Starting With Your Questions
Written by Harry
May 24, 2008
The entire purpose of role-playing at Escaping Reality is to write an infinite interactive story by collaborating with other players. There is no finish, and there is no winner. There is no Holy Grail quest, nor great mystery to solve, nor one uber-antagonist to take down.
There is no end. This is a never-ending novel.
A storyteller sets the stage and choreographs the story. Your character is an actor with its part to play. Other players have their character, and each has his or her part to play. It’s much like a collaborative novel, with each person adding a section to the book.
To participate, you take on the personae of a character you create. You write his reactions, actions, thoughts and speech for all the situations your character faces based on what storytellers and other characters have created.
It’s completely impromptu and spontaneous – no one knows what’ll happen next, not even the storytellers moderating the scenes. A game couldn’t be any more exciting than that.
We have great posts lined up in the coming weeks, but we also want to hear from you. What do you want to learn? Do you have questions? Are there creative writing techniques you’d like to explore? Do you want more information on role-playing or using rpg as a creative writing class?
Or maybe you have an experience to share about collaborative novels, group author environments, forum boards with never-ending stories or other text-based play-by-post rpg games. We’d love to hear them, and this is the place to share!
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Though your preference seems to be for the Storyteller system, I would love to hear your thoughts on D&D 4th Edition when it comes out next week.
And on that note….what constitutes a good roleplaying game? That could be the topic for an entire post, heh.
Ben Overmyer’s last blog post..Lifestyle Reboot - Part One
I’m not really into D&D that much anymore, so the new 4th Edition hasn’t sparked my attention at all.
A good role-playing game to me is one that provides the players with the basic ideas as a jumping off point. I think I left D&D because far too many players and DMs got caught up in the stats and goodies.
I don’t like being tied down to numbers and dice rolling, all too often it becomes a massive number crunch instead of a game of developing a character and sticking with it.
That can be true, yeah. D&D is a very strategic game. However, I’ve had some marvelous roleplaying experiences with D&D….and, ironically, some very bloody, mindless hack-and-slash in Vampire.
For me, a good role-playing game is one which does two things well - A) offer lots of opportunities for all players (and the GM) to have fun, and B) capture the players’ imagination in a deep way. Both can be just as readily provided by a GM as by a role-playing system, but generally, the two are inseparable; the rules are only what the GM says they are, and the players only have as much fun as the GM is capable of facilitating.
Ben Overmyer’s last blog post..Lifestyle Reboot, Part Two
I realize this is first and foremost an endeavor for fun, and it truly is that! I’m having great fun, and I think a good deal of that is the immediate sense of community you have going on at ER.
The second reason I love the place is the many different examples of writing. It’s fascinating to see so many different styles come together in a surprisingly cohesive storyline. Some players are writers from the word go, and others well, not so much, but everyone is doing a superb job in my opinion.
Not being a writer, I would love more articles about using RPG as a creative writing learning process. I’m definitely the minority on that front, but I was surprised at the number of players who don’t think of themselves as writers. Fascinating, because they all fooled me!
Nicole’s last blog post..New Addictions and Getting Organized
It’s been so long since I’ve done this I may as well say I don’t know anything, anymore. I looked at that character sheet and didn’t have a clue as how to fill it out or what I should be creating. I’m definitely a milieu person. In fiction I read, if I don’t care about or like the world, then I don’t care about anyone in it.
I guess what I’m saying is I need to know what world (or what kind of world) I’m creating a character for. What year is it? Where do we live? What is the technology or magic? What is supernatural? I feel like I need some context.
Never mind. I guess I could go read the damn game boards, huh?
@Michael: Ditch the stats for now (we can help with those later) and just write up a good, solid background for your character.
The setting is present day, (right now May 31 2008) The area is Reckon Nevada, a fictional town on the east shore of Lake Tahoe. Modern day tech, no magic that you know of. Supernaturals are werewolves and vampires. Plus there’s a strong emphasis on the things that scare you most.
The World of Darkness takes the ordinary and makes it not so ordinary. Think M. Night Shyamalan or Stephen King.
@Nicole: We have plenty of more articles coming up. Expect them twice a week or so.
@ Michael: well, there is that…
[...] the comment section of our Starting With Your Questions Post, Ben Overmyer asked, “What constitutes a good role-playing game?” It’s a very [...]