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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9458656" data-attributes="member: 71699">I've been mulling the proposal that RPG's biggest differences from other story-telling media is that there is no editing and authorship responsibilities are distributed among contributors. Each of those qualities could unpack into much that is salient to the sort of story-telling that happens in TTRPG.Regarding the first, I was thinking about the composite nature of the various ludic fictions and facts that make up roleplaying game play. For instance, a fictional map might be imagined and drawn, talked about and redrawn. A table might be designed and consulted, and its entries imagined. A character might be constructed in advance following written rules for doing so, and then imagined, talked about, and reimagined. A die might have faces with special meanings, that when rolled direct imagination in one rather than another direction. There are signifiers of many kinds: some are prepared before play, some of those that are prepared before play are edited, some are put forward only in play. Who may put forward which, when, is normally down to roles and rules that are to some extent agreed in advance.To get more concrete, were I to use Stonetop's The Wider World and Other Wonders, say the maps on the first few pages and the entry on Barrow Builders -- describing barrows when play moves to the Steplands, and on entering (probably a bad idea!) picturing tools of human sacrifice courting the Things Below -- all those designed and edited fictions are part of my play. The crucial skein of fiction that isn't edited is that which is contributed at the table, making use of those curated signifiers.There seems to be something more to those signfiers than say the individual words making up a story in a book. They're more like the collections of words formed into deliberate paragraphs describing something which may be exceptional, such as descriptions of Roshar in Sanderson's The Way of Kings. That is, as well as describing goings on, they can establish new norms relating to what will go on to be said.One way of looking at roleplaying game play is to see it as (solely) the unedited conversation itself. Another way is to look at it as a composite fiction made up of that conversation along with other elements, such as maps and tables. That could better explain the distinctiveness of the fictions woven from a given game text, such as how the incorporation of say a map or table into the conversation takes what is imagined one way rather than another. Even with this second perspective, the unedited conversation is crucial: it's the fiction created and experienced at the table.</blockquote>

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