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Short Remarks: The Drugging of a Player Character

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

I was reminded of this incident when I read a discussion about player knowledge versus player character knowledge. I am firmly of the opinion that roleplaying is most enjoyable when those are identical as much as possible – maybe with the exception of the Host describing to her players a few choice cutaway scenes which help build a sense for the greater story that is going on, but are unlikely to influence their characters’ actions.

Giving players access to all of their characters’ knowledge is of course not very difficult, at least when there is no need to go into too much detail, and when that knowledge can be given to them on a need-to-know-basis instead of all having to be available upfront. (There are a few more complications, but I must save discussing those for another blog entry.)

Denying players all knowledge which their characters do not have is, on the other hand, obviously completely impossible. To ignore general 21st-century knowledge or specific modern education should not be too much of a challenge for mature players in most circumstances (yes, there is again a lot more to be said about this in a possible future entry), but it is downright annoying for both Host and players if the latter have to pretend to not know about plot elements which they for some reason learned about. (It is of course even more annoying if the players simply use that knowledge!) Again – and again with the reminder that there is more to say about it – this is usually not an issue for mature players if neither Host nor players chat about stuff which isn’t common knowledge, pass a few secret notes if it seems necessary, and maybe resolve certain scenes in short private sessions; but there are some situations where the Host needs to get a little more creative to preserve the unity of player knowledge and player character knowledge about the plot.

This entry is about such a situation. Continue reading “Short Remarks: The Drugging of a Player Character”

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Rearranging the Five Find-Outers (and Dog) for a Roleplaying Chronicle

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

This week, I’ve been binge-listening to the audiobooks of Enid Blyton‘s The Five Find-Outers and Dog series. The main reason for this was that I wanted to listen to something while I was doing some rather tedious, but not exactly involved work on my computer; preferrably to a story read in English, which is a language I am still not quite as comfortable in as I’d wish. Out of nostalgia, I chose the first book of that series, and then got carried away with it. Now, as I mentioned in this entry on my more personal blog FINAL DESTINATION, Blyton’s books certainly have a good number of flaws, and that series is no exception, but it is overall more charming than other works of her I know, including her possibly most popular Famous Five series; and at least some of those books qualify as reasonably good detective fiction for pre-teens.

One thing that disappointed me, though, is that an originally promising setup of characters speedily devolves from „Five Find-Outers and Dog“ towards „The incredible genius Frederick Trotteville, his dog, and a few completely irrelevant sidekicks“. Continue reading “Rearranging the Five Find-Outers (and Dog) for a Roleplaying Chronicle”

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Short Remarks: Musings Triggered by Vague Memories of an Exemplary Con Game

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

(Of course, this is about a session at a roleplaying convention; not about that other kind of con game, which thimbleriggers and „conservative“ politicians excel in.)

This happened a long time ago: I honestly cannot pin it down more precisely than saying it was either in the 90s or the early 00s, and I remember very little of it – but that little I consider significant. Continue reading “Short Remarks: Musings Triggered by Vague Memories of an Exemplary Con Game”

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An Urban Legend about the Design of Original D&D, and how I Fell for it and almost Contributed to its Spread

I write this as penance. On twitter, I said: I guess I should type 100 times “I shall not believe, and even less propagate any story I read on twitter without doing some basic fact-checking and thinking first, no matter how much I like the idea of it being true.” However, it is obviously more useful to explain things in a blog entry instead, and I will do that now.

You will not have noticed it (in fact, you couldn’t, if the click statistics I get shown for IMAGINATION are correct), but for a short while, my entry 1974 in Roleplaying – which, evidently, deals with original Dungeons & Dragons exclusively – featured the following addendum: Continue reading “An Urban Legend about the Design of Original D&D, and how I Fell for it and almost Contributed to its Spread”

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Browsing Lex Arcana by Quality Games

This is a new kind of entry I’m experimenting with on IMAGINATION, another effort at writing more regularly by being briefer. While I list it it in the Reviews category on my index page, it is not really a review as I understand it; just a first impression after browsing a book.

The 2019 roleplaying game Lex Arcana by Quality Games is a 310-pages book which impresses me a lot both by its concept and its presentation. Set in „a Roman Empire which did not fall“, and introducing thematically fitting supernatural elements to that history-based setting, it really intrigues me, since I’m a sucker for the alternate history / mythic history genre.

I consider its visual presentation outstanding. Continue reading “Browsing Lex Arcana by Quality Games”

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Short Remarks: Defining Immersion by Introducing the Roleplaying Tetrahedron

(Note: In this entry, I have both introduced new terminology and redefined existing terms to express my views.)

This blog entry by Jon Peterson reminded me of how often I use the term „immersion“ on my blog without having explained in detail what I mean by it so far. True, I have described my favourite style of roleplaying several times – for example in my inaugural IMAGINATION entry The Formative Years of a Story Gamer, or in my latest entry, Of Railroads, Sandboxes, and the Roleplaying Happening in between – but I have not yet tried a definition from a theoretical angle. So here goes:

I consider roleplaying to possess four fundamental aspects, coming from different approaches to this pastime stressing those in varying amounts. I picture the extremes of those approaches as the vertices of a tetrahedron comprising the whole spectrum of roleplaying, with no dominating antinomy between any two of them. These extremes get into the way of immersion in various ways, which is why I reject them, but all of them have proponents who enjoy those styles of play (although they will possibly disagree with my phrasing).

The four fundamental aspects are:

1. Identification. This is about how much you „are“ your character. If taken to its extreme, it results in narcissist roleplaying, focussed on the players acting out power fantasies.

2. Challenge. This is about finding solutions to problems. If taken to its extreme, it results in gamist roleplaying, with players exploiting rules for tactical advantage in lieu of following common sense.

3. Believability. This is about how much the game world and what happens in it makes sense. If taken to its extreme, it results in simulationist roleplaying, being preoccupied with overcomplex rules procedures depicting events in great detail, aiming for ultimate realism.

4. Storytelling. This is about creating a satisfying narrative. If taken to its extreme, it results in narrativist roleplaying, codifying the act of collaborative storytelling, and exchanging the player perspective of a character in the story with that of one of its co-authors.

In my opinion, roleplaying is most enjoyable when it blends the fundamental aspects of these approaches while avoiding their extremes, and therefore immersive roleplaying sits at the centre of the roleplaying tetrahedron. It combines identification, challenge, believability and storytelling to create an immersive sensation for its players, enabling them to experience and influence an interactive, captivating story as one of its characters.

Immersion is about being in a story.

(to the IMAGINATION index page)

 

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Of Railroads, Sandboxes, and the Roleplaying Happening in between

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

This is another post which I wanted to write for a very long time (I have literally dozens of those…) It has been bumped up in my priority list recently, though, because of this blog entry by Xathrodox86. (But then again, my blogging for IMAGINATION went on a hiatus just when I was working on this, and later I got stuck, and then distracted by another blog entry, and distracted from that distraction by a third… so „recently“ is not at all true anymore.) I already wrote a lot on this topic in the comments to that blog entry, but unfortunately I could not directly reply at that time for technical reasons, so Xath had to copy and paste my words from direct messages, making them difficult to identify, and slightly garbling their formatting. I reiterate and refine a lot of what I said there here, but those replies also included a couple additional ideas and opinions, so if you happen to be interested in what I wrote there, I give you a somewhat cleared up version of it behind this link.

Ends of a spectrum, not categories

I have been unhappy for a long time with the inconsistent use of the terms „railroad“ and „sandbox“ in the roleplaying community, and especially if that use had been in conjunction with the connotations „railroad=bad“ and „sandbox=good“. I’m afraid that this terminology has been successfully hijacked by fanatics from the anti-storytelling camp. I hope I can clear up some of the misconceptions which have developed (and partly consciously introduced, I suspect) around it. Continue reading “Of Railroads, Sandboxes, and the Roleplaying Happening in between”

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The Legacy of Dungeons & Dragons

I saw a tweet mentioning the „legacy“ of Dungeons & Dragons, and raising the question if it were worth preserving. I got the impression, though, that the author’s concerns were a lot more specific, although that didn’t stop them from creating a wider context by addressing several problematic aspects of the game and its history (illustrated by a few especially appalling Gygax quotes), which I feel do not necessarily belong together, at the same time.

So, I wondered: What exactly is D&D’s legacy? I did some brainstorming and came up with the following basic aspects of it, ordered roughly by the time I believe they appeared: Continue reading “The Legacy of Dungeons & Dragons”

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Short Remarks: Why I no longer Host RPG Sessions in the â€žPresent“

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

This is not really a very recent decision of mine, but it has now become definite enough that I feel I should address it in a blog post. Actually, I thought I would discuss it in my series Eras to Roleplay in once I got to the 21st century there, but I realized that this is still going to take a very long time – on one hand, I have been doing way too much research for it already to keep the number and length of its further entries low or short enough for its end to be in sight; and on the other hand, I got (as with all of my larger projects) sidetracked and turned my attention to other things.

So, I am no longer going to Host roleplaying sessions in the more or less real world after the year 2000, unless they are set in a clearly alternate past/present/future. The reasons for this are threefold: Continue reading “Short Remarks: Why I no longer Host RPG Sessions in the â€žPresent“”

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Short Remarks: Preparing PCs for Convention Games

(In this text and others, I use the term „Host“ for the position that is widely known as GM (game master or game moderator), and refer to any unspecified Host as she/her, obviously without implying that a Host is always female. In the same way, I will always refer to unspecified players as he/him for clarity. Generic examples for player characters (PCs) and Host characters (HCs) follow this pattern, too. For a longer explanation, please see this entry.)

This is a spinoff of Short Remarks: The Ideal Number of Players. It started out as a retroactively added aside to that entry, but gained enough length that it merited its own article instead. A disclaimer: I have never hosted an online roleplaying session or participated in one, nor do I intend to ever do so, so all my advice is geared towards „real life“, face-to-face play. Yes, I hope this will be possible again in the not-too-far future…

When preparing a session for a situation like a convention, where you have little control over the number of players who will show up for your game, it is obviously a great idea to choose a scenario which lends itself to being played both by rather few or by quite many players. It is rare, though, that I come up with something I would consider enjoyable for either the minimum (2) or the maximum (6) player number I am on principle willing to host for.

Taking into account the Host/player ratio I expect (but also the total available playing time – in general, the less time I have, the fewer players I prefer), I will usually either go for 2-4 or 3-5 (6 in a pinch) players; with the former approach optimized for 3 players, and focussing on engaging the PCs in intense roleplay; and the latter optimized for 4 or maybe 5 players; focussing on a mix of internal group dynamics and rapid action scenes, and possibly adding a prepared PC or two as HCs to facilitate this.

I will almost always offer a selection of pregenerated PCs in such cases, because I believe that the scant playing time there is better spent playing than creating PCs (and certainly better than having to explain character creation rules!); and because I feel that a single game session isn’t nearly enough to explore and enjoy the idiosyncrasies of a character worth the effort put by his player into his creation, even if it wasn’t already shortened by that very process. To increase the chances that every player will find a PC he finds enjoyable, I will always offer a couple more PCs to select from than will actually get used. As a rule of thumb, I suggest twice as many PCs as the optimal number, and at least two more than the maximum. Don’t overdo it, though – you don’t want the presentation of too many PC concepts eating into your playing time, and you also need to be aware of the danger of analysis paralysis when you confront your players with too many enticing options.

It may be a good idea to categorize your pregens into essential, main, and support PCs: Continue reading “Short Remarks: Preparing PCs for Convention Games”

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