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Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7610378" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>At the risk of further controversy, I'll take up where you left off.</p><p></p><p>One central feature of the D&D-as-wargame experience is that the player plays <em>a single figure</em>. This obviously creates some sort of invitation to performance ("playing out my guy"), protagonism etc. I wasn't playing in the mid-70s, but between reading around a bit and looking at some of the products that get published in the late 70s (eg RQ, C&S, Traveller) it's clear that some sort of move towards character and "story" was happening in some parts of the hobby.</p><p></p><p>Dragonlance seems as good a thing as any to point to for the mainstreaming of this idea, and I think by the time AD&D 2nd ed is published in the late 80s, followed by the White Wolf break-out, the connection between RPGing and character/story has become a pretty solid one.</p><p></p><p>The question of how to make RPGing work as "story" turned out to be a hard one to answer. I think that the idea of literary performance - the GM narrating his/her heart out, the players doing their best to perform their characters - is one (broadly described) path that's been taken up. A focus on situation and protagonism is a different path, and the one that I am putting forward in this thread.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7610378, member: 42582"] At the risk of further controversy, I'll take up where you left off. One central feature of the D&D-as-wargame experience is that the player plays [I]a single figure[/I]. This obviously creates some sort of invitation to performance ("playing out my guy"), protagonism etc. I wasn't playing in the mid-70s, but between reading around a bit and looking at some of the products that get published in the late 70s (eg RQ, C&S, Traveller) it's clear that some sort of move towards character and "story" was happening in some parts of the hobby. Dragonlance seems as good a thing as any to point to for the mainstreaming of this idea, and I think by the time AD&D 2nd ed is published in the late 80s, followed by the White Wolf break-out, the connection between RPGing and character/story has become a pretty solid one. The question of how to make RPGing work as "story" turned out to be a hard one to answer. I think that the idea of literary performance - the GM narrating his/her heart out, the players doing their best to perform their characters - is one (broadly described) path that's been taken up. A focus on situation and protagonism is a different path, and the one that I am putting forward in this thread. [/QUOTE]
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