I don't know what Blorb stands for (if anything) but it's the name of a set of refereeing principles for roleplaying that you can read here. The essence of the thing is not to prepare a plot but just to define NPCs' stats and motivations and events that will happen unless the player-characters do something, and then let the story emerge in play. You know, the way life works.
In a nutshell:
- Blorb is a preparation-focused playstyle, and prep is central, but never prepare plot.
- Do prepare entities. Places, enemies, friends, items, rewards.
- What happens should be emergent, not prewritten. Events should be things that might happen (from mechanics, dice rolls etc), not always will happen, or, worse, that the DM could decide to have happen.
If you like concepts like act breaks, character arcs, flashbacks, plot twists, and all that Save the Cat/TV Tropes palaver then Blorb is not for you. And I would add that if you do like all that stuff then you should be writing a novel or screenplay instead of running a roleplaying game, because you're missing 90% of what makes roleplaying a unique medium.
The ever-excellent Good Friends of Jackson Elias have a inspiring episode about reactive off-the-cuff GMing right here. I particularly like the description of a roleplaying scenario as "the negative space of a story" -- not that the best campaigns need anything you could call scenarios, mind. Anyway, come back tomorrow for a look at one way to weave stories out of games.
I fully agree! This is largely what the OSR playstyle proposes.
ReplyDeleteWhat worries me is that newcomers to the hobby might suppose that freeform gaming is part of a package with OSR, and that they can't play that way unless they accept the whole package. But that's a subject for another post!
DeleteI have been playing for a long time, but I am Spanish and here most people play railroad since the 90s. I discovered emerging narrative thanks to the OSR movement, although it is true that there can be emerging narrative in other styles of play, but unfortunately very few people know about them (OSR included).
DeleteIt is a shame that many people coming to roleplaying for the first time will never get to realize there are other ways to play than the "writers' room" approach. My former gaming group are nowadays into systems that let them have story flashbacks and extra points for character arcs, but that holds no appeal for me. Roleplaying at its best should be a unique medium, capable of letting participants experience a story from the inside. As soon as it turns into authored narratives, even when authored by everyone around the table, it's reduced to a subordinate form of traditional linear narrative. At best it's then just improv scriptwriting, which is very different from what it can be.
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