Monday, December 26, 2011

Narrative in Role-playing Games - Continued

Theologian Randy Harris, in his post, "contra narrative" (on his seemingly now defunct Postmodern Mystic blog) is still available in Google's RSS cache, so I copy it here:

I want to share with you one of my favorite short stories in its entirety. It is written by the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms.

“Now one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.
And thats about it, more or less”

Is that a great story or what?

You see, Kharms understood that our life is not a story as some contend. It is not full of action and sometimes the plot is meandering or totally non existent. Most of life is utterly mundane.  To expect life to have the neatness of a well written story is bound to lead to disappointment and even anger.  What the mystic asks us to see is that all of those mundane moments are filled with the presence of God - and that is the ultimate meaning of our lives – not the story as we would have it.

I think this one post helped me a lot to let go of the desire for every event, no matter how insignificant, to have some wide-ranging meaning.  And this carries over into what I now expect from table-top role-playing.