Someone at the table

When I was fourteen, my friend Annie's older brother ran a game at their kitchen table on Friday nights, and for some reason he let us play. Matt was nineteen, worked at a hardware store on Superior Street, and kept his notes in a three-ring binder with a broken ring that he held shut with a rubber band. There were five of us. We drank orange pop and ate whatever their mother had left in the oven, and for about three years it was the most important thing in my week.

I've been trying to work out why. The stories weren't remarkable. There was a cursed abbey, a great deal of rain, and a dragon he forgot about for most of a year. What I remember is that he was watching. In the first month I'd said, in passing, that my character couldn't swim. Months later we came to a river, and there was a rope across it, and a boat on the far bank with nobody in it, and I realized the whole evening had been built around one sentence I'd forgotten saying. He'd remembered it. He'd thought about what a river would mean to me, not to the table in general.

He did that with everyone. Annie wanted to be a hero and secretly wanted to be told she was one, so now and then an old woman in a village would tell her. A boy named Pete only ever wanted to open doors, so there were a great many doors. Matt changed his plans in the middle of a sentence when he saw on someone's face that they wanted something else. It wasn't magic. It was attention, kept up for four hours at a time, by someone who liked us.

I write games for a living now, and I wrote for tabletop for a few years before that, so I can tell you why most games don't feel like that kitchen. When I write a quest, I'm writing for a player I'll never meet, a year or two before they arrive. I have to guess. I write the version for the person who's kind and the version for the person who isn't, and the version for the person who wasn't listening, and I hope one of them fits. Branching dialogue is a very good guess. It isn't attention. A guess can be generous, even brilliant, and it's still made in advance, by someone who isn't in the room.

I've been thinking about Matt more this winter than I can really explain. He sells insurance in Hermantown now and, according to Annie, still has the binder.

Did anyone ever run a game for you, at a table or anywhere else, who noticed what you wanted before you'd said it?