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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2047129" data-attributes="member: 7240">I'm not the biggest Ron Edwards fan but I think he had it right when he said that story is the product of gaming. Gaming is not storytelling but it had the same output as storytelling: story. Improvisational theatre, similarly, is not storytelling but its output is nonetheless story. So, for that reason, I am interested in resources for story production. I think the reason there is a dearth of them on the market is that the actual creative processes of GMs are so different and the areas where GMs will need aid are hard to predict. The kinds of things I need as a storytelling resource are things that help me with travel times, travel distances, weather and ecology. Other GMs might want help with other aspects of world-building where they lack knowledge in the real world. But I think one of the reasons that there is not much publishing going on in these areas is that non-gaming material can be used easily as resources for gaining this kind of knowledge. All we need, and I think we need a great deal more of it than we have, are things that translate these things into game mechanics. I would have purchased Frostburn if it actually told me how to model all the arctic environmental conditions I would like to. Or imagine if they had listed all the various potential mounts that could go through cold climes, how much they could carry, what their movement rate would be like over various kinds of snow or how cold an environment they could survive in -- wouldn't you love to know which kinds of cold places you can put yaks in and which you can put dogs in? The reason story benefits from things like this is that then the players can enter into the process of doing things like choosing mounts, developing travel strategies, coming up with new combat strategies tailored to their environment, etc. This moves things like this away from GM fiat and towards a collaborative process of storytelling. It is the heavy codification of D&D that enables more collaborative processes of story generation.So, yes, there are holes in terms of GM resources. We need to get away from only looking at the fantastic elements of the environments our publications describe and describe all the elements, fantastic and otherwise in ways that relate to the game mechanics. It's been over 30 years and there is still nothing in the rules telling me how fast a yak can go over which kinds of terrain.</blockquote>

Verification