Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska -- A game master, for role-playing games, controls the world around the players, setting the scene, the challenges and telling the players’ epic tale.
Tech. Sgt. Steven Lau, 301st Intelligence Squadron information assurance manager, is an experienced game master. He is an official volunteer for Paizo’s Pathfinder Society Organized Play, a worldwide tabletop role-playing campaign, and has created and joined gaming groups around the world for the sake of camaraderie.
Tabletop RPGs are conducted through discussion between the game master and players. Pathfinder Society has set the stage so everyone is on the same playing field and there is always a game any player can jump right in.
Organized play is a type of campaign that is shared with every member of the Pathfinder Society. Players experience the same story as every other through scenarios, one-sitting adventures, and modules – multi-sitting adventures throughout the season.
Each season has a theme for the adventures to follow and each player is an agent of the Pathfinder Society with a personal objective to accomplish within the story.
“I love organized play in particular [because] I meet all these new people of all different backgrounds and I do all this to build friendship and community,” Lau said.
In the military, he said he learned how to better communicate with a variety of people and give back to the community.
Lau started playing in 2008, shortly after the Pathfinder Society was created, and said he has always enjoyed being a game master because he loves telling stories. The first game he officially ran was in August of 2008 at a RPG convention in the United Kingdom when he was stationed in Germany. He has been traveling and playing ever since.
“I’ve traveled to Seattle, Indianapolis, Atlanta, the UK; Houston and Dallas a lot when I was in Texas; multiple conventions around the United States and a couple in Europe,” Lau said. “When I am traveling to other places, it is usually for RPG conventions.”
Lau’s last duty station was Joint Base San Antonio, a city that hadn’t established organized play yet. Once he created the group, it slowly grew into a large community.
“Once we built that community and we started acting like a community, we would do a lot of things, like charity events,” Lau said. “I would like to do the same thing here.”
They cooked food and provided numerous board games for the families and friends at the Joint Base San Antonio Fisher House. Throughout his time in San Antonio, his group also raised thousands of dollars for local children’s hospitals.
When Lau came to Alaska in January of this year, he noticed there were a few Pathfinder players, but no group. Five or six players would crop up, but eventually dissipate – so Lau created an organized play group in Anchorage.
Players meet biweekly at a local comic book store or library and play starting at noon. If it is a module, they continue it the following session. Because the organized play campaign is a string of adventures, missing a game doesn’t usually hinder the player’s experience.
“Since we’ve had Steven down here as a permanent presence he has done a lot of great work to build up the local area [and] build up the local community here,” said Brendon Green, Pathfinder Society Organized Play venture captain of Alaska. “He has done a lot of great work in the area. He has been building up Anchorage, which is an area that … was difficult to get the local player base energized while I was [living in Fairbanks, Alaska].”
Pathfinder Society has a rank system for its official volunteers. Green is in charge of the society in Alaska. Lau is a venture lieutenant, whose responsibility is Anchorage.
“You can either make your own character within the rules of Paizo’s organized play or use a pre-generated character to try out first, for almost all of the classes,” Lau said. “If you’re just starting out, we have premade characters for every [adventure], and you don’t have to play the same character for each one.”
The first role-playing games were on tabletop, or ‘pen-and-paper’ RPGs. Over the years, as technology advanced, more people started to play single or multi-player RPGs online.
Video games are very narrow scripted-narratives compared to open-world RPG board games, where the possibilities are endless, Green said. Players also have more control over their characters – creating extensive backstories and impacting the world around them the way they intend to.
“People can really disappear when playing video games and sure, you can play with a microphone online, but it’s not the same feel as having someone in the same room,” Green said. “This is one of the last activities you can get together with other people for a block of time and just play games.”
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