Role Playing
At high school I was always rather ashamed of liking video games. I had precisely one other friend who appreciated them as I did, with everyone else assuming they were a part of a medium destined to be assigned to the scrapheap of history as an attempt to keep the geek distracted from the real world.
Funny how that turned out.
But still. This has led to an ongoing feeling of inherent shame whenever I chose to indulge, or even discuss, my more nerdy habits. I do enjoy video games, but over the years this has become an interest in the industry and craft of the medium as well as a like of actually playing them. Finding someone else similarly invested in such things is a rare treat, but not as rare as it used to be.
Because of my inner shame of being a nerd, I had never considered the playing of tabletop RPGs until recently, and only then after various cultural touchpoints meant they became more socially acceptable. Stranger Things framed its entire first season around a D&D game, leading no doubt to a surge in sales and a boost in popularity for the Demogorgon.
They really are fun. I’ve played several campaigns, and have led 2, and until recently have never failed to entertain. They are social by definition, a shared dreamspace where characters interact guided by rules that are, if well executed, there to bring an element of uncertainty to actions that require your characters skills.
I enjoy the creation in these games, and the collaborative nature of it. A character you create in one session may reveal to you his/her hidden depths in the next purely through the playing of the game. The plot, or at least the course through which you move through the plot, may be completely different than anything you or the gamesmaster theorised could happen.
As a GM it is fascinating to see the players react to the ground rules you set, and the way they move through a basic skeleton of a plot, filling it out at every turn. It is infuriating, and fun, to see them mess with carefully laid plans and complete objectives in ways that are, of course, more beneficial to them, even if it means skipping the encounter you meticulously planned for them. It is fascinating having to come up with new stories and characters on the fly, to inhabit the worlds you create with interesting people for the characters to bounce off. Fascinating, and difficult.
I wish I’d gotten to them sooner. I wish I’d had that experience of storytelling and narrative design at an earlier age. As it is, now I’ve learned there a valuable resource here, I’m going to mine it for all its worth.
This is the seventh entry in my ongoing series of freewritten doodlings. The rational behind this is here: https://goo.gl/hi9Ub7
