Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4576113" data-attributes="member: 15538">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).</blockquote>

Verification