Off the Wagon

I've gone a couple of weeks without posting about RPGs, so I guess I can fall off the wagon now. Hell, I'm not even going to use LJ-cuts to spare the fainthearted. Watch me choke up your Friends pages with my geekiness! Moo ha ha ha haaa!

First, the following salvo from Ron Edwards, author of Sorcerer and Grand Moff Tarkin of the jargon-spouting indie gamers over at The Forge.

Why does role-playing culture not talk about its primary, defining activity? Oh, we talk about anticipating the experience, about buying and owning the games, and about playing them in the abstract, but rarely, if ever, about what we do while actually playing them—their content that we create. The literal act of role-playing is not a part of gamer culture, as we mainly discuss its trappings (the book, the system, industry gossip) rather than "what happened" during play.

Even when we do discuss the play itself, more often that not, the content is incoherent: "My guy did this, my guy did that," deep inhale, "and then he did this." Such talk may even turn into a litany of die rolls, punctuated by enthusiasm for what is, after all, a predictable outcome. ("And then, I got a 20!") If role-playing really were what it sounds like when described, it would be a worthless and pathetic thing.

This situation should change, if not in the overall culture, then at least in the experience of individuals. Role-playing is not perversion, we are not weird or fringe because we enjoy it, and frankly we should start behaving accordingly.

Comments, queries, cheers, jeers?

Unknown USA

We're supposed to be playing Unknown Armies on Monday, and I'm kinda stumped as to what is going to happen.

I've got piles of ideas: weird people to meet and places to go and plots to be embroiled in and so forth. Coming up with that stuff is easy and fun. It's logistics that drive me crazy. How do I herd the PCs to the place where the story kicks in? Will they investigate lead A or lead B? Will they be interested in subplot C or subplot D? Now, I don't think that "railroading" is always the crime that a lot of gamers say it is. My Adventure! game was a massive exercise in consensual railroading and that seemed entirely appropriate for the genre. But it is a lot of work, and I'm not all that interested in doing it week after week after week.

I have this idea, though. If, say, I want to run a session where the PCs are in rural Appalachia searching for the Book of Good Roads, or are being chased by an implacable bounty hunter across the New Mexican desert, why can't I just start the session by saying "You're in rural Appalachia, searching for the Book of Good Roads." Or "You're in the New Mexican desert. A bounty hunter is chasing you." If I was going to run a one-shot, that's what I'd do, and nobody would complain. Couldn't you run an extended campaign this way?

It sounds like I'm robbing the players of their autonomy, and to some extent I am, but all the herding takes place "off screen," between sessions. In a lot of ways the players end up with more "in game" autonomy, because I've already established the situation I want to explore. They now have absolute freedom in how they respond to it. No need to spend half the session asking "What do you want to do? Wouldn't you like to look into that intriguing-sounding McGuffin that NPC muttered about last session? [clatter of dice] You hear rumors it might be in Appalachia..." And of course, if the players say, "but we wanted to go to Minnesota!" then I can always start out the next session with, "You are in Minnesota."

Basically it's the difference between a TV show like 24, where each episode leads directly into the next one, and one like Samurai Jack, where we have no idea how much time has elapsed between epsisodes or even what order the stories come in. The latter probably leads to a more picaresque, episodic story structure, but then that was always part of my plan for this game.