Posts Tagged ‘rpg techniques’

A few days ago, I caught a post from John (jenskot) on Story Games that I found cute and clever.

Story Games – Sometimes RPGs are like food.

Cute and clever, yes, but I would never have thought to make something out of it. Earlier today, though, I was editing and fleshing out some of the posts I hope to publish on the Monkey this week, and it struck me as interesting that taken at face value, many of the things I post seem to be all over the map. Sometimes I imagine it seems like I’m even contradicting myself. And when I explore ideas from other folks I enjoy following, you’re sure to catch me saying that I agree with two or more opinions that seem incompatible. When it comes to espousing a particular ideology, you could easily accuse me of coming off like a waffler.

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Check this out! Mike makes many great points, and presents them with clarity. I especially liked his rationale for why it is worthwhile for us to make our own stories rather than just consume (and imitate) the stuff handed to us by the corporate “professionals”:

RPG design auteur Jonathan Walton adds some very nice bits of gaming technology to Rob Donoghue’s list. I’m compiling stuff like this here so that when I DO get around to discussing this with folks, we’ll have lots to draw from.

4 New, Useful Things « one thousand one.

I am so buried under work this weekend that I can’t keep my head straight. But a glance at this post makes me REALLY want to talk about the stuff that Rob is highlighting here:

Robert Donoghue – 10 Useful Pieces of Gaming Technology.

This post has all my pistons firing. Inspiratius Maximus. Seriously. I don’t know when, I don’t know how – I’d hope that maybe on Canon Puncture we could hit this thing around a bit but I’d also love to see it be even bigger and broader than CP – but somewhen, somehow, I really would like to have the conversation. I mean verbally.

Holy Crap, I can’t believe I helped make this happen:

http://dmperez.com/2007/06/01/story-now-an-odyssey/

Me, this blog, a bunch of great comments from several of you on my “Ronnie… and Me” post from a few days ago, and I helped someone do in a week what it took me practically a year to do.

Instead of this making me feel all “Dark-Veiny-Willow” powerful, it just humbles me, and makes me wanna do it more, for more people. And to remain open to continuing to learn even more FROM others myself.

Wow, community, baby! Woo-Hoo!

It’s been nearly two years now since I first encountered the theories of Ron Edwards on The Forge. I’ve been wrangling with it all that time, slowly and gradually coming to appreciate the great game designs and discussions and intellectual challenges that have been born out of those theories, and slowly finding that they have the potential to help me grow in the style play that I really long for, but still essentially resenting Ron just a bit for some of the things that I THOUGHT he was trying to say about the dysfunction of most traditional games.

Well, today, May 24th, 2007, will now have to be considered some sort of Misfit Monkey holiday.

Today, for the first time, during an interview on the Theory from the Closet podcast (episode 8), I listened to Ron Edwards and actually understood him and –gulp– pretty much agreed with him.

Holy crap, I think I’m starting to get it. I understand why he was pissed – particularly at White Wolf – and said that stuff about brain damage. And I finally understand (also partially thanks to Paul Tevis) what the meaningful distinction is between “Story Before”, “Story After”, and “Story Now.”

If you care to dig deeper into what I’m getting at, you’ll get a much better result by listening to the Theory from the Closet interview (or listening to Paul Tevis’ latest HGWT: A Few Games More episode) than you’ll ever get from reading anything I am currently capable of writing. So I encourage that big time, if this subject interests you at all.

But the gist of it is, Ron was pissed at early White Wolf games like 1st ed. Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf specifically because they promised a new thing. They promised that their games would result in stories – stories that could be watched by an audience and the audience would be entertained – stories that could be considered LITERATURE. Stories that were epic and interactive and rich. They made this unprecedented promise, attracting a whole bunch of people who wanted to roleplay just exactly that sort of way, and then, in terms of system and mechanics, failed to deliver on the promise, because they failed to actually build a system that rewarded “story now” play. They brought about a nice new twist to “story before” play, where the GM makes up a significant portion of the “story” before the players even become involved, but did nothing to foster or reward the true interactive, collaborative type of in-game shared story development that “story now” calls for.

So in a nutshell, White Wolf promised “Story Now” and failed to deliver. And the most unfortunate part of that is, the result was that instead of thinking that it was the Storyteller System’s fault, many folks thought it was their own fault. Every time someone would play Vampire and it would fail to make them a grand collaborator in epic literature, people would say, “I must be doing it wrong, I need to keep trying. I need to buy more splat books and keep going with this.”

Anyhow, I don’t want to belabor this, if you want more depth I really ask you to go to the sources I’ve mentioned. My main point is, today, this time, Ron Edwards made sense to me. He articulated clearly and he did not offend my entire gaming experience. And after two years of being pretty resentful of him, today I grokked him.

And that feels kinda weird. I need to go lie down. Except I can’t, because I actually want to go play Little People pirates with Liam.

Originally published at Musings of a Misfit Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Ah, roleplaying games. There are all kinds of camps, all kinds of styles, all kinds of approaches, and of course all kinds of rules systems. And you’ve got people who put up walls and people who won’t open their minds, defending their preferences and all too often ripping on other camps, styles, and systems.

Whatever. I want to talk about roleplaying. I want to share and learn and communicate about it and I don’t want it to degenerate into who’s defending some camp and who’s ripping on another camp.

There has to be common ground. There has to be a place where we can all see the value of being open to anything that might make play more fun.

That’s the bottom line. I’m not the first person to recognize that, and don’t claim to be – I’m just thinking about it a lot lately and it just seems so simple. We have a few hours to play on any given night. In practically every case, those four hours are spent with little moments of cool-ass brilliant roleplaying fun surrounded by long stretches of sucky crunch-mongering and play-halting meandering. I want to talk about ways to increase the amount of time spent having fun and decrease the amount of time that sucks.

Some people think it ain’t broke and we don’t need to fix it. But I say, the only time that becomes true is if you’re having four solid hours of roleplaying fun in a four hour session, every time you get together. Short of that, there are things to talk about.

So, I want to talk about it.