Krug
Newshound
http://www.hicksville.co.nz/PerfectPlanet.htm
Quite intriguing...
Quite intriguing...
THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME
Role-playing games (or RPGs) grew out of table-top war-gaming at the end of the 1960s. Dave Wesley, a war-gamer in Minneapolis-St. Paul, was inspired by an old combat-simulation game created in the 1880s used to train army officers, which used an objective referee to adjudicate between opposing players. Wesley decided to try this out for himself and so he devised and refereed a Napoleonic minatures session set in a fictional German town called Braunstein, which stood between two opposing armies:
Some players represented advance elements of the armies just entering the town, and others represented factions from within the town itself. Each player’s faction had differing goals and abilities. The players, used to set-piece battles between armies, had never encountered anything like this before, but soon they were deeply engaged in all sorts of intrigue, with their figures chasing each other around the miniature town of Braunstein. The game dissolved into apparent chaos, and the armies never did get to the town.
This undisciplined brawl violated all Wesley’s cherished theories of organized game conduct, and he thought of it as a failure. But the players loved it and were soon pestering him to run "another Braunstein." (32)
The players’ excitement grew as Wesley’s group tried a series of increasingly immersive scenarios, which gradually took on more and more elements of role-playing. In 1971 one of the group’s members, Dave Arneson, began running an ongoing campaign set in a mythical medieval barony called Blackmoor. By now, most of the key elements of role-playing were in place: each player was in charge of a single character, whose adventures were not limited to a single session, but could continue indefinitely (or at least until their death). The referee created the world and was in charge of everyone and everything inside that world apart from the players’ characters. Blackmoor even introduced the idea of adventuring in underground labyrinths, or "dungeons," which soon became a staple of fantasy Role-Playing Games.
In 1974, Arneson teamed up with fellow war-gamer Gary Gygax to design Dungeons & Dragons, the first published Role-Playing Game. The rest, as they say, is history. From their initial following among war-gamers, RPGs soon grew to become a global craze and the hobby spread to include games set in countless genres and played in countless different ways. You can play with miniatures, with nothing more than pen and paper, with or without dice, online or in a "live-action" game (LARP). There are RPGs which seek to accurately simulate life in medieval Europe, others which emulate the genre conventions of anime or Hong Kong action films, games about teenage romance or Arthurian legend and "universal" game systems which claim to be able to recreate any setting or situation the gamers wish to explore.
The referee (or, as they are now usually called, the Game Master, or GM) oversees the world in which the game will take place. In the earliest RPGs, that world would often be little more than a simple "dungeon" or battleground. But as the games evolved, entire nations, continents, worlds and even galaxies grew around those humble beginnings. Nowadays you can choose to set your game in any one of hundreds of published settings, from the fantastic Forgotten Realms to the star-spanning Traveller universe. A game shop like Christchurch’s Comics Compulsion has shelves of books detailing such settings, while the world-wide web boasts thousands of sites dedicated to filling in as much detail as possible on these and many other campaign worlds.
The Forgotten Realms (centred on a continent named Faerûn) is one of the most popular such settings, and has appeared in hundreds of gaming supplements (including the Volo’s Guide series, which are written in the style of Baedeker’s travel guides) as well as novels and computer games. The Realms was created by Canadian librarian Ed Greenwood, initially for a series of stories and later for his own Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Although thousands of pages of information have already been published about Faerûn, Realms fans know that this has merely scratched the surface of the vast archive of notes in Greenwood’s basement. The situation is complicated further by the fact that Greenwood sold his world to the Dungeons & Dragons franchise in 1987 and although he has been an active contributor to the Forgotten Realms line of products since, the "official" published version of the Realms has subsequently diverged in significant ways from the vision of its original creator – and not always with his approval. (33)
Another setting with a smaller but equally dedicated following is N. Robin Crossby’s Hârn, which strives to present a "realistic medieval environment, unsurpassed in research, depth and logic." (34) Unlike many commercially produced campaign settings, which evolve over time as new supplements describe new historical events which alter the world, all Hârn products describe Crossby’s world at exactly the same moment in its history. Instead of providing a "meta-story" which develops over time, then, Hârn’s authors provide ever more geographical, political and cultural depth, with the goal of mapping each and every region to an astonishing level of detail, including floor-plans for important buildings, lists of residents and descriptions of their economic productivity, relationships and social roles:
(35)
But of course many GMs choose to create their own world from scratch. Some turn to a book like the Advanced Dungeons & Dragon’s World Builder’s Guidebook, which contains detailed instructions on generating everything from tectonic plates to weather patterns, ocean currents and population groups. By following the author’s instructions, you eventually begin mapping individual regions, cities, villages and even houses – with as much or as little detail as you wish.
(36)
Others study geography, history, biology and meteorology in order to "get things right." A visit to RPG.net’s message boards (37) will reveal extensive discussions on everything from the history of coinage to the migration patterns of different species of birds – and countless other topics that dedicated GMs study in order to make their game world more believable. It’s as though the ultimate goal for these world-builders is to outline their world in so much detail that it becomes in some sense actually real – like Baudrillard’s "map that precedes the territory." (38)
Apart from "campaign settings," the other kind of book you’ll find in RPG shops is the "system" or rule book. These rule systems provide a kind of language that quantifies the abilities and limitations of people and things within the game – and a way to determine what happens when those abilities are put to the test. A character designed for Dungeons & Dragons, for example, will have six basic abilities (strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma), each of which is represented by a number (usually between 3 and 18, with 10-11 as the average). A character with 18 strength is capable of extraordinary feats, while one with a strength of only 3 could barely lift a mug of ale. Then there are long lists of skills and special abilities, hit points (how much damage they can take before dying), possessions, back-story, etc. All these statistics determine how likely a character is to achieve certain actions; various dice (from the traditional 6-sided to the less familiar 12-sided, 20-sided and even 100-sided dice) introduce the element of luck.
(39)
In the past three decades RPG systems have gone through numerous evolutionary phases and today there exist a range of ‘schools’ or styles. "Physics engines" are designed to give nothing more or less than the most realistic outcomes in a given situation. "Narrativist" systems, by contrast, treat a game as an improvised story, and seek to empower players to generate scenes which serve the overall plot and its themes, rather than merely emulating the laws of physics. "Cinematic" games seek instead to simulate the feel of particular cinematic or literary genres, by encouraging characters to behave in appropriate ways and generating outcomes that fit the conventions of the genre, whether they are realistic or not.
These days, there’s a lot of theoretical discussion on the topic of game design – mostly on the internet, of course. Online message boards like RPG.net or The Forge (40) are full of arguments about "GNS theory" (which stands for gamist-narrativist-simulationist, each designating an element of Role-Playing) (41), "Role-Playing vs. Roll-Playing" and so on. For some, RPGs are little more than a "game," but for others, they are a means to collectively improvised complex narratives, experience life as a medieval knight or immerse themselves in another reality.
But whatever the system or setting – whether it’s as detailed as the Forgotten Realms or as vague as a few notes quickly sketched by the GM over lunch – at the heart of all RPGs is improvisation. Neither the players nor the GM are able to completely predict or control how a game will unfold. Many GMs do prepare a kind of plot – but even the most plot-driven GM is only able to plan so much. Many published settings include "plot hooks" – brief open-ended suggestions of potential story-lines which the characters may encounter and take further. But these are far from full plotlines – they are hints, pointers, situations. (42) In the end, it is the choices made by the players, tempered by the way the dice roll, which will determine what happens on the day.
This unpredictability forces GMs and the authors of RPG settings and systems to adopt a narrative paradigm quite different to that of the traditional novel. Like Scott McCloud’s gardener, the GM cannot know which paths his or her players will take. Rather, the trick is to create as interesting a garden as possible – with landscapes, situations and possibilities that give the players opportunities to explore and interact. In some of the most rewarding RPG worlds, these landscapes and situations are pregnant not only with opportunities for adventure, but also with emotional resonance, themes and allusions, metaphor and meaning. The art of creating an RPG, then, is very much an art of world-building, or "sub-creation." And the way that art is experienced is through play.
Last edited:
