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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 2781671" data-attributes="member: 259">Dremmen, may I suggest that a term other than "role-playing" might serve you better?  Technically speaking, as long as someone is taking on a role in a game in which they're plkaying, they're experiencing a role-playing game.  In the early nineties, a roommate gave me a book about Dungeons and Dragons which he loved, which revolutionized his experience with the hobby.  It was written, I believe, in the early eighties, and it contained all sorts of advice for improving the game.  For example, it recommended that you give your character a name, not just call him "Elf" or "Dwarf."This was written years after the term roleplaying game was in wide use amongst D&D geeks, and yet it considered naming your character to be something that developed character, something that people wouldn't necessarily do if they weren't told to.What you're talking about is certainly something I enjoy; recently, I've been enjoying playing with my character's religious taboos, and I happily roleplay his foulmouthed, impatient outspokenness even when it sabotages delicate negotiations.  I would call something like this "character-focused gaming," in which the personality of each PC has an important effect on the story.There's also what I think of as "spectacle-focused gaming," in which characters are broadly drawn and quick with the one-liners, and in which the spectacular scene is the center of the session (a fight on a burning zeppelin, a bad guy using Villain Time to make her apocalyptic speech uninterrupted).  There's also "mood-focused gaming," in which the DM uses lighting, sound effects, voice modulation, and so forth to establish a powerful mood, and the mood becomes the focus of the session.  Call of Cthulhu is an excellent game for doing this.And there's more.  I've engaged in symbolic games, allegorical games (closely related), mystic theory games, oplitical games, and so forth.Beer-and-pretzels gaming is tons of fun, where out-of-character comments are the norm, and nobody much cares about their character, and the point of the session is to allow the players to relax and hang out with their friends.  It's still roleplaying--especially if they've gone so far as to give their characters names--but it's not character-focused, mood-focused, or spectacle-focused.Daniel</blockquote>

Verification