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.

Narrative in Role-playing Games

I've heard it said that role-playing games, especially those of the indie sort, are really about telling stories. I don't think that's the case.  We do tell stories, out of game, about the game sessions we've played.  All the more reason to play and play well.  And there's no question that a character within a game can relate a story to other characters during play.  But gaming isn't equivalent to creating a single story or even a set of stories.  There's no script - at least, not one that survives much into any given game session.  In role-playing games, the characters do interact with and within imagined situations.  But it's improvised.  The choices and events don't fully merge into some over-arching, cohesive plot, nor should we require that they do so.  Any given interaction or event within a session may be enjoyable or satisfying in itself, aesthetically, viscerally, morally.  It need not tie into a story arc to be worth playing out.

In that way, RPG's are like life.  Though I'm a Christian, I'm not one who believes that everything happens for a reason, as part of One Big Plan.  A great many things do happen for a reason, though I tend to be pretty careful about reading meanings into events.  God is constantly involved in what we do, but He is under no obligation to make this obvious or to explain any of it to our satisfaction.  It isn't One Big Story that binds history together, it's God himself.  God involves Himself with His creation in such a way that it can and should be conveyed as story.  "Can" because God is intimately involved in events, and events flow from one another.  "Should" because we are story-telling creatures.  We recognize sequence and closure and, through story, find and create meaning.  "In the beginning" isn't just the beginning of all things, but the beginning of a story.  And our lives aren't complete without those stories.  But a single isolated event can have profound meaning, simply because God is behind it.

So I'm much more open to saying that RPG's are about drama, than about story.  Stories will emerge, and our play will be better for it.  But  there's no need to worry if a party's jaunt through the woods isn't worthy of some novel.  It can still be exciting, amusing, or even deeply touching - no script required.

Setting it all to music...

Some will think it weird (it's Talking Heads, after all), but I think it's inspiring.  I saw this one in the early days of MTV inside a dim, dark projection pit in the university's student center.  Amazing.

Once in a Lifetime

First Light

For my first bit of creation, here's what this is about:

This blog isn't about me (Lord, I hope not), but it will be about whatever I think is worth commenting on - or at least whatever is worth mentioning.  I'm taking Socrates' idea that the unexamined (and unshared) life isn't worth living, and I'm running with it.

As you'll see, I have quite a few interests, many of them pretty geeky, and I'll jump around a lot from topic to topic.  I'll use lots of tagging, so feel free to filter out the things you have zero interest in.

Enjoy the show.