12 days to go before I get to do the part-time job which has been the crowning of my hobby/passion for over fifteen years now, GenCon. I'm not there for the new products. I'm not there for the cosplayers. I'm not even just there for the RennFaire with the guy with that hurdy-gurdy, believe it or not. I am there to do nothing but wake-up, roleplay, eat and drink, maybe some more roleplay, drink and maybe eat, and then crash. To wake up again and repeat the cycle for three more days, where I am both honed as a RPG enthusiast and mildly sick of the good life. If I can get some cosplayer chicks/boy toys/somewhere-in-between dancing around a guy with a hurdy-gurdy and then purchase a new Phase World supplement from Palladium Publishing, all the better, but not necessary.
Now all this talk of roleplaying brings me to, well back to, what is "true" roleplaying?
There is the ancient way of drawing a map, filling it with creatures and then the players and their GM hashout some sort of story, meaningful or not, through only interacting with each other by reacting to the situation as determined by rulings and rolled results. Many purists of that other game (TOG) have refined this by randomizing the material on the map. Then there is the "all-about-me" (the player) extreme of roleplaying, where events follow a script with the pretense of drama being all about clarifying a character or characters, like professional wrestling.
As for myself, I am really good at crafting plots around people exploring their characters. I have at times though sat back and played accountant and obstacle director to a group of players that were there to miniatures around a plastic-covered placement paper with a grid on it, so I tend to feel a guilty about the above mentioned propensity that I have. So I've doubled down on the plotting but it is only the vehicle. Well actually it is only the vehicleS. There is the roleplaying and the roll-playing.
The Characters are in a somewhat scripted plot, where the players work on their roleplaying with each other many times more often than with the GM of the events. Using cards instead of dice things often get LARPy, but tabletop enough to where there is a definite beginning, middle, and an end; while players are only slotted a couple minutes here and there as the GM works the table.
But the storytelling aspect is kind of the shallow take on these sessions. Things while noted are not really that scripted. Sessions can go crunchy as well, as players root through the rules book
to find that certain thing to make a bigger splash on the screen so to
speak. Often the "Acts" of my scenario are only there to list what details the GM has to reference without making things up, not to serve as any sort order of any sequence of events. Like "sand-boxing" of the early Aughts, but with a very strong sense of pacing.
When I am using dice, I stick to the axiom that the rolls make the big deals in the plot. This will lead to scenarios taking on their own dynamic, despite the expectations of the players drawn to the event. This is about as close as I can get to the true "mechanics first" roleplaying, err role-playing should be closer to a wargame style of game (which is beginning to become "miniature-LARPing" in my mind). I can't help but think 'Why else am I playing, if I am not watching a story unravel in my mind's eye as well as for the other participants around me?'. As long as I keep the tone and the ending based on the rolls of the dice in relations to the rules of the game, that is indeed a roleplaying event versus the visceral stimulation of different events like watching a movie, playing with plastic army men, having a tea party with dolls in your mother's dress, or playing Magic: the Gathering.
Maybe I'll talk more about miniature-LARPing tomorrow. Unless I can think of something more interesting to me. Oh I can't wait for the hurdy-gurdy.
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