Welcome to this year's TTRPG Club! I will be using this space for public-facing announcements and helpful links.

Housekeeping

This section's a little long as it's the first meeting, sorry.

Club Culture

First and foremost, before anything else is discussed, Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) are meant to be fun. I sponsor this club because it's fun for me, and I hope that it is also fun for you.

If something is going on that is not fun, it is not for us to "tough it out." We can and should have a discussion about what isn't fun and how it can be changed.

I have literally changed which game we were playing because members wanted certain things to make the sessions more fun and one set of rules did a better job with that than the other set.

Less drastically, changes in regards to plot points, character choices, settings, genres, and more are all things that are changeable. Nothing in a TTRPG is carved in stone, unless you're using some very fancy, expensive dice.

What's Needed

Every member on day one will be provided a folder for keeping notes/character sheets/etc. and a set of polyhedral dice. These should be brought to every meeting as I don't expect everyone to remember all details from one week to the next.

I have a standing policy that students can trade any of their starter dice for equivalent dice from the box I keep in the classroom for this exact purpose. (Currently it has 3 pounds of dice in there. I don't have a problem with dice hoarding, it's ONLY 3 pounds of dice.) These need to be EQUIVALENT trades, though. A student wanting a 20 sided die they found in the box will have to trade the 20 sided die in their starter set for it, not the 6 sided die.

What Isn't Needed

Anything that costs money.

TTRPGs can be a VERY expensive hobby, but they don't have to be. Every game that we will play has enough free material out there, released BY the publisher, for students to run their own games at home or wherever without needing to spend a dime.

This does not mean that everything is free, but just because I bought a shiny, hardcover rule book does not mean that a student has to do so.

Club Size

We have a smaller group than last year, but this is a good thing! Most TTRPG campaigns flow better with 3-5 members. The more there are, the longer each player has to wait before it's their turn to do something cool.

It's still my intention to invite more members at the end of the Semester, but at that point one or more of you may be running your own game during club time so that we can manage a larger membership.

(Last year I took a chance at allowing more members, and we had to split into smaller groups or no one would have had a chance to play much. I don't regret this, but prefer not to have someone run a game on day 1 without any prep.)

Meeting Days

When I pitched this year's club to Ms. Hogue and she approved it, I selected Mondays after school due to their being schedule conflicts with every other day during the week.

Since then, a change on the County level has led to our staff meetings being shifted to the 2nd Monday of each month. (Previously it had been Tuesdays.)

This is not a thing that can be fought by anyone in this building, so we will adapt. We have 2 options we can select:

We continue as planned and meet on Mondays, but our meetings will be canceled on the 2nd Monday of each month as I will be attending a staff meeting instead. This is the default option.
If all members (and parents) are able and willing to adjust, we could switch our meetings to Tuesdays. (Tuesdays had originally been off the table because of the staff meetings, but that's no longer an issue.)

The switch to Tuesdays WILL NOT HAPPEN unless I have confirmation from all families involved that this is acceptable. I would rather miss one club session per month than lose a member.

Session 1

Finally, we get to play something.

Lasers & Feelings

This section is super short on here, but this is where we'll be spending most of our time in the first meeting.

I'd like to hit the ground running, so our first session will involve a one-page game that requires very little prep time to make characters. This is not the best for longer campaigns, but for a single meeting - and an introductory one, at that - it's a good way to get a feel for the basic concepts of TTRPGs without getting bogged down in a system with more complex rules.

Next Game - Cypher System

Genre Pending

The neat thing about TTRPGs is that they can exist in any genre. Lasers & Feelings is Sci-fi, Dungeons & Dragons is Fantasy, but there's also Modern, Historical, Fairy tale, Post-Apocalyptic, and more that we can mess with, and the Cypher System rules are built for all of these.

You can even combine these to get some really fanciful stuff. Last year our first campaign was Sci-Fi with zombies.

I do not have a set plan for our first campaign, because I want to build it based on player input.

Character Creation

Character creation in most games is more involved than Lasers & Feelings, though Cypher System is easier than most.

Things I'd like players to work out, at least partially, include the following not-carved-in-stone items. We will likely not have time to go over all of these during the session, I'm just over-planning by including them.

Character Name
- This should not be YOUR name, as you are not your character.
Basic summary of the character
- This can be almost anything. Two years ago we had a steampunk goblin, a wizard wearing bunny ears, and a goldfish in power armor all in the same group. Last week I ran a game at home where one of the characters was a capybara, one was animated stone, one was a super fast human, and the last was a human who could punch through walls and summon lightning.
Character Descriptor
- There's lots of words that can describe characters. Picking one of the words below gives your character certain abilities in the game.
- Appealing, Beneficent, Brash, Calm, Charming, Clever, Creative, Empathetic, Exiled, Fast, Graceful, Guarded, Hardy, Honorable, Impulsive, Inquisitive, Intelligent, Intuitive, Jovial, Kind, Learned, Lucky, Mechanical, Mysterious, Mystical, Perceptive, Resilient, Risk-Taking, Rugged, Sharp-Eyed, Skeptical, Stealthy, Strong, Strong-Willed, Swift, Tough, Virtuous, Weird
Character Type
- There are 4 types of characters that can be played in Cypher System, but each of these is highly customizable.
  - Warrior (Examples: Fighters, Rogues, Thieves, Gimli, Legolas, Aragorn, soldiers, brawlers, Jedi/Sith, etc.)
  - Explorer (Examples: Artificers, Mechanics, pilots, scientists, Indiana Jones, etc.)
  - Adept (Examples: Wizards, sorcerers, clerics, druids, psychics, doctors, Jedi/Sith (again), etc.)
  - Speaker (Examples: Diplomats, bards, doctors (again), spies, professors, etc.)
Foci
- Foci add an additional description and set of abilities to your character. These include the following:
  - Absorbs Energy, Battles Robots, Builds Robots, Calculates the Incalculable, Commands Mental Powers, Conducts Weird Science, Dances With Dark Matter, Entertains, Fights With Panache, Focuses Mind Over Matter, Fuses Flesh and Steel, Fuses Mind and Machine, Hunts, Infiltrates, Interprets the Law, Is Idolized by Millions, Learns Quickly, Looks for Trouble, Loves The Void, Masters Defense, Masters Weaponry, Moves Like a Cat, Needs No Weapon, Never Says Die, Operates Undercover, Pilots Starcraft, Siphons Power, Solves Mysteries, Talks to Machines, Travels Through Time, Wears Power Armor, Works for a Living, Works the Back Alleys, Works the System, Would Rather Be Reading
Why the characters are all working together.
- This is a big deal. If you don't have a team that wants to work together, they can end up ... not working together. A little chaos in a game can be fun, but only one person working towards the end goal is usually not fun for anyone.