It started as a simple fantasy-RPG play experiment: Could I mash-up a bunch of genre references, a handful of game accessories, an undercooked experimental game mechanic, and a few weekday hours into some kind of crazy, bawdy crime story?
It turned into a collaborative storytelling farce, well balanced (quite by chance) as a device for facilitating unreliable narrators in an otherwise old-school fantasy-RPG adventure romp.
Here’s what we did:
I was talking with a traditional RPG-designer friend of mine who was extolling the virtues of the RPG as a storytelling device. In many ways, in talking to me, he was preaching to the choir.
Every now and again, here at GPW, we’ll feature articles by guest writers, sharing their thoughts on games, stories, and anything in between. This is our first guest-written article. What do you think?He told the story of a friend of his who’d never played an RPG before and what happened when an NPC betrayed her character, literally stabbing her in the back. The player said, “I felt like I had been stabbed!”
Certainly, for her, this was a revelatory experience. She didn’t expect to have that kind of experience while playing a game, and this is all well and good.
My friend said, “That is the kind of thing RPGs can do that movies cannot do!”
This was where we parted company.
Paizo’s GameMastery-brand item cards are a great accessory. They used to come in boosters, which are fun for random treasure hoards.Now and again, we said we’d throw some praise around to products we personally dig. Considering the number of them I’ve got floating around the house, accumulating after every Gen Con, I should really drop a link to Paizo’s GameMastery collection of products.
Specifically, I want to draw some more attention to the underwhelmingly named but otherwise excellent Item Cards. I’ve used these things like crazy, and I haven’t played D&D in something like 20 months. Any time I get a chance to run a short fantasy-RPG campaign, though, (lately using systems like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, or the SAGA System I loved, or a heavily retrofitted version of the Coda-System edition of Lord of the Rings, always with my own settings, ’cause I’m an egomaniac), I pull out a stack of these cards to use. Each one is pretty, thanks to Vincent Dutrait and the cunning art department at Paizo.
Besides being pretty, these allow for nice and easy MMO-style equipment-lugging mechanics and just enough “grind simulation” (uh, in the MMO sense) to make the acquisition of items feel like winning on a slot machine. (Every monster in WoW is a slot machine, don’t you know.) Not into that kind of tomfoolery? Me neither, sometimes. So, again, you can just fall back on the pretty.
Today on his LiveJournal, Robin Laws brings his superior perception to bear in pointing out a unique improvement that the tabletop RPG brings to the typically tiresome, and rarely dramatic, mystery-story denouement. Do check it out.
You’ve read the same kinds of opinions that I have regarding RPGs, especially D&D, versus MMORPGs. Specifically, I’m thinking about the opinions that say, “If all I wanted to do was walk a bunch of miniature figures through a dungeon, fighting and looting, I’d rather do it with a videogame and not worry about knowing all those rules. Let the computer do it.”
It’s a fair point, and you can imagine that I like it because it says people want to play paper RPGs because they get a degree of freedom out of them that CRPGs can’t match. (Yet.) That’s great. I want people to keep being attracted to RPGs, and the best way to do that is to attract attention to the thing do well and other games do not, as several commentators have said in the last couple of days.
But one of those things that RPGs should do well, they often don’t.
