Dice Tales

Marie Brennan

Description

Some people play roleplaying-games for the challenge; others play them for the story.Award-winning fantasy author and freelance game writer Marie Brennan is unabashedly in the latter camp. In these essays she looks at tabletop and live-action RPGs from a narrative perspective, exploring the ways the framework of a game can generate and support (or undermine) your tale.Whether you are a player or a game master, DICE TALES offers insights on every facet of RPG storytelling, including:* generating characters with rich narrative potential* scaling plot as PCs become more powerful* managing the interaction between rules and roleplay* campaign planning at different stages* the social dynamics of collaborative creation* and more!

Sujets

• Hobbies
• Afición
• Role-playing
• Hobby
• Loisir

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611386844
• Langue: English

Extrait

Dice Tales
Marie Brennan


Published by Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
ISBN: 978-1-61138-684-4
Copyright © 2017 by Marie Brennan
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover design by Leah Cutter
Introduction
I make no secret of the fact that role-playing games are one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve played them; I’ve run games of my own; I’ve written fiction inspired by games I’ve played in or run; I’ve done freelance writing for a couple of RPG companies; I even studied RPGs in graduate school, before I left to write full time. I love them because narrative is my favorite toy to play with, and the medium of RPGs makes them a fascinatingly different approach to the concept.
Nor am I the only one: scratch the surface of any number of fantasy or SF writers and you’ll find a gamer underneath. That isn’t surprising, really. We write because we love stories, but it’s usually a solitary activity. RPGs give us a way to be social with our stories, to experiment with new ideas in a non-professional context, to play the narrative equivalent of speed chess.
My interest goes beyond the hobby level, though. When I went to graduate school in anthropology and folklore, my intent was somewhat vague: I wanted to study science fiction and fantasy fan culture. But I also got involved in a local Changeling: The Dreaming LARP, and soon my academic focus narrowed in on RPGs specifically—which turned out to be a great way to combine my two fields. The social aspect of RPGs fit very well into anthropology (looking at the subculture of the gaming world), while the narrative side fit very well into folklore (improvisational oral narratives). I wound up leaving school to write full-time before I finished my Ph.D., but later on I became a freelance writer for Legend of the Five Rings and Tiny Frontiers , adding a design perspective to my experience as a player, a GM, and an academic.
So this book is a melding of all those perspectives, along with that of a professional novelist and short-story writer. It began as a series of blog posts at Book View Café; this version contains seven new essays on variety of topics, as well as revisions of and expansions to the original posts. It focuses primarily on two types of RPGs: “tabletop” or “pen-and-paper” games, of which Dungeons and Dragons is a foundational example, where the players describe their characters’ actions; and “live-action” role-playing games or LARPs, where the players perform their characters’ actions in a manner more akin to improv theatre. (Video games are also interesting, but because they’re pre-coded, they offer a different experience than the one I’m exploring here.)
For players, I hope this book offers a way to deepen their enjoyment of their games. For GMs, I hope it offers tools to create a rich framework for storytelling. For game designers, I hope it offers perspective on how to facilitate certain kinds of play in the mechanics of the game.
And for all readers, I hope it offers food for thought.
So what is an RPG?
Before we get into any of the subtler aspects of game storytelling, we have to address the first, most basic question: what is an RPG?
It may seem inane to ask that question in a book whose audience is almost certainly made up of people already familiar with the concept. (Mind you, that doesn’t stop RPGs themselves from asking and then answering it, each in their own way: almost every core book I’ve ever picked up usually has a few paragraphs or a page explaining the concept to hypothetical newcomers who have picked the book up at random.) But as I’ve mentioned, I studied RPGs in an academic context, and so I know that it’s actually quite important to be clear about what you’re discussing before you get into the discussion itself, because laying out your definition amounts to showing your audience the lens you’ll be using to look at your subject, and the frame you’re placing around it. I’m not writing for academic purposes here, but I am drawing on my scholarly experience, so I’ll use that to put together a definition for the purpose of this book:
A role-playing game is a form of collaborative, improvisational storytelling mediated by rules.
It’s a pretty simple definition, and deliberately on the broad side. After all, there are a lot of games out there these days, and elements you may think of as standard for the genre (such as dice) don’t appear in all of them. But this definition distinguishes an RPG from, say, a novel written collaboratively, where there are no rules and the authors can go back to revise; or a computer game, where the player can make decisions, but only within a pre-scripted framework that defines what actions are and are not possible. And each element of the definition is a pointer toward a larger and more complex set of ideas, each of which we’ll explore as we go along.
I phrase my definition the way I do because I think the most distinctive element of RPGs as a genre is the way they bridge the gap between narrative and gameplay. In fact, one of the things that sometimes confuses newcomers is the ways in which RPGs aren’t precisely “games” as they’re used to thinking of such things. You can win a game of basketball or a game of chess…but you can’t “win” Dungeons and Dragons . Battles within the game, sure. You can solve the mystery or defeat the bad guy. But you aren’t “beating” an opponent or the game itself, because Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have an inherent, defined win condition the way more conventional games do.
On the other hand, it does have rules (sometimes also referred to as mechanics or the system; I’ll be using those terms interchangeably). As I see it, the purpose of the rules in an RPG is to create consensus . This is important in a collaborative story, as anybody who played Cops and Robbers as a kid can attest. “I shot you!” “No, you didn’t. I dodged.” “I shot you before you could dodge.” “Nuh-uh!” “Yuh-huh!” Rules in an RPG define what characters can and can’t do, and how likely they are to succeed at things that are within reach. As the words “how likely” suggest, this often involves an element of randomization, so that ability is defined in terms of probability rather than a binary yes/no. Dice are the most common method of randomization for RPGs—to the point where colorful dice with different numbers of sides are an iconic symbol of the genre—but they’re not the only option. For example, one popular system for live-action games uses rock-paper-scissors as its resolution mechanic. Other games have used cards. Some don’t use randomization at all; challenges are resolved entirely through negotiation among the participants. But even then, there’s usually a codified framework for how this should be done, rather than the designers just shrugging and saying “eh, work something out.” Without at least some kind of framework, you may have a method of collaborative storytelling, but (in my opinion) you don’t really have a role-playing game. And if you have rules but no story—if there aren’t characters whose roles the participants play in a meaningful narrative fashion—then again, you don’t have an RPG. The genre sits on a fence, sometimes tipping in one direction, sometimes the other…but the fence makes it what it is.
How does all of this work? That’s the first broad question for us to tackle, and the subject of the first section of this book.
Participants
The participants in an RPG often get divided into two categories. On the one hand you have the players; on the other hand, you have an individual most commonly referred to as the game master or GM. I say “often” because not every game is built around this division, and in fact some independent game designers have made a point of breaking down that distinction so that every person at the table is an equal participant. Most RPGs still operate on a player/GM model, though, so that’s what we’ll focus on in this discussion.
Each player in the standard model has their own character to play—their “player character” or PC. In some cases this character will be created for them, by the GM or the designer of the game, but more often players make their own PCs. This means pretty much everything it would in the case of a novel: deciding on the character’s name, what they look like, where they came from, what family they have, what their goals and aspirations are, whether they have any enemies, and so forth. Of course these things will change as the story goes along, but anything from before the game begins is a suitable target for the player’s creativity. In addition to this, the player also has to make a “character sheet” for their PC, which is a representation of their character’s skills and other qualities in terms that interface with the rules.
The PC is the primary frame through which the player interacts with the story. Once the game begins, I speak my character’s dialogue and describe her actions, or act them out if this is a LARP. I make decisions about what she will do. As she learns things, I try to piece together the information to figure out what’s going on in the plot. My PC is the only part of the story I truly control; everything else is out of my hands.
The game master has many different names, depending on which game you’re looking at. Dungeons and Dragons uses the term “dungeon master,” for obvious reasons; White Wolf’s World of Darkness games, with their greater emphasis on character and narrative, call this person the “Storyteller.” Nobilis , for idiosyncratic reasons having to do with the setting, prefers “Hollyhock God.” One of the early academic books on RPGs used the term “referee,” but I dislike that; I think it places too heavy an emphasis on the concept of rules calls, which are only a tiny fraction of what the GM does.
If each of the players is responsible for their character, the GM is responsible for…everything else. Any character in the story who isn’t a PC is an N