Do you play more for the story or the combat?

[Scribble]

"Basically, think of it as soap opera for males.

Thats pretty much it... The story arcs are suprisingly similar, only instead of love, it's fueled by anger. Instead of passionate lovemaking, we have passionate fighting. In both cases we have groups/individuals mouthing off at eachother, and spreading rumors about their enemies. In both cases the stories are often overly dramatic, with individuals over-reacting to simple things.

 

[Primal]

My first 3e campaign, as a professional wrestling storyline.

The Young Bloods are the hot, newest thing on the wrestling circuit, under the highly respected star manager Howard Smith, known affectionately as Howie. Howie gets them their uniforms, pimps out their locker rooms, and arranges their fights. Things seem really great for the Young Bloods, but when the tourney for the All Star Championship belt begins, the opponents the Young Bloods face in the ring turn out to be far stronger and better equipped than expected. Fights they thought they could win turn out to be near losses, draws, or even complete routs. Things look bad for the Young Bloods, so Howie promises to set them up with an easy match. In anticipatory celebration of their upcoming easy victory, Howie treats them to a night on the town. But when they get to the ring, their opponent is actually the favored victor of the entire championship, Hughe Orc! And what's worse, he seems to know all their best moves, even the secret ones that they haven't yet used in the ring! Only by inventing an entirely new wrestling move are the Young Bloods able to leave the ring on their own feet, with the match as a draw. The Young Bloods regroup in their locker room, and realize what's happened- Howie has betrayed them! They investigate, and find that he's been betting against them, and setting up to lose! They keep their knowledge secret from Howie, and plan revenge...

Hey, you could run that "as is" if you implemented it into the gladiator module in Dungeon 101 or 102 (?).

I wonder what happened to 'Know your role D20'... I saw the preview rules, and it looked *really* promising to me! Well, the guys declined my offer to run it ("Uh, sounds... interesting? Maybe some other time, okay?"), but I would have bought it anyway!

 

[Primal]

Thats pretty much it... The story arcs are suprisingly similar, only instead of love, it's fueled by anger. Instead of passionate lovemaking, we have passionate fighting. In both cases we have groups/individuals mouthing off at eachother, and spreading rumors about their enemies. In both cases the stories are often overly dramatic, with individuals over-reacting to simple things.

Yeah, it's pretty much about "feuds". Yet there was the love triangle between Kane and Edge and Lita (with Lita and Edge doing "it" in a bed set up in the ring). This storyline was actually based on what was going on between Edge and Matt Hardy and Lita behind the scenes (i.e. Lita, Hardy's girlfriend, was having an affair with Edge, Hardy's best friend). And there have been other, similar "love triangles" or marriages or lovers being threatened by another wrestler, and so on. But mostly it's about violence.

Wrestlers have to portray emotions in an "overly dramatic" way in the same way that actors on stage (in a theatre) have to do it -- so that the whole audience can see and understand what's going on. It looks a lot sillier on TV than if you're sitting in the audience, but that's the same thing if you show a theatre drama on TV.

 

[Fifth Element]

No... It makes them AWESOME.

Agreed. All D&D stories are awesome!, regardless of how shallow or contrived they are.

 

[ExploderWizard]

SWEET!! I'm away a few hours and the topic changes to wrasslin
I likes some good wrasslin plots. In the D&D application of these things the players will always try a couple of go-to staples:

1) The PC's will always try to ambush the other team in the locker room.

2) At least one PC will try and become the midnight rider.

 

[Jenrock]

I would love to say that I care so much about my story and have crafted every minutia with the greatest detail, and I only focus on combat because I game with simpletons, but I would be lying.

Combat has always interested me, and while I do have a story that is solid and flexible, I have yet to play a single session without at least two combat encounters, but I have played a session or two with no roleplaying.

That's just the way it goes sometimes, I guess.

 

[howandwhy99]

Then who is authoring it?

It exists within the system.

I imagine some actors and most writers of fiction would disagree.

Personally, the writer in me thinks this is nonsense.

I think you've just unintentionally come up with my favorite description of the process of writing fiction. Possibly my favorite description of making art, period.

Writers tend to drink.

I think people like disagreeing with you about this, how, because in their games... well, certainly in mine, storytelling and role-playing go on simultaneously, even though you maintain it can't be done. Players are both the authors of, and performers of, their characters, more so one than the other depending on the situation at hand (and sometimes their characters are merely playing pieces on a game board. All these things go to make up role-playing in the context of an RPG).

Yeah, I don't think you know what roleplaying is. An actor is either performing a role or playing with a role to learn it. If they are just making it up as they go along, that isn't either. They are acting extemporaneously. I think what you are playing is a theatre game, not a roleplaying game. And I have no problem with that, but the community of theatre gamers seem adamant in their arguments against RPGs because they don't make good theater games. Which were never designed to do either, but some folks just do not understand that. Not to mention the misunderstanding of roleplaying as the person who is giving the role a personality, not succeeding at playing the role well.

It is same thing as thinking a person can come up the definition of the job of police officer, while while trying to learn what it means to be a police officer through roleplay. It doesn't happen if you get to change the reality of the role. You learn nothing, can infer nothing of the situation as true, and can achieve nothing either.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It basically takes the same format of storytelling as soap operas use, however instead of being mainly centered around romance, they're centered mostly around violence.

Violence is romance.

REH got it right.

 

[Hussar]

HowandWhy, I have to give you credit for sticking to your guns. Insisting on using a definition of role play that NO ONE inside of RPG's uses and then insisting that your definition is the only true definition certainly makes your point a lot easier to defend.

However, since everyone else uses a definition of role play that is perhaps a little more grounded within the hobby and not so reliant upon elements drawn from other disciplines which have little or nothing to do with RPG's, then maybe the problem here is one of semantics, rather than substance.

 

[pawsplay]

I think RPGs do involve storytelling. But the story is "story after," much like real life. In real life, we struggle to ascribe causes and reasons and significance to things that happen, after the fact, and that is a respect in which RPGs are like life and unlike poetic forms of art.

The art forms RPGs most resemble, in my mind, are pageantry, improvisational theatre or storytelling, and the novel. As far as the novel goes, RPGs have in common creating a fictional world and assigning trajectories to the dramatic elements and like novels, RPGs have a fictional historical element. It is like pageantry, in that it is intended to invoke a genuine sympathetic response, not merely an empathic relationship to the characters. And it is like improvisational theater, in that theme takes a back seat to creating a logically connected series of events.

RPGs are not simply artistic in design, though. Art is used to enhance RPGs, but centrally they are games. Maybe more like The Minister's Cat than Monopoly, but n RPG is based around conflict resolution, even if that conflict is simply deciding what happens next. Nothing happens in an RPG without a resolution system, even if that resolution system is simply delegating the storytelling privilege to someone for a scene (as is often the case when the GM is asked to set up a situation, but also occurs when a player specifies an action their PC takes).