that we hadn't used yet. But as I was still trying to figure out how to make it work, Greg beat me to the punch.
And it did prove to be a small wonder of organized chaos. Greg allowed us a great deal of narrative power to define how we actually ended up in that fight. A rule of time travel (for the episode if not the entire series) was that we absolutely could not change history. So when we declared that our future selves "remembered" something from the previous 12 hours, we miraculously managed to make it happen for real.
Of course, Erik instantly remembered the he had received a call from himself (thus kicking off the whole series of events). Erik can't keep a secret, even from himself. The conversation between future Erik (played by me) and past Erik (played by Greg) was one of the highlights of my RPG life.
Now the Greg has done this episode for Buffy, I can't imagine doing it again for this particular campaign. *But*, Oh My do I want to try something similar in the next game that I run! And it doesn't have to be time travel. This episode also served as a model for how to one of those "start the party in a cliffhanger and explain how they got there before the resolution" type games.
* By some strange coincidence, Greg has run most of our Christmas episodes. Weird.
1 comment:
I will say that I absolutely wouldn't have had the guts to do this if we hadn't been playing this game -- and these characters -- for the last ten years. I'm the master of doing sessions with very little preparation -- often just some NPC stats and one or two key scenes -- but even for me going into an episode with absolutely no idea what was going to happen beyond the opening combat was pretty scary. I've done some stupidly risky things GMing in this game ("The Book of Prophecy," the ending to "Imagine"), but I think this set a new bar. With Knights, for example, I wouldn't have dared try it. Not for another at least another five years, anyway.
The Christmas thing is kinda weird. Actually, the very first Buffy episode idea I had, way back in Season 1 (so, what, 2002?) was going to be a Christmas episode. It was going to be the Season 3 Christmas episode (I needed to let the characters get a little better developed to do what I wanted to do) and it was going to be called "The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come" and involve a time-traveling Slayer from the future. Then Joss ended the TV show the way he did and that ruined the idea I had for the dynamic between the future Slayer and Sam, which was the whole point. On the plus side, that left the Season 3 Christmas episode open for "The Greatest Tori Ever Told" and I finally got to use the title this season.
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