Welcome to Roadworthy! This is a chance to show off a Road Crew Judge and allow them to share their experience and wisdom. We provide these profiles to help provide insight into their personality and style, and maybe give up-and-coming Judges some advice on improving their game.
The Road Crew theme for 2019 is Road Trip! We want you to get out there and experience the world. Whether it be in real life or online, you can always explore unknown lands and make new friends. Who knows, maybe we’ll put you up on our website. Jump on into the Road Crew program for your chance!
Our latest Judge shares the same home town as Gen Con! From the hotbed of Indianapolis, IN comes Judge Kara Baker!
Roadworthy: Kara Baker!
What’s your name, where do you live (and game), and how would you describe yourself?
My name is Kara Baker, and I live in Indianapolis, In.
Before running Mutant Crawl Classics in public my GM experience had only been running a handful of Shadowrun games with friends at home. I have been running MCC for about a year.
I have anxiety and panic disorder, but my love of MCC helped me overcome that and run games for strangers!
How did you first discover DCC?
A friend of mine and also one of the most amazing GM I’ve ever met, Eric Bennett, ran a different RPG every week, and one week it was DCC and it was part of the Road Crew games that year. We played a funnel and it was so much fun! After that game we kept up with what Goodman Games was doing, and found MCC!
I’ve now run 18 MCC sessions in my history!
As of “right now,” how many Road Crew games have you run in this season?
I’m taking this year off from The Road Crew and spending time as a PC in DCC, to give my husband a chance to get his Judge’s badge.
But I still have run 5 games because of Gen Con and Whosyer Con!
What’s your favorite Road Crew game experience so far?
*wicked laugh* My TPK on the first day of GenCon.
That’s always fun when the PC are excited by it. That’s what I love about DCC/MCC it’s like a privilege to be killed off, especially when can give them stuff like con ribbons and dead stamps.
With my regular Road Crew gang, they are so many it’s hard to remember them all, but I think it’s the time one of my PCs survived the funnel with 3 characters left! One was killed off from radiation on the way back, but the other 2 survived and I told her one more had to die and she begged for his life. So we decided that he had been too traumatized by his adventure to every leave the village again and decided he didn’t want to be a seeker. That was a very fun bit of role-playing.
Tell us where you run your Road Crew games.
We play in the very lovely, very spacious game room of Imbibe Bar & Game Room inside the Fountain Square Theater at 1105 Shelby St Foutain Square, Indianapolis, IN.
We are on Facebook as Indianapolis Crawl Classics Road Crew if you want to find us.
What advice would you give to other Road Crew judges?
Be flexible, don’t be afraid to ad-lib, and let PCs change up the whole flow of the campaign if it means they are having fun. Don’t be to easy on them, but don’t let them get bored because you want to follow it to the letter. Let people name their pregens—you get some very creative and fun results and give a better connection to the character.
You were there with the whole Goodman Games tribe at GenCon 2019. What was that experience like?
It was very scary at first, but so wonderful. It was my first time running games at a big con and only my 2nd time running games at a con ever.
Everyone was super encouraging and supportive. It was a great experience, and I hope to be back next year.
You actually finished a game up that took place in the big Goodman Games room (127-128) during the award ceremony—how did you pull that off?
It was kinda my players idea as much as mine. It was a big module at the end of the con and we knew we need as much time as we could get. One of my players wrote down on a notecard what he wanted to do when the ceremony was over (that particular player was a walk-in and didn’t have much invested in the awards or raffle) and I just kinda got the idea that we could keep going and keep my PCs interested and move the game forward by writing down stuff and showing it to the players. Giving people interested in the ceremony and raffle time to participate in both.
So I just sort of wrote in my notebook things like, “Do you want to open that door?” “Roll a strength check,” and they would either write it down or show me with hands what the rolled or what they wanted to do next. It worked really well since the PCs were in an area of the map where they couldn’t hear each other speak anyway. Once the raffle started we would pause for the number just in case someone won something. It was really nice to be able to keep everyone going and still be apart of the awards and raffle.
Interested in learning about our other amazing Road Crew judges? Click here for all the Roadworthy profiles!
