On titles and choices: Two Roads

As shown one entry before, our next map will be on traveling overland via roadways: dangerous, rutted, lonely, busy, notorious, etc. (whatever the GM’s need)… we’ll place two of them in the terrain, one down at the floodplain, and another one up on the terrace. This we knew from the beginning, hence our working title was “Two Roads”. Since then, we struggle for a less prosaic title…

Problem is, I fell in love with the two-roads-approach at once, because of the (yes, I know, very frequently quoted) poem by Robert Frost (1916): 

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 (…) [I skip the two stanzas in the middle]

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

I always loved the last two sentences, being so full of verve and meaning! Surely, an ode to non-conformism! I never read the complete poem before, actually. Now found it on Wiki, together with a discussion on its interpretation. It seems that Frost, rather ironically, wanted to express that we often rationalize our decisions in hindsight; but that there would not have been so much difference if we had taken “the other road”.

Funny thing is: That’s exactly the feeling that creeps up on us gamers when we’re getting ambushed or encounter otherwise interesting times on the roads we let our PCs take. And we never can be sure what would have happened elsewhere. After all, the GM has prepared the ambush/encounter/treasure in advance and is now eagerly waiting to make it happen.

In case of Heiko’s campaign, due to a painfully low session frequency, but even more due to our tendency to dally on the way, “role-playing our character!!”, this can take quite a time. Once he had a mind-blowing encounter in a tavern ready for us for more than a year, location, music and all. When we finally arrived in the PC’s hometown, hoping to “keep a low profile” in his family’s townhouse, he only needed this one sentence (“There’s a problem with the kitchen, Sir”), counting on us role-playing our characters (mostly their flaws, in that case) to get us to said tavern – and an hour later we had our minds blown…at last!

Still, there’s this feeling of fatedness or predestination, and we might want to ask: “If we had taken the other road/door/coach/exit, would we have been saved/killed/bored?” Of course, the cunning GM never would answer that one:)