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Roleplaying and Telling Stories

LinkWhat Players Really Want

I have an article up on Gamegrene. Thanks to Salvatore at Gamegrene and Jess for editing.

--Chris--7/16/2003--

 

StorytellingCatching Moonlight

Roleplaying games don't lend themselves to recording. You can video or audio tape them, but that only captures a very top down, storyteller only point of view. You could transcribe them, but then you miss the acting part of the experience. You can take notes on them and write up those notes as a novel, but then what you have is a novel, not a roleplaying game. Any method you use has to contend with the enourmous length of the medium. A year long game that meets weekly generates 200 hours of conversation... assuming you only have one conversation going on at a time.

Why would you even want to record a roleplaying game, I hear people asking. Most mundanely, each game has tips and techniques that simply can't be passed from group to group without a recording method. Imagine how hard it would be to learn to paint if you could only talk to other painters, never see their paintings. Recording roleplaying games would also encourage appreciation of the medium amoung non-gamers. Explaining your game to a non-participant would be as simple as giving them a recording. Heck, imagine your groups game hung on the wall of the roleplaying gallery.

I've got no good ideas for how to solve this problem, but I firmly belive that its a very important one. The development of the craft of roleplaying is being hindered by the lack of recordings, as is the development of roleplaying as an art. If you have insight into solving this problem I invite you to comment.

--Chris--7/14/2003--

 

AdministrativeNo More RSS

The short lived experiment known as manually created RSS feeds is too much of a pain to maintain, so I'm not maintaining it any more. Sorry! If anyone really cares e-mail me and I might change my mind.

--Chris--7/14/2003--

 

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Chris has been roleplaying since 1993. He became a Game Master starting from his very first game. It was Battletech, but he's gotten better since then. He especially enjoys historical games, and is interested in troupe style storytelling. He can be reach by e-mail at maastrictian[at]gloria-mundi.net .

Jess has been roleplaying since 1985, until the boys kicked her out. Fortunately for her current all-male troupe, she doesn't return the favor. She is interested in roleplaying games as a larger model for interactive narrative. She can be reached by e-mail at hammer[at]kleene-star.net .

The Authors have run one game with extensive material published on the web, Carpe Noctem, and are currently running another, Gloria Mundi. The current game will also be published as an entirely new historical setting for Vampire: the Masquerade.

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All roleplaying games mentioned on this page are trademarked by their owners. The original content on these pages, the posts and sidebars, is copyright 2003 by the authors.

Dates given on these pages are based on United States Eastern Standard Time