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Friday 10 May 2019

A journal of the play years


Here's the thing about write-ups. The point of a roleplaying game isn't to create a story. "But, but..." you may say, especially if you've bought into all that genre-flavoured, trope-carbonated Hollywood screenwriting fizz. And I do like stories. I read a lot of them. I even write a few. But the second life conjured up by a good RPG session goes way beyond any of that break-to-act-two nonsense.


I'll give you a really good example. Watch The Knick. The first eighteen episodes are tour-de-force writing, as superficially formless as daily life and yet driven by conflict, emotion and need. In the last two episodes the writers were forced by Cinemax's cancellation of the show to tie everything up with a bow -- not even a suture -- and that meant scraping the barrel of trope-driven, by-the-numbers storytelling. Suddenly characters were having arguments that the actors obviously couldn't bring themselves to believe. Previously complex characters stood revealed as dastardly villains. An interesting and rather touching romance turned out to hinge on an improbable master plan. Two of the hospital staff abruptly decided to turn into psychotic murderers and then got together. Where before we'd had great original drama, now we had the most disappointingly cliched melodrama.


That's the kind of cookie-cutter plotting that comes from treating the narrative as an artifice to grab the attention of bored audiences rather than, as they had done previously, allowing it to find its own shape from the many nuanced processes going on inside. The determination of incident driving the illustration of character.


So I'm wary of going into a game with the intention of doing write-ups because it can make the roleplaying self-conscious. Players start worrying about whether their character will come across well, get enough of a starring role, be perceived as having an interesting (ugh) arc. That said, when the write-up is done in character and comes with all the unreliability and partiality that implies, it can be fun. And as I get older it gets harder to remember what happened in the session two weeks ago, so write-ups are useful mnemonics.


Preparing for one of our Christmas specials, it occurred to me that, although my group don't often bother with write-ups, nevertheless we'd accumulated enough of them in twenty years to fill a book. So I put them all together and printed up a dozen copies to hand out to the players, with this introduction:
Getting around the table for an evening’s gaming is a highlight of the week, and lots of fun even when (as often) we’re simply larking about.

But when the magic starts to work, and we steep ourselves in the world, and the characters speak through us – then our imaginations join together and take flight. And that’s when we might say to non-gamers: we have seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

Stories matter to human beings. They entertain, but they do more than that. They are how we see the world. And in our games we’ve had the privilege of getting inside the story. The joy of creating it together with good friends. The wonder of experiencing things beyond the everyday.

This book collects some of the fugitive scraps of those marvellous moments together. Long may it continue.



ADDENDUM: The point here, of course, is "the joy of creating [a story] together with good friends". That's why roleplaying is such a unique experience -- like life, what matters is not the story that emerges, but the fact that you make it happen and you experience it with people you care about. But for those who are interested in my group's write-ups, you can find a lot of them just by excavating the deeper strata of this blog. For instance:


I could go on, but it's safe to say that's probably more than enough.

8 comments:

  1. Well! I found myself lusting after each picture you posted, I even stooped to trying to read the see-through type on the reverse pages. It even makes me want to track down Oliver's Lightbringer Trilogy which I sadly missed when it was released. I'm hoping that the tome in the above pictures would be available to purchase at some point in the future!

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    1. The Lightbringer books were recently re-released on Kindle and you can still get the paperbacks, I think. Oliver's new series (on which the campaign mentioned above was based) is even better, but he hasn't had any luck finding a publisher so far. Personally I think HBO should turn both series into TV shows as they're far better than GoT -- but maybe I'm biased.

      As for whether I can publish the book -- I'd need permission from he players who did the write-ups. I did ask and most agreed, but one remained silent on the subject and so I suspect he's not happy about it.

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  2. Couldn't you just omit those of the silent party?

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    1. I think it's got to be all or nothing. It wouldn't feel right to only have some of our campaign write-ups in there.

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  3. As soon as I saw the title to this post instead of immediately devouring it I set it aside to savour over a coffee. After reading Andrew's comment I don't feel so bad that I zoomed the screen and squinted lots in a desperate bid to read each chapter intro :-) Like others I'd love to read these write ups and pay for the privilege Dave! But I do confess that after reading it and your moving intro I did have a slight feeling that to do so would be a little awkward - kind of like when you unwittingly intrude upon a tender farewell moment between strangers at the station... But then I brushed that aside, fell to my knees and pleaded with you to encourage your hold out to let this work loose for avid fans to enjoy. {for some reason blogger has refused to let me comment as me (or at all) on this thread. Not sure why}

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    1. There's no accounting for Blogger. Sometimes it won't let me comment on my own posts, even.

      I do have another worry about a book like this, which is that some of the campaigns are based on novels that haven't been published yet, such as Oliver's brilliant Knight of the Fields. I wouldn't want to spoil those, so it might be a while before it could be published anyway.

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  4. Great post - here are some tantalising glimpses of a book you can't read.

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    1. I'm sure I don't need to explain that it's a story about camaraderie and the value of shared experiences even when they're imaginary. So, okay, you might react by thinking, "I'm pissed off that can't I read that group's write-up book." But at best that would be like listening in on the banter of a bunch of close friends who you don't know. If you've read any of the write-ups I've posted here over the years (all of which went into that book) then I hardly need to tell you that.

      How about this takeaway instead: "What a nice idea, I'll make a book like that for my own group to share." Try it, and the rewards will be far greater than you'd ever get by reading someone else's write-ups.

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