My friends and I have recently picked up Only War, and are having a great time playing it. We are all completely new to roleplaying – not just Only War; this is our first RPG ever. Being the least lazy of the group, I am the GM. We are currently trying the rulebook adventure “Against the Savages”.
Combat has been fine, and conversations with important or obvious NPCs (commanding officer, quartermaster, the Brontian lieutenant after landing) were awkward initially but everyone has got into it. However, we are struggling a bit when it comes to out of combat and narrative.
As an example from the adventure: after the very first fight, the squad arrives at the Imperial Guard supply depot. It says the squad should be assigned duties and gets some down time to explore. But how do you ‘play’ this? How do you handle tasks like guard duty or routine cleaning/maintenance? How are you supposed to play out everyday activities like roll call, breakfast, going to chapel for prayers, etc, where nothing out of the ordinary happens? We felt a bit lost at this stage and didn’t know what to do, so we just went to mission briefing and set out (having been on the planet for barely a couple of hours).
This led to a similar problem – travelling. The adventure states a journey of 12 hours, with a navigation test every 5 hours to see if they get lost or have an encounter. It describes how the journey should be difficult and very tense. However, we weren’t sure how to flesh it out or create that tension; I basically ended up going “you drive for 5 hours through the jungle, navigation test time” until we reached the base. I didn’t know what I could do to make the journey exciting or tense, and the rest of the group didn’t know what they should be doing other than listening to me fail to describe their journey.
In addition, none of the players interacted in character other than to discuss what actions to take. This isn’t though lack of want, just lack of any experience roleplaying whatsoever. The players in our group are very imaginative and could create some amazing characters; just don’t know what to do.
I realise that these are pretty vague and broad questions, on how to do things that are probably as natural to some of you as speaking or breathing. But if anyone has any advice/suggestions, knows of any resources for absolute beginners (everything I found for GMing was for more experienced players), our group would be very grateful.
TLDR: Brand new GM, brand new players, how do we play the bits that aren’t shooting stuff?